Case Study Update 2 – More Building and Planning

Sorry I didn’t get this post out yesterday fellas, but the weather was awesome and the fish were biting. An early morning fishing trip turned into an all day event. Hope you don’t mind getting the case study update a day late!

Still Building

I spent most of this week still building the foundation of the site. I installed the new WordPress skin as well as a ton of widgets. WordPress really is boring as hell unless you install a few widgets and add-ons to add to the site. Here are a few of my favorite must-have WP add-ons:

I’m not going to give you guys a breakdown of what each of these plugins are or what they do, I think you’re all smart enough to figure it out for yourself! But these are my favorite widgets, and I am using them all on this blog as well as my new rock and roll blog.

Preparing Content & Promotion

I’ve only made one post on the blog at the moment, and that is really just to have an early contextual post up for applying to PPP and RM later on. I’m not entirely concerned about updating the content at the moment since the only visitors the blog has right now are my readers who have managed to find the URL! However, when I begin promoting the site I will definitely be posting at least once per day. At the moment I plan for the blog to “launch” next week or so.

I have been brainstorming about a lot of ways to get the initial promotion of the blog going. One thing I’ve already mentioned was of course Digg. I’ve written down 10 headlines/stories that I think I could get to the frontpage of Digg without getting buried. I’m hoping that will get it a bit of an initial surge of traffic. I am not, however, going to be publishing these Diggy stories early on. I plan to run the blog at full speed writing my normal content for at least 3-4 weeks before submitting it to Digg for the first time. NBB was able to take off early on with Digg, but I’ve never used Digg for a non-business niche so I’d rather be safe than sorry in this instance by making sure the blog is full of delicious content before promoting it through Digg.

I also have a Myspace profile that I haven’t touched in *months* but has about 1,000 local bands and a couple thousand other rock-oriented friends on it. I would say about 90% of these friend requests came to me so hopefully the users will be active and actually interested in the niche. I will be sending some bulletins and messages to my Myspace “friends” when the blog officially launches to muster up a little interest in it. I also have another promotional idea for Myspace that I think will really work, but I’ll talk about that a little more next week.

I have been working on some offline techniques as well, all of which I want to actually *do* before I write about, so sorry to leave you guys with yet another teaser, but that will have to hold off for another week or so as well.

Overall there isn’t a whole whole lot that went on this week with the case study. Just boring dev work for the most part, but she’s getting closer to launch – that’s when the case study will really get interesting!