Protoscopic

Contrary to instinct, your marketing effort is really the first part of building your project. Before you begin investing too much time and energy into your site you need to do some market research. Are people interested in what you’re offering? Is that interest rising or diminishing? Is their interest already being adequately met?

In many ways we did not adequately do this for Walt Disney World For Grownups. Or maybe more appropriately we disregarded what we knew. We were well aware that the space was rife with “competitors,” but we decided to enter the ring anyway. Mainly because we hoped that our niche was not filled, because we had good subject matter expertise, and because there are fringe benefits to working in an area with which we were already familiar.

Despite this, if we had engaged in more “market research,” such as key word analysis and search engine optimization, before we entered the space, we could have probably put ourselves in a better position to succeed. Of course making these kinds of mistakes is part of the “Protoscopic Experiment,” and we’re glad to learn from them.

Our advice now–which we will follow with subsequent sites–is to optimize your marketing effort before you start any kind of development. What key words will increase your search traffic? What are good ways to increase your pagerank? Make sure the demand is where you think it is, and that you’re putting yourself in the best position to capture it.