Protoscopic

getting creative with cake?

The Chocolate Part

I was watching a Food Network show today about cakes, and a baker said something in an interview that I found intriguing. When asked about baking blunders, she said that the great thing about her job is that nobody ever knows exactly what was planned. For example, what was supposed to be a three-layer, frosted chocolate cake might accidentally end up as a flourless chocolate tart, a chocolate mousse cake, or even chocolate parfaits with ice cream and raspberries. In the end, everyone gets a lovely dessert and nobody ever knows that it differed from original concept. Failure can, in fact, be opportunity.

The SEO Part

It made me think of a recent situation at wdwforgrownups.com. Because we have a high standard for the type of links we post on the site and don’t require linkbacks as a “payment” for space, we’re forced to figure out other ways to drive traffic to Walt Disney World for Grownups. As you know from other posts, we’re working on building our forums and have installed quizzes as interactive content. But we’ve also been writing what we consider to be strong content articles aimed at the interests of our niche market, such as working remotely in Walt Disney World and what to do in WDW without the kids.

Initially, we wrote the articles to facilitate our search engine traffic, assuming search engines would spider the articles making WDW for Grownups a hit for more keyword searches. Though we’ve not yet seen increased search traffic from the articles, we’re confident that it will eventually come. In the meantime, we’re considering submitting the articles for use by fellow webmasters (“free” advertising), and continue to increase and improve the articles’ targeted content so that the articles are “link-worthy” by other sites and “forward-worthy” by our readers.

The Sweet Truth

If our tenets are to go out on a limb, try new things, and learn from our mistakes, I’d also add that we should make a chocolate parfait out of a three-layer cake! If you’ve spent a significant amount of time on something and it doesn’t turn out how you’d hoped, just turn it into something else!