Author: navin

See this informative article on the various things you need to do to run a successful website. Although the article is about “blogging”, I think pretty much the same considerations apply to running a good website too.

The initial parts of that article has some stuff about passive income – skip over those to the rest of the article where the real meat is.

Excerpts:
Engaging in your Niche – Conversations happen outside of your blog also and most successful bloggers have systems in place to monitor what is happening in their wider niches. This lets them know what is being said about them elsewhere but also helps raise their profile and become valued members of the wider community. Monitoring the niche via RSS and news alert services are half of this equation – engaging in the conversations on other’s blogs is the other half. It all takes time.

When it comes to driving traffic to a website, seemingly minor things
make a big difference. I have a fairly popular (i.e. high traffic)
website at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~navin/india/songs.

Since movie
reviews are related to the content of that site, I decided that it
would be acceptable to post a link to
http://withoutgivingthemovieaway.com on that page. Initially, I
simply put in a link that said

Check out Meeta’s Hindi Movie Reviews

This was not bad. About 3 to 5 percent of the visitors to the songs
site clicked through to this link. That gave a reasonable amount of
traffic.

Then, I had an idea. I changed to link to something that looks like
this:

Check out Meeta’s Hindi Movie Reviews (Risk, Guru, Bhagam Bhag, Dhoom-2…)

Seems like a minor change. But as soon as I made this change, traffic
instantly doubled; or maybe tripled. The click-throughs to the main
site stayed approximately the same as before. But now, in addition,
each individual movie page listed above was also drawing traffic.
Interestingly, this traffic appeared to be related to
the popularity of the movie and how recent it was.

I have decided to use this blog to chronicle the process of setting up a successful website. Specifically, Meeta has started writing hindi movie reviews and and I suggested to her that she should have her own website where she publishes these reviews. Now, she is actually hoping that some day in the distant future this converts into a money-making venture for her. The question is, will it work? I am hoping to blog our experiences along the way. What did it take to set up the website? How did we work on increasing traffic to the site? What worked, what did not? What was easy, and what was hard?

I am not sure whether I’ll be able to keep it up. Well begun is half done, they say. Let’s see. Sometimes I surprise myself. Let’s hope this is one of those instances.