WordPress: The Ultimate Hype Machine
One of the reasons things have been quiet here for a while is because I’m working on a new project called ScoutPath (http://www.myscoutpath.com). If you have been to my projects page you may know a little about it. ScoutPath is an online community for Boy Scouts where they can track their trail to Eagle, interact with their troop, connect with groups, friends and more. Anticipated launch isn’t until June, but I think this project has a lot of potential so I’m going to pull out all the stops and do a full hype/promo campaign leading up to the launch. To help me accomplish this I’m enlisting the assistance of WordPress (WP). This post is about how I plan on using WP to assist/automate the pre-launch promotional process.
Flying Solo
I’m a one man operation… the legendary solo programmer famous in song and story. I handle all the programming with my applications along with the HTML/CSS for the interface and then all the promotional and marketing tasks as well. A few years ago I hooked up with a great designer who handles all my visual stuff but I’m pretty much it when it comes to my projects. This means that I have to be very picky with how I spend my time.
In the past this has meant that I didn’t have time for a big hype/promo campaign before launch because I was too busy programming and finalizing code. But with ScoutPath I really want to make an impression so I needed to find something that would help me accomplish this task without taking up a lot of my time. After coming up with a plan on what I wanted to do I decided to use WordPress for this task.
The Plan
When your coming up with a plan on how to build hype/anticipation of an upcoming project it’s not enough to simply put up a page with a project description and walk away. You need to feed users a little new information on a regular basis so they stay excited and don’t forget about you. I learned this after my first attempt at ScoutPath a year ago. I put up a simple landing page with one or two paragraphs about the project and a mailing list sign-up form to be notified when the project goes live. That “plan” didn’t really go anywhere because I didn’t have the time to do anything with it.
This time around I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and now a WordPress install to help things go better. The plan is to post some details about the project each week leading up to the launch in June. You won’t find any deep detail with screen shots and explanations; just enough to peek a users interest and get them to sign-up for the launch mailing list. Facebook and Twitter are two additional distribution channels I will leverage to help get the word out to users in other parts of the web. So between now and June I have roughly 12 weeks to get people psyched about ScoutPath.
Using WordPress
ScoutPath is still in the development stages. I’m hip deep in lines of code that don’t yet make sense so again I’m faced with not having time for promotion. But the beauty of using WordPress is that I don’t need time. I devoted an hour or two to writing 12 or so posts and then scheduled them for publishing one week at a time leading up to June. This means that I can continue programming and doing what needs to be done to get the project completed and still get the word out and build hype around the project. I may have to respond to the odd comment or two but besides that I can use WordPress to keep the project fresh in peoples minds automatically while I focus on other things.
WordPress also comes with tons of plugins you can use to integrate it with other sites like Facebook and Twitter. On the Facebook page I’m going to import WPs RSS feed so every post get’s published in Facebook as well. I’ve also installed a Twitter plugin that posts a link to new posts from the blog on the Twitter account. These plugins, with the assistance of WPs scheduled publishing, allows me to put the entire promotional campaign on auto-pilot while I focus on the more important programming items.
Looking Ahead
This is really the first time I’ve every done a formal hype/promotional campaign for one of my projects so I intend on using this experience as a case study to see how it all goes. In the end I hope to answer questions like “did it work?” and “was it really worth it?” etc. As things progress I’ll post my progress and findings here so you can benefit from my experiences as well. Stay tuned… it’s sure to be an interesting ride.
Related posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
