FabulousEntertainment

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.

The USA campaign continues, I’ve just filled out an application for NASCA membership. NASCA is really big in the US and most swingers clubs are affiliated and they have a pretty large membership in the swingers community too.

In addition to spreading the word about Fab Swingers I think that NASCA membership will add a bit of credibility to the site too.

Here’s the latest rankings from Alexa:

Our other data is backing this up, so I’m in a good mood!

The only negative is that I was about to do another big mailing but I think I’m going to have to pause briefly on it until I do a few server improvements. Given the timeframe I think I might just go for a memory upgrade which should buy me enough time to get the new code in place.

My key term used to be UK Swingers. If I do a search for “uk swingers” on Google I get my old favourite of Swinging Heaven followed by UK Swingers in the number 2 spot. This tells me a few things.

First off, the only reason that Google could possibly be favouring a low traffic, very poor quality site like UK Swingers over Fab Swingers is due to age.

Secondly, PageRank is really not that important, Fab Swingers has a PR of 3 verses 1 for UK Swingers.

Thridly, repeating the term frequently still seems to deliver some gain. The term “uk swingers” is repeated 11 times on the UK Swingers homepage in addition to being present in the URL.

And finally to answer the question I started with, being number 2 for searches for “uk swingers” is obviously not much of a big deal in terms of building up a lot of traffic as UK Swingers has an Alexa rank of 378,670 compared with Fab Swingers rank of 137,428.

I actually think that creating a brilliant site and getting lots of word-of-mouth recommendation is much better than ranking high on Google.

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve successfully generated quite reasonable traffic to the site form the US campaign. The bad news is that the traffic isn’t really converting; the conversion rate is just a bit over 10% but for a free site with compelling content this is pretty poor and it’s a fraction of the virtually 50% conversion rate we get for UK traffic. So, I’m going to put the traffic generation on hold while I fix the conversion rate.

Looking at the site I think it’s pretty obvious what the problem is; the homepage makes Fab Swingers look like a UK swingers site.

I’m actually quite inclined to change the homepage completely anyway and rather than making it just the recent online profiles I think it should be more of a discussion about the site with some sexy photos and lots of search-engine friendly text. Making it a bit more static would also help performance too.

Unfortunately I’m flat out with other web projects right now so I think this will have to get paused for a week or so. However I’m in no big rush and UK membership continues to rocket.

I’ve kicked off the US promotional campaign today. First off, I made a few changes to the homepage to make it a bit more welcoming to Californians by making the USA mentions a bit more prominent.

Secondly, I changed the Swingers Online Now page so that it only shows people in your country rather than everyone who happens to be online. I also posted a message to Swingers in California explaining that the site is just beginning so it doesn’t have many American members yet. The site will need some other changes too but it’s fine for now.

We now have 95 members in California and I’ve began the email campaign.

In some ways it feels like being right back to day one, however I think that this should hopefully work faster than the UK campaign because:

• The site is technically much better. When we launched in the UK we had terrible forums, a terrible chatroom and lots of missing features. However for this launch we have a site that is technically one of the best.
• I think that we know much more about what works and doesn’t for member recruitment.
• We now have some budget so I don’t mind spending some money to do this. The original launch had to be done with virtually nothing.

I’ve had a good chat with my collaborator today and we now feel that the time has come to begin to target the USA market.

The UK side of the site is now on an almost exponential growth path and the main challenges that we have are to technically cope with the increase in traffic and to ensure our community is regulating itself. Almost none of the new members have anything to do with our efforts anyway, it is virtually all word of mouth.

It would be good to try again on the SEO and maybe also do a little bit of offline activity but I think that basically we’ve established the critical mass and it’s now there.

We are getting a bit of traffic from the US but we have the chicken-and-egg problem that the site is not of much interest because there aren’t that many members. On the positive side though the site is technically good, when we launched in the UK we had some pretty weak parts of the site (such as the chatroom).

I think it’s also pretty important for us not to view the US as a market anyway, we need to think about it in terms of states or even smaller areas. California is the largest state by population and also has the reputation for being the most liberal so that is where we are going to start.

The target is 10,000 new members in California over the next year. As soon as we hit this target we’ll start on another state. I think the free love message will go down well!

For a brief two weeks in July we got great coverage on Google and then we got removed form the search results again, in favour of low-traffic, irrelevant sites.

My first theory was that it was due to the duplicate content problems that we had (which I fixed by removing it through the webmaster panel and using a robots.txt). Then I thought it might be due to linking to dubious content from our forums (which I fixed by modding phpBB to add a rel=”nofollow”).

It’s now clear that it’s none of these issues so I’ve re-done the homepage by essentially reverting some of my SEO changes.

I guess in the couple of weeks we’ll find out if that was the issue or if it was something else.

In the meantime, yesterday we had the highest ever traffic day with more than 1 million hits and enough page views to ensure that we’d get kicked off the free Google Analytics if it continues at even close to that level for the month. I’m continuing the off-line marketing campaign plus there’s accelerating word-of-mouth online; just today somebody emailed saying that they’d recommended the site to 40 people.

So I am still pretty comfortable that we will continue our exponential traffic rise even without any coverage from Google. But it would be nice to see Fab Swingers come ahead of some of the absolute crap that is presently beating it.

Well, it’s been two weeks since I signed up for Google Sitemaps to use the console to remove the duplicate site that has trashed my rankings.

I logged on again today to make sure that the request to delete the site from the Google index had been processed only to see that it has in fact been denied! The reason was that I hadn’t put in a robots.txt to exclude all of the content.

This has now been done so with any luck over the next few days the duplicate site will be removed, allowing Fab Swingers to return to its rightful place in the Google index over the next couple of weeks.

The Erotic Awards are on the 1st September but unfortunately we’re much too late to get nominated for the web category, the finalists have already been announced.

Must remember to get a nomination in next year!