Category Archives: Development

Introducing The Money Side of Life

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I just finished leading a team in developing a niche news and information site for brass that we’re calling The Money Side of Life.

Money Side of Life starts as a blog written by a team of bloggers, designers and video producers with the goal of informing and inspiring people to take control of their money and live more fulfilling lives. In the future, we envision many more opportunities for reader involvement: events, contests, and more.

What was interesting from a content-wrangling perspective was the process of defining what we wanted the site to do, planning which social media platforms to use and how, and getting the editorial workflow into place. I was stoked to install EditFlow, a plugin that creates a robust editorial backend on WordPress that is very flexible and easy to understand.

Right now, our focus is on ramping up a less-periodic content team into a multiple-post-per-day operation. Then we’ll continue to refine our focus and develop reader habits.

Pretty exciting stuff. Follow us on Twitter (@MoneySideofLife) and Facebook.

The importance of stating the obvious

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A primary issue with developing anything out of thin air is the tendency for discussions to quickly move from idea to solution, then include a little strategy on the backend for good measure. This works fine if you find yourself with a pool of oil under your car:

Oil’s leaking. Where’s it coming from?
The engine. Looks like a seal’s gone bad.
Better replace the seal.

But when you’re trying to create niche products, market to a particular group, or turn content into profit, the “quick start” method can lead to some problems:

  • Half-baked strategies
  • Wasted effort
  • Mixed messaging
  • Incomplete campaigns

So while I’m a fan of brainstorming and getting things hashed out quickly, it’s important to start with a problem statement: What problem is this thing trying to solve?

It sounds obvious, but everything stems from that. Knowing the problem (and, hopefully, the desired outcome) even in general terms helps to bring focus to the project. The brainstorming can come after everyone knows the lay of the land clearly. I’d argue that your creative process is even more effective when the goal is plainly stated, since I firmly believe limits enhance creativity.

Revamp: Making home improvement easier

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After four months of planning and hacking and testing, I’m proud to announce Revamp, a niche vertical aimed at the homebuilding, renovation and repair industry

After launching a self-contained social network about a year ago that was half community, half business directory, we learned that the product lacked consistent reader activity and was difficult for non-blogger business owners to use.

So I and a colleague regrouped and tried to distill the essence of what businesses might want from the Web. Our answer? Personal contact with potential customers. It’s why they join Facebook and do branding advertising and buy a listing on a newspaper social network.

The problem? These are plumbers and designers and landscapers, not writers. So we trimmed down the options to three categories: news, events and offers. We integrated an “Ask a Pro” feature as a way to put experience front-and-center to start the conversation with primed customers. And we always have a way for people to contact our pros to ask in person or schedule a bid.

We can also work with networks like Facebook, Twitter or existing products like a company Website or blog. We want to be the hub for our advertiser’s various work on the Web. We want to bend like the reed and help local businesses understand the social Web.

What it isn’t

Seems like a funny thing to explain, but it’s important:

  • Revamp is not a business directory. Why reinvent the wheel? Get into the stream where people are looking for information.
  • It also uses some newsroom content to provide relevant local information for people who search the network, but is not driven by editorial material.
  • Revamp is also not the most important part of the network. Yes, we want people to find our network aggregator useful, but if we can teach local businesspeople to tag and categorize regular postings correctly in order to maximize their exposure to local search traffic and a local customer’s first stop is their profile, we’re successful.

Take a look and see if it meets your needs. I’ll be following up with the kind of feedback we get from the pros who join the network.