Previous related posts: Reply to the four-year itch; The four-year itch; Puppetry in Australia – does it exist?; Big plans for 2010.

So now that I’ve got a little bit of self-discussion out of the way, we can get to the crux of the plans. In thinking about what to do with SOP, it was important to look at what’s been working and what hasn’t been working…

What have I tried:

• Forums. They don’t work. The majority of my readers seem to be drive-bys, and those who are following on a consistent basis seem to prefer the simpler comment-on-post format.
• Competitions. They don’t work. For whatever reason, competitions don’t seem to garner enough interest and there are never any submissions.
• Giveaways. Iffy. I’ve come to the conclusion that giveaways will only work if I avoid doing them on my own site. If I tapped into a different audience – say, giveaways to a captive audience on the Just boB show – then it may have some effect. However, this entirely depends on what is being given away, since not all audiences will be interested in patterns, etc. Something tangible would work, but then there’s the whole issue of paying for shipping. So this one is best to avoid, unless there’s something huge offered to me/by me which can reasonably work for the target audience.

Plan of attack:

This refers to the SOP site only. There are five (possibly six) areas that I’m going to implement. As far as I can see, they should complement each other, as well as the site’s aims pretty well, and shouldn’t require too much of a change. Plus, all of them are money-makers, although micro-money-makers, and add a reasonable amount of redundancy into the whole thing, in terms of seasonal sales.

On a side note, and based on previous discussions (linked above) I’ll be changing the navigational structure. You’ll be able to navigate posts via archives, but the drop-down categories will be killed. I’ll return to the default category lists provided with the blog software: instead of clicking the drop-down category name and seeing a list of posts, you’ll just click on the category and be sent to a main category page, from where you can select the relevant article. It may be one more click, but it does streamline navigation, and allow a much better view of each category, as well as each post. I am imagining it to be very similar to the way in which Bakerella lays out her site: posts on a single main page, which you click for more detail; category blocks which allow you to navigate previous stuff; and a large search button. It may not be the ideal solution (I don’t think there will be one that’s perfect considering the size of the content database), but it does seem better than what I have now.

1. Teacher’s packs.

Even though I prefer to keep the site on a track of writing for professionals and not students/teachers (and therefore turn everything into a hobby/crafting mum’s circle thing), teacher’s packs should extend what is currently available on the site. Books seem inappropriate (not inappropriate as such, just they don’t fit in well with the rest of the site) and I’m not envisaging an easy process to collect and collate all the information on the site into an formatted book.

Teacher’s packs will most likely be downloadable pdfs – like my patterns – which will contain basics of puppetry theory, plus exercises, patterns and sample lesson plans. They will contain some of the info already posted on the site, but in an easier-to-read format. I will most likely offer CD versions as well, despite CDs never selling as much as downloads, but I figure teachers will be more likely to want additional files, like videos.

This fits in with the rest of the site, isn’t too hard to create, is passive income, and if marketed correctly can make use of the large audience that seem to come from the student/teacher group. I note a lot of hits to my site come from password-protected school forums and intranets, and instead of wasting my time trying to get into the school-workshop scene, I can make more use of my already-considerable online presence.

2. Advertising.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about things the wrong way around. All this time I’ve been freaking out about my ever-growing bandwidth problem and had some cognitive dissonance going. If my past employment with websites has taught me anything, it’s that dotcoms love big viewership numbers. Why? In order to sell advertising space. The more viewers you have, the more advertisers will want to be seen on your site, increasing their chances of sales. Up until now, I’ve not wanted ads on my site (tried: google ads; I get pathetic fees. Amazon; decent fees, but I use them to buy books with. Other ad services; worse than google and often very bad selection of ads). The reason I didn’t want ads is because the whole point of the FAQ was to generate enough visibility to draw potential customers for my own products.

Now with the FAQ moving to a different domain name, I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to compete with other people: if I treat the site as planned as a business separate to PIM. Suddenly, a huge micro-money-earner opens up to me. This past month of May saw 23 000+ page loads, with hundreds of visitors. Since most are drive-bys, it doesn’t matter too much if I lose them going to another site (and most will go to another site if they’re clicking on free patterns and the like), but only if I take advantage of this fact.

From placing small ad spots on the current page, I know that ‘above fold’ (ie. anything that you don’t have to scroll to see) ads are relatively popular, and that ‘below fold’ ads get less hits.

So when everything moves, I’ll be taking advantage of ad spots, removing the Amazon banner ad and replacing it with for-sale spots. The ‘above fold’ ad will be more expensive to buy than the ‘below fold’ ones, but all will be pretty cheap. I’m not going to go through ad services, but rely on networking amongst puppeteers and the like in order to sell them. That is, I’ll make up my own pricings and just sell spots via Paypal. I’ll keep them cheap, and make a point of sales out of the growing audience that would see the spots.

Why have this huge and growing audience, and not make the most of the visibility? That’s pretty much the only selling point of the entire site: it’s popular.

(For those playing at home: moving everything across should make no noticeable dip in viewership if done correctly. The beautiful thing about my blog software is that in the blog post options, you can manually select to redirect said post; google or other searches will be slow to update at first, but it won’t matter, because you’ll just get redirected anyway. Since I’m planning on moving posts bit-by-bit, the only slow part is the split between viewership on PIM and viewership on SOP. Meaning the numbers overall won’t drop off at all, but just keep growing as normal.)

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