| Written by Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith,
on 21-10-2007 00:06
|
Views : 249  |
Favoured : 52 |
Published in : The News, Articles |
I'm trying to have ideas for new things to try to create sites with traffic. In fact I've got quite a few ideas, and I'd rather try to exploit things which are potentially useful for people as well as for myself.
Now I know I've talked about ideas in the past and never really gotten round to implement them but here's a few things I think I want to play with.
To be fair, for someone like me, blogging is probably the best way to try and interest people. Of course with my obscure interests, my chances of finding a prolific niche are pretty slim so let's try to explore a few ideas I've had.
First the sword-shop reviewer. While I think this is a good idea, it would work better on its own dedicated site. As a result, I would have to find hosting (which may or may not be a problem) and a good marketing name. Whether I would have time to dedicate to this, I'm not sure. To be honest, my main concern is about the proportion of web users that come on-line trying to buy a sword. Let's be honest here, unless you're really sure you know exactly what you want, shopping for a sword is best done in an exhibit room, in a workshop, at a re-enactment faire or in a shop that sells them on the high street. In particular if these are meant to be used as functional weapons, it's always best to actually try them in your hand first. Swords can be a very personal thing. Consequently, I may just stick to the list of European Sword-makers and resellers. Let's face it, last time I bought a sword, I was in an actual shop and I got it because it felt right in my hand. Chances are, unless people are just looking for wall-hangers as presents, I would guess a lot of people doing what I do are likely to be like me.
This takes me to a second, bigger, even bolder idea. This is an idea I've had for a while but which I somehow can't fathom whether it would be useful or not. The idea is to have a central rating system for on-line shoppers, whatever it is you buy, to rate the place you've bough from. This concept may already exist for all I know. The inspiration for this is obviously ebay, where you can (have to even) rate the seller with whom you traded. This provides a level a trust where other buyers can buy safely from the same seller. However, a similar system does not exist (as far as I'm aware) for standalone on-line shops. Usually you have the "we take these cards", "we have this level of security", "we use hackersafe", "Our payment service provider is so-and-so" but not really any buyer's feedback per-se. A shop can of course place a guestbook of some sort but really if they have full control over the system and their service is actually horrible, what's to stop them removing bad comments? (I did come across such an obviously bad shop before). At least on eBay, the seller can't remove bad comments at will because s/he doesn't like them. If there was an impartial body whose sole purpose is to gather buyer's experience from Amazon to the wee yarn shop up the road who happens to sell on-line then people could have somewhere to refer to. The downside is, it would potentially take a long time before it even remotely starts to become useful, it would need to be heavily publicised and thoroughly designed to avoid obvious caveats like the same person spamming positive or negative comments to dilute the ratings. Whether this is really a one-man project is a matter of debate.
So we come to my third idea, which would probably not even remotely interest the three pilgrims who'll be reading this article  .
Here are the facts, I'm French (well okay Norman but that's beside the point here) and I live in Scotland. I once tried to create a community on LiveJournal for French people living in the UK. This never took off simply because the French don't use LiveJournal (funny that), but what if there was some kind of blog, in French (hey I can do that) talking about random stuff, what it's like to live here. Hey my family asks me that all the time. You know, "what's the food like", "Do they have Social Security like we do", "How do you get a doctor", I was even once asked (I won't say by who) "Do they also drive on the left in Scotland?"
Now the down-side is, unlike the time when I lived in Vaasa, Finland, I have never been involved with the French community, and I'm not so sure I would want to. Would that be an issue? I don't think so. See, if I was involved with them, I may not be trying to adapt they way I've been doing for the past 7 years. Would this attract traffic? I'm not so sure. I'll have to figure out if I can use word tracker with French words and see if I get useful results. By the way, www.en-ecosse.co.uk seems available (as are all other popular tld's  ), so I might go on a domain name shopping trip. This might also be a good reason to use the wordpress1 account I opened the other day ....
Thoughts? You who reads this, yes you, stop looking back I'm not talking to the ghost behind your shoulder... 
1: Ermm, or not. It looks like Wordpress have a very strong policy against Adsense or other similar types of advertising. Well that's this out of the window then, I'll probably just got for another Blogger then...
Last update : 21-10-2007 01:00
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