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Neuropathy Microsite Launched As New Startup Project
I've been exploring an idea for the last several weeks: creating small websites (microsites) geared for little areas of the internet that are underserved.
Actually it's a little more complicated than that (isn't everything!). The trick is to find a three-way balance: things that people search for that advertisers pay for that there isn't a huge amount of information out there already.
And of course there are no black-and-white answers. Ideally you'd find a topic that a million people were searching for daily, that advertisers were paying million dollars a lead, and that no other sites existed on the internet.
Ideally I would have my own lunar base and be declared emperor of the solar system. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we don't have universal perfection, simply local optimization.
My new microsite Neuropathy.me is about seven pages of the common things people search for when looking up neuropathy. (Neuropathy is a condition that affects the nervous system, causing tingling or numbness. If you've ever had a foot fall asleep, you get the general idea)
I've made about 40 pages in all for this general area, all spread out among various related domains. I will probably mention them here over the weekend as they come up just to get some link juice. I'll be sure to put them in the title, so you can skip them if you want.
Lots of questions remain, and this is just an experiment to try something and see if it works. What's the smallest number of pages that makes a useful microsite to a user? Is it better to split your information up into 3 or 4 domains? Or have everything in one domain? What types of advertising would work best for such a system? How long does it take to get working?
So far, this is a lot of hard work! I wouldn't recommend it for people looking to get rich quickly. It's more for patient people who want to make a little money slowly. Search Engine Optimization is just a smoldering pile of dirt -- search engines control this huge amount of cash flow represented by eyeballs. So games are set up between people wanting to rank highly on search engines with minimal effort and the engine-makers, who don't want "bad" sites ranking highly. What's bad? I guess it's like pornography: you know it when you see it. So millions of folks are trying to optimize a system that is actively adapting to not be optimized. It's not exactly a friendly situation to get into.
But still, I'm fascinated. As part of learning all of this, I'm learning why some things are popular on the web and some things aren't, and (maybe) how to make use of that. If nothing else, it's a skill I can take with me to my next adventure.
After all, once you build something -- once you complete version 1 of you killer internet app, if nobody knows about it, what difference have you made? I read somewhere that initial application development is only about a tenth of the total effort needed to get people buying your product. Yet many times we hackers treat the coding part as the important part. Lots of really complicated coding never amounted to anything, and lots of really simple coding made millions. The difference is all about finding a need, filling it, and getting the word out. Kind of those same three areas I mentioned above, huh?
So if you get a chance, take a look at the site! Feedback is greatly appreciated. What would you want, as a reader, that isn't on there? What's wrong with the business model I've described?
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Daniel Markham
Nice site, Daniel.
It'll be interesting to see how this does.
One suggestion: I have to scroll right to see all your text. I really hate that, especially as I generally need to bump up the font size quite a bit, which makes it worse. This occurs in Chrome 1, Firefox 3, and IE 8.
Thanks Phil.
I'll put that into my to-do list for site redesign. If it keeps bugging you, ping me again. I've got too many to-dos and not enough Daniels!
Do you know what screen resolution you are using? I have a wide-screen laptop, so I bet the problem is that I'm not testing the designs out on smaller screens.
1024x768 on an old laptop I keep Windows on so I can use Chrome. I haven't tried it on my 17in Mac laptop, but the issue persists even when I switch down to an unreadable tiny font.