What am I doing wrong?

[soccerprodigy777]

Hey all...

I run NXTLVLMAG.com, an online magazine that mainly covers Christian Rock and Hip Hop. We've been online for little over a year, but traffic to the site is no where near where I had wanted it to be by now. We have great content, an appealing design, we use social media (mainly twitter and Facebook), etc., but i cant figure out for the life of me what we're doing wrong. Its hindering plans we have to expand. Any help? Suggestions?

Thanks

[Carlos™]

There's not enough 'attitude' on the site. You need to push harder on marketing the site, but you need to nail down the whole 'rock' and 'hip hop' stereotype. The thing is this, there are a few hip hop websites out right now and they are doing better than what you are doing. For example HipHopGamer is so popular right now, but his website is crappy, however, his brand has 'attitude' written all over his site.

First thing I would do is move the social media stuff to the top of the site. I feel like I don't see enough social media presence unless i scroll down a bit - below the tags area.

Secondly, the domain name doesn't come off at me as a hiphop website or a rock website. Although, the name is clever. Perfect gaming magazine, I'd say.

Look at the difference: http://www.hiphopgamershow.com/new/

[soccerprodigy777]

The suggestion to move up the social media presence location is good...I think I'll go ahead and move that around. But in essence, the website lacks edge? How would I go about giving it edge? Is it just a matter of imagery and colors, etc? And about the domain, its a bit late for me to do something with it now. I've already branded it for what it is, and besides, im not a gamer. But i am intrigued by the whole "attitude" idea...just not sure how to implement it.

[Carlos™]

Yes, for example, the logo you're using right now for the site is lackluster compared to what you're using for 'promotion' images. That logo is perfect as a "company" logo, so put it in your about section or make a variation of it, make it a transparent gif and put it as a logo for company-like logo on the bottom of the site, where the copyright stuff is usually. where you have contact suff.

I also noticed the logo for "NTV" - that screamed at me "attitude" and edge. Keep that there.

[soccerprodigy777]

okey dokey then. Noted. Any other suggestions guys?

[jonn655]

Social media is fast becoming the domain for interaction on a global scale so it is important to use this medium. SEO/SEM efforts are also needed - perhaps more - because your presence on search engines is what makes you visible.

[akula]

Hey all...

I run NXTLVLMAG.com, an online magazine that mainly covers Christian Rock and Hip Hop. We've been online for little over a year, but traffic to the site is no where near where I had wanted it to be by now. We have great content, an appealing design, we use social media (mainly twitter and Facebook), etc., but i cant figure out for the life of me what we're doing wrong. Its hindering plans we have to expand. Any help? Suggestions?

Thanks

1) hii, thanks for posting
look...the way problems like yours get solved is in a structured manner.
firstly, focus groups get conducted, which results in changes being made either to your positioning, marketing mix, strategy or execution.
the issue of course, is that NXTLVLMAG is a consumer facing product with a non quantifiable value proposition. It's hard to say if you have a good product or a bad one, because your value proposition is subjective.
in other words, the popularity of your site is dependent on consumer tastes which are random in nature, so it's difficult to recommend any one objective thing that you can implement to change your results.
giving the site "more attitude", what ever that means...could be as a valid bit of advice as anything else...and I do hope that some little tweak will solve your problems.

2) On another hand, I will tell you one thing. People in the internet business have been aware of this fact for a very long time. The fact is, it is impossible to predict which consumer facing site might or might not be a success. Things like NXTLVLMAG either go viral or they don't. It's all a a matter of luck. Therefore, under these circumstance of uncertainty, the best way to succeed for entrepreneurs is to avoid trying to make "perfect products", but rather try to make lots of imperfect prototypes. That's basically the methodology behind the Lean Startup Movement. And it's a good methodology, because it helps entrepreneurs avoid fixing products which are by their nature unfixable. Is NXTLVLMAG unfixable? it might be..or not. no one can tell for sure.

