Things are starting to come together nicely. Significant new features are being rolled out and there is good progress on marketing.
We have just added rich text to diary and some other spaces. There has been a lot of traction on the diary features of eWoFF. Many users are using primarily the diary space on a daily or every 2-3 day basis.
We are rolling out a big update to the photo space this week. It will make the space much easier to use while retaining all of the personal features. The new features include drag and drop, album edit, multi-photo upload, and an updated sharing space.
The Google campaigns for eWoFF are starting to work. We have scores of 9 and 10 for many useful keywords in diary and family space.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Look and Feel Matters Most!
After a slow start with the updated eWoFF site, we are surprised at the difference attributable to a refresh of the look and feel. We hired a company on elance to provide us with a graphic design update. Even though we were not sure if their design was the greatest, we deployed it on the site because it was a great step forward.
Almost immediately, our bounce rates fell and our conversion rate went up sharply! As we updated in application pages for the members, the amount of content that is being created also went up.
With our refreshed look and marketing campaigns getting tuned, everything is coming together very nicely.
Almost immediately, our bounce rates fell and our conversion rate went up sharply! As we updated in application pages for the members, the amount of content that is being created also went up.
With our refreshed look and marketing campaigns getting tuned, everything is coming together very nicely.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
AdWords Mysteries
Even though we do not display any advertisements on our site, we do depend on PPC traffic to seek our members.
As we started to pilot the new version of eWoFF.com, we created accounts to get PPC traffic at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo and MSN have been predictable and somewhat successful. However, we just cannot seem to sort through the mysteries of Google AdWords! We thought that we were technically competent to setup and sort through Google AdWords. We are only now realizing that our technical tinkering may have broken us for good with Google!
We invite any feedback on our learning of Google AdWords! Given that we have not yet made with Google, some of what is here may not apply! Here is what we have learned so far:
a. Do not use any complex DHTML on your landing pages! Before we even started to setup the various landing pages, our home page was totally unreadable by AdsBot (the special robot to scan for quality of landing pages for AdWords accounts)! You cannot really see what AdsBot sees, but you can guess by what GoogleBot sees! Nearly all of the text on our pages was asynchronously served from web services. Bad idea! This little fella never waited for the stuff to be served!!
b. Never have any important landing page be served to two different URLs that Google crawls! We do not know how they do it, but they link a page to only one URL Our home page used to be served to http://beta.eWoFF.com and we forgot to remove the DNS listing for beta host when we started serving this page at http://www.eWoFF.com. Bad idea! Google kept the old keep the old page as our home page until we removed the beta host entry! Same problem bit us a second time, when we continued to serve eWoFF.com site at WebofFamily.com.
c. Once your campaigns go bad, they do not turn around. At least not in days or weeks! As we improve the quality of the landing pages, it is better to try to setup new campaigns for these improved pages. It is a hopeless venture to tune campaigns that have gone bad!
More to come!
As we started to pilot the new version of eWoFF.com, we created accounts to get PPC traffic at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo and MSN have been predictable and somewhat successful. However, we just cannot seem to sort through the mysteries of Google AdWords! We thought that we were technically competent to setup and sort through Google AdWords. We are only now realizing that our technical tinkering may have broken us for good with Google!
We invite any feedback on our learning of Google AdWords! Given that we have not yet made with Google, some of what is here may not apply! Here is what we have learned so far:
a. Do not use any complex DHTML on your landing pages! Before we even started to setup the various landing pages, our home page was totally unreadable by AdsBot (the special robot to scan for quality of landing pages for AdWords accounts)! You cannot really see what AdsBot sees, but you can guess by what GoogleBot sees! Nearly all of the text on our pages was asynchronously served from web services. Bad idea! This little fella never waited for the stuff to be served!!
b. Never have any important landing page be served to two different URLs that Google crawls! We do not know how they do it, but they link a page to only one URL Our home page used to be served to http://beta.eWoFF.com and we forgot to remove the DNS listing for beta host when we started serving this page at http://www.eWoFF.com. Bad idea! Google kept the old keep the old page as our home page until we removed the beta host entry! Same problem bit us a second time, when we continued to serve eWoFF.com site at WebofFamily.com.
c. Once your campaigns go bad, they do not turn around. At least not in days or weeks! As we improve the quality of the landing pages, it is better to try to setup new campaigns for these improved pages. It is a hopeless venture to tune campaigns that have gone bad!
More to come!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Noise between you and your Family and Friends
Social networking has become a remarkable Internet phenomenon. With a rapid recent rise of giants such facebook and MySpace, there are hundreds other that are trying to emulate or build on these successes. Soon, you will see that we are not one of them!
