As some of you may know, Suggest of the Day is a site I came up with last year, basically to record all the weird and often offensive suggests that Google brings up when you start a search. Despite just being a bunch of pictures, it gets a few hundred natural visitors a day – mainly people searching on the bizarre “suggested” keyword, and mainly Americans. I made Suggest of the Day for my own amusement, and I’ve kept it up this long because it’s so low maintenance, but I’m starting to wonder…what should I actually *do* with it?
I could….
– Write an opinion about each suggest. To fit in with the spirit of the site this should be really sarcastic, possibly offensive but always tongue-in-cheek. This may help to generate discussion, but unfortunately, as the comment thread on