3) So, my advice to you is this: it is impossible to guess what is wrong with NXTLVLMAG. It could be everything, one thing, or nothing. Because it's impossible to tell, it's impossible to fix. Therefore, if the thing's not taking off, I suggest to you that the best way forward may be to drop the project and do something else...
Now...does that seem harsh? Yes it does. But that's because you are emotionally/financially attached to the project, not because the advice is bad. The hardest thing an entrepreneur can do is to walk away from an under-performing venture, but that's a necessary skill that you must have if you wanna succeed in the long run. You don't wanna be the guy who is gonna spend the next 2 years trying to make this online mag work, only to quit it then when you could have quit it now.

[Carlos™]

So, my advice to you is this: it is impossible to guess what is wrong with NXTLVLMAG. It could be everything, one thing, or nothing. Because it's impossible to tell, it's impossible to fix. Therefore, if the thing's not taking off, I suggest to you that the best way forward may be to drop the project and do something else...
Now...does that seem harsh? Yes it does. But that's because you are emotionally/financially attached to the project, not because the advice is bad. The hardest thing an entrepreneur can do is to walk away from an under-performing venture, but that's a necessary skill that you must have if you wanna succeed in the long run. You don't wanna be the guy who is gonna spend the next 2 years trying to make this online mag work, only to quit it then when you could have quit it now.

OP, do not heed this advice. It does not work for everyone.

I can tell you that I have first hand experience of running a site for 4 years, moved to a new domain for testing purposes. And realized that there was nothing wrong with my previous efforts. In fact, my current site has grown so much, that if I moved it back to where I begun; my site gets a huge boost in visits. No rebrand necessary. In your case, a visiual rebrand is more necessary than a complete re-brand.

Especially if you have spent years working on the brand. It would be a BAD idea to restart all over again because it means losing SEO trails. Losing whatever you had in search engines.

[rpermana]

You have 0 backlink. You need to promote your site by linking your site to social media...

then you got to participate in your category forum, let say your site is about 'hip hop' ,

then google all hip hop forums, sign up , put your website link on the signature, then participate... post at least 2 posts / day in each forum..

[akula]

OP, do not heed this advice. It does not work for everyone.

I can tell you that I have first hand experience of running a site for 4 years, moved to a new domain for testing purposes. And realized that there was nothing wrong with my previous efforts. In fact, my current site has grown so much, that if I moved it back to where I begun; my site gets a huge boost in visits. No rebrand necessary. In your case, a visiual rebrand is more necessary than a complete re-brand.

Especially if you have spent years working on the brand. It would be a BAD idea to restart all over again because it means losing SEO trails. Losing whatever you had in search engines.

Thanks carlos. Perfect example.

1 ) soccerprodigy777, when it comes to startups, advice is not straight forward. Behavioral biases play a role. For example, anchoring. So, if someone for example, was running a manufacturing business and they did a successful SEO campaign, then, when you ask them for advice that's what they're gonna recommend you...because their advice is anchored to their experiences. It doesn't matter that many online magazines might have implemented the same tactic with negative results etc etc

2 ) So yeah man...it's tricky stuff. For example, if you want positive advice on how to do better with your online mag, lets run through a process to identify 10 changes that you might make.

For example, the problem your product is solving is "music discovery". It's hard for people to find music that they might like, based on music that they currently listen to. That's why you have NXTLVLMAG, which is supposed to help people find new bands. Except however, you don't have a scaleable solution. Not in the way that Pandora or LastFM or t61 or GrooveShark do. You are neither a user gen site, not do you have features that viralize your product. This means that your content will always be old (or there will be too little of it), and people won't be able to seamlessly tell their friends about it...and all of that equals to is LOW return users and LOW new users. So that could be a major problem for you - it's product engineering. You have an uncompetitive solution compared to your competitors.

From a user's perspective, once I've had a look at your content, what is my reason to come back? How much new content can I expect? It's all up to your editors....and it's unlikely they can churn out as much content suited to my tastes as t61 might (for example). The other issue is that you don't have fb integration etc..

Now...this kind of advice gives you a lot more directives. But is it a good idea for you to re-engineer everything you've done in order to play catch up with Pandora? I doubt it...