Besides growing faster and greater than their predecessors, these sites still seek a business model that is sustainable. One could draw many parallels between these new sites and those that rose earlier including eCircles, sixdegrees, myfamily, and friendster. In our opinion, the key weakness in all of these sites is a poor "revenue to noise ratio". We have created this term to evaluate our business model. "Revenue to noise ratio" simply means the amount of revenue that you are able to generate for the amount noise that you throw at a user.
In the old days you had an opportunity to put only a couple of displays ads on the page of a polite site. As the CPM for banner ads plummeted, these sites folded rather quickly. There was a time when graceful shutdown of a dot com was natural end to a venture! Even though the noise on these sites was modest, the revenue was minimal. Thus "revenue to noise ratio" was low.
In contemporary days of web 2.0 (higher?), we made good headway with noise by reducing the ads to simpler non intrusive text scattered anywhere and everywhere. We also gained by getting much better and matching meaningful ads with context. Many times ads were as useful as the content on the page! As everyone gravitated towards a model that was working, the model is now starting to show signs of weakness. As the clickthrough rates for ads plummet and cost-per-click goes down, the noise created for every dollar of revenue generated has skyrocketed! Many times, for a click that generates 10 cents in revenue, there are thousands of messages that are displayed! Talk about a poor "revenue to noise ratio"!
So, how does all of this relate to eWoFF.com? Quite simply, reducing noise in your interaction with your friends and family is our primary objective. Over the coming weeks and months, you will learn that it is possible to stay in touch with family and friends quietly and privately and safely! You will see that we can quite effectively offer these services to you where there is very little, if any, noise to generate revenue from your use of our sites.
Stay tuned, help us tune up the spaces in eWoFF.com such that they really work for you!
Besides growing faster and greater than their predecessors, these sites still seek a business model that is sustainable. One could draw many parallels between these new sites and those that rose earlier including eCircles, sixdegrees, myfamily, and friendster. In our opinion, the key weakness in all of these sites is a poor "revenue to noise ratio". We have created this term to evaluate our business model. "Revenue to noise ratio" simply means the amount of revenue that you are able to generate for the amount noise that you throw at a user.
In the old days you had an opportunity to put only a couple of displays ads on the page of a polite site. As the CPM for banner ads plummeted, these sites folded rather quickly. There was a time when graceful shutdown of a dot com was natural end to a venture! Even though the noise on these sites was modest, the revenue was minimal. Thus "revenue to noise ratio" was low.
In contemporary days of web 2.0 (higher?), we made good headway with noise by reducing the ads to simpler non intrusive text scattered anywhere and everywhere. We also gained by getting much better and matching meaningful ads with context. Many times ads were as useful as the content on the page! As everyone gravitated towards a model that was working, the model is now starting to show signs of weakness. As the clickthrough rates for ads plummet and cost-per-click goes down, the noise created for every dollar of revenue generated has skyrocketed! Many times, for a click that generates 10 cents in revenue, there are thousands of messages that are displayed! Talk about a poor "revenue to noise ratio"!
So, how does all of this relate to eWoFF.com? Quite simply, reducing noise in your interaction with your friends and family is our primary objective. Over the coming weeks and months, you will learn that it is possible to stay in touch with family and friends quietly and privately and safely! You will see that we can quite effectively offer these services to you where there is very little, if any, noise to generate revenue from your use of our sites.
Stay tuned, help us tune up the spaces in eWoFF.com such that they really work for you!
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Welcome to eWoFF.com, Your Web of Family and Friends
Welcome to the blog of eWoFF.com development team. We will write about our plans, our success, and our challenges. If you are an eWoFF.com member or are interested in ideas around staying in touch with family and friends, please visit us periodically.
eWoFF.com is the primary site of eWoFF.com, Incorporated. eWoFF.com, Incorporated is an Illinois corporation based in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Our offices are located in the historic Civic Opera building at 20 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 2704, Chicago, IL 60606.
eWoFF.com is a complete update of a site that was originally created in 1999. Some of the original members of the team are still in the current development team. Many of the original members of eWoFF.com have used this site quietly and privately for nearly a decade!
Rather than a social networking site, ours is a private network. Our members connect, share, and communicate with family and friends privately and safely.
eWoFF.com is the primary site of eWoFF.com, Incorporated. eWoFF.com, Incorporated is an Illinois corporation based in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Our offices are located in the historic Civic Opera building at 20 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 2704, Chicago, IL 60606.
eWoFF.com is a complete update of a site that was originally created in 1999. Some of the original members of the team are still in the current development team. Many of the original members of eWoFF.com have used this site quietly and privately for nearly a decade!
Rather than a social networking site, ours is a private network. Our members connect, share, and communicate with family and friends privately and safely.
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