Entries RSS · How Tech IT Easy will go the extra mile
You tell me!
In a few days, we will celebrate the first anniversary of Tech IT Easy. Although the growth of Tech IT Easy has overall been pretty amazing (+25% / month on average), it’s been slowing down a bit in May and beginning of June.
For next year (24th June 2007 –> 24th June 2008), I would like us (we’re a big and growing team now, a happy crowd) to multiply by 5 and move from 800 – 900 single visitors waters to 4000 – 5000 single visitors territories. Looks ambitious but since we’ve proofed our concept, I believe Tech IT Easy has what it takes to reach that milestone within 12 months.
I’m planning to take different steps to increase traffic:
- Host this blog ourselves to be able to incorporate the widgets we want in our sidebar and slightly change our layout (to make it look less sort of serious);
- Move to a proper techiteasy.org/blablabla address, keep jeremyfain.wordpress.com for myself only; my issue being that I’m not moving an inch until we find a solution not to loose our trackbacks. Any expert in the room?
- Hire more bloggers (goal: 35 tech-passionate bloggers in 18 months; how: no constraint whatsoever, publish whenever you want on the topic you want)
- Hiring direction: topic diversity matters (web experts, software buddies, develops, usability consultants, consultants, VC, entrepreneurs, sales, marketers, acad, etc.) as well as geographical diversity (still weak on Oceania, Asia, Mideast, Africa & Americas analysis coverage – very strong on Europe & South Pole innovation clusters)
- Bring in prominent bloggers publishing in their native language only (eg German, French, Italian, Spanish) or entrepreneurs who don’t have time to run a blog full-time to discuss their business with you contributors
- Organize a physical reunion of co-bloggers to strengthen links within our geeky community
- Evangelize shorter posts, alternating rogue news and in-depth analyses, and push towards embedding more videos?
In your opinion, what action should we take to go the extra mile? I’m not asking for praise, but for criticism: what’s wrong about Tech IT Easy? How would you improve things if you were on board (or if you are a Tech IT Easy blogger already)? Thank you in advance for your feedback. We’ll make sure we implement all relevant advice in reasonable time frames.
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From my point of view, priorities are: better design and widgets (implies solving the hosting problem), more videos, and more diversity in articles (more book reviews, more interviews, more feedbacks on some conferences, more “guess who”, more short articles to share a specific discovery…)
The native language stuff, I would only do under a native domain, i.e. not all on the same site.
For the rest, I agree and hope we can move to a more customisable layout (the linear format is a little tired, in my opinion).
I think more in-depth analysis is a good idea, though of course it shouldn’t dominate the page. I have no idea what ‘rogue news’ is. More interactive games like “guess who,” polls, competitions, and whatever else draws in participation, is an excellent idea. WIdgets… as long as they’re useful.
What matters in the end is to get more posts in per day, from more people with interesting and diverse stories to tell.
Oh and more things on the backbone – metrics, etc.
As well as real-time and other kinds of meetings between bloggers to promote “culture” as well as discuss strategy.. I’m all for that!
Fidji> I agree with you about the diversity in articles. But since I don’t want to control content, I have no lever on this. I can only help selecting the appropriate bloggers, picking profiles that aren’t similar but still share a passion for high tech.
Vincent> I didn’t make myself clear about languages. English is the lingua franca on Tech IT Easy. However, I believe we have here what it takes to attract bloggers who run a blog on their own and in their native language. We’ll tell them: “look, you keep your native-language blog, but when it comes to building yourself an international reputation, then you use Tech IT Easy as a publishing platform”. Our USP: these guys won’t have to build another readership, it’s all there already.