Principles to growth

Langorang has been a trial in sanity for me. With life as chaotic as it has been the past 6 months, I have been able to stay sane because of my wife and my time working on the site.

As I follow the numbers, it reached another milestone today. Last month Langorang reached 91 absolute unique visitors and so far this month it has already accomplished the same. This may not seam like a lot but there are some principles in play here that I thought I would share.

Have a crock pot mentality
It may take you 10 years to be an overnight success. I understand that we live in a world where everyone wants super results now. That may happen on occasion and we can all name sites that have gone from nothing to millions in revenue in a year or two. But this is not the case in general. If that happens to you, enjoy the ride. As for the rest of us, dedication over time is the key. Langorang has been in existence for almost 7 months. When I started there were 2 results in Google for the term Langorang. As of the writing of this there are 2990 results. Also, on my old analysis tools there were 50 unique visitors for the month of October. Using that same tool the site already has 179. The point is that it has grown every month. The numbers may be small now but be ready, when you catch the wave of momentum you may be in for the ride of your life.

Spend a little bit of time every day making your site better
This is key. It is difficult to get others excited about the site if you are not improving it. This site started out as a community. However, no one signed up so I had to start adding features that would make it useful to people. Starting with a video and job tool, I built in a language news aggregation utility and more recently I have been working on a unique content tool and a comments feature for people to add comments to the news items. The point is to keep improving even if it is just a little bit each day.

Be willing to adapt
I heard an older gentleman one time say that he who is not flexible will be bent out of shape. This is very true. If you want to grow your site you need people. You may want people to do one thing and they may be doing another. If you find that instead of buying all your products they are reading all of your content, consider enhancing your content tools. Don’t throw away your products but instead build the traffic to the content and then make the products available through a soft sell approach.

Learn about SEO and Usability
This is can be a very inexpensive way to grow your site. There are several helpful books available to get you primed for the pump. My reading list has a couple that I read recently and they have helped me to get the site on track for better usability and make it easier for search engines to sift through the content on the site.

Build your site debt free
With the plethora of inexpensive hosting companies on the web, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep costs down in this area. Also, you don’t have to pay for expensive software to build your site if you are willing to get a little bit of code dirt under your fingernails. For example, Langorang is built using Ruby on Rails, MySql, Aptana (a tool used to write the code), and MySql Query Browser (a tool used to edit the database when I can’t do it from the Rails code). All of these products are free and there is a lot of community support out there. Don’t be afraid to dig in and make it happen.

Track your success
Finally, how will you know you are doing well if you don’t track it. There are 3 primary metrics that I track with Langorang (you may need to track something different): Visitor Stats, Items Clicked and Revenue. You should be able, at a glance, to tell people how your site is doing and what the trends are. There is an excellent free tool out there called Google Analytics that will help you with this. It has been an invaluable resource in my quest to grow the site.

Most of us have ideas, families and full time jobs. We don’t have a lot of extra time to make the next big thing on the web. However, you may find that your hobby has turned into a full time job. Don’t let it become work!!! Keep it fun and exciting. Always growing and improving. Always try to make things better. Even if you one day have a team working on it with you, establish a culture of excitement, growth and adventure. Have fun storming the castle!!!