California swingers update
The California Swingers recruitment is going quite well. There’s people messaging through the site, logging in multiple times and uploading photos which is good. People aren’t recommending the site yet or using the chatroom but that will happen once there’s a critical mass which I think will happen in about 2 months if I can keep up the present rate of growth.
The funny thing is that the Alexa rank is beginning to dip as a result! The reach is increasing (because there are more users) but the average number of page views is dipping (because there are fewer USA pages on the site for the new members to look at) and of course the Alexa rank is the product of page views and reach so for now the American expansion is going to result in a slight dip of the Alexa numbers.
I will shortly start a separate competitor benchmarking exercise for the USA using Compete.com which is much more accurate than Alexa but is sadly only measures US traffic.
I’ve also had a small re-think on my original strategy. I had been thinking about going for California, then New York, then Texas based on the size of the local markets. The problem with that approach is that if I move onto New York next then I’ve gone back to square one with the problem of building the site with no members. Then moving to Texas gives me the same problem again.
It makes much more sense to move onto neighbouring states such as Nevada or Oregon or even Arizona which is getting me towards Texas. At least in this situation new members will be more likely to find people fairly near them.
There is also a small technical advantage in keeping to the west which is that the server is pretty overloaded during UK evenings but is very quiet during PST evenings so it will be a little bit more cost effective.