[soccerprodigy777]

valid points and advice Carlos and Akula...thank you. It gave me plenty to think about, esp about what the site has to offer to draw visitors back. I know Im not at the point where i'm ready to walk away, as i havent done everything i could do to improve the product yet. Not so much to re-engineer everything, but to improve on aspects of the site. Like it being user-gen...i really hadnt thought too thoroughly on that. thx

[akula]

valid points and advice Carlos and Akula...thank you. It gave me plenty to think about, esp about what the site has to offer to draw visitors back. I know Im not at the point where i'm ready to walk away, as i havent done everything i could do to improve the product yet. Not so much to re-engineer everything, but to improve on aspects of the site. Like it being user-gen...i really hadnt thought too thoroughly on that. thx

Ok bud..i like that you are open to new ideas...so let me definitively suggest to you how to fix your site in a comprehensive way.

1) The problem: What NXTLVLMAG does is music discovery. You help fans find new christian music. Your early adopters are people who go to christian music gigs, or listen to that kind of music.

2) The solution. Your current solution is a blog run by an editor who posts interviews with artists and other content. It's not an effective solution because there isn't a lot of content. This is bad because people have varied tastes in music so it is unlikely that any one person will find something they like on your site.
The solution you should be implementing is a user generated blog network like 9rules.com etc.

The way it works is like this:

a) You approach an artist and say "how would you like to get more fans free of charge?" They'll say "cool, sign me up"
b) then, you use a tool like feed.informer.com to take the artist's RSS feed from their site/blog/myspace/facebook/youtube/twitter and resyndicate it on your site. i.e. you create a page on your site for "artist XYZ" and then use a little javascript that you get from feedinformer to post an automatically updated stream of all their videos/posts/status updates etc on that page. The artist doesn't need to do anything else.

The end result is that once you've signed up like 100 artists, you're gonna have a site that's constantly updated with tons of fresh content from hundreds of artists. So that when a user comes to your site, they have lots and lots of fresh content to look at every day. Then once they've found something they like on your site, they'll follow a link and go to the original artists page where you are streaming the content from. They'll also be able to "like" the syndicated music they heard on your site and post the link to your site on their facebook page.

c) You will promote the site as "the world's largest collection of christian music, where fans meet artists". That's a site that people would come back to and tell their friends about. And it's easy and cheap to implement. You can get it done in a week with $0 financial outlay. You don't even need to ask artists for their permission, because all you are doing is scrapping their content in the same way that google scrapes content..and if the artist doesn't want to be in your index, you can get them to ask you to remove their content from your site...which they won't because the whole point for them of publishing publicly available content is for people to see it!

What do you think?

[soccerprodigy777]

sounds very doable. I really hadnt thought of that, and this would definately be a plus. I may need to switch up my layout...but i'll see how I can work it out. Do you know of any other resources that i can reference to put something like this together? Thanks

[akula]

yeah..the rss media grabber script
i dunno if you can get your hands on it..but it's pretty good

RE layout. sure..you'll need two things; once you have hundreds of artists streaming content on your site, you need to sort all those pages to help users navigate between diffrent artists...i dunno if you wanna do it by location (for example..a listing of all new york or california etc based christian artists)..or alphabetically..or by music genre...could probably do it by all three.
Then you need a recommendation engine, so that if I'm on a page for a soft rock artist from texas, tour site should be able to recommend me similar artists...but it's not essential. it could be a v2.0 feature.

The critical feature you need is simply lots and lots of pages, for lots and lots of artists, streaming lots and lots of their content.

Once you have that, you have a competitive value proposition: "The world's largest collection of christian music"

[seofactor]

I can tell you from being on the site for 5 seconds, there was absolutely no SEO thought given to it. To get traffic to a site you have a couple options:

Rely on the search engines to produce that traffic

Rely on word of mouth (social, sharing, email, etc.)

In both of those, you need a plan in place. Right off the bat, SEO would probably do wonders for you, even a conservative campaign (barring issues with your CMS).

As for viral, I can understand why most people think it's all luck, but it really isn't. There is a strategy involved with getting your site to go viral just like there is with anything else in marketing. I would suggest looking for a professional service provider if you have the funds. If not, get to learning both of those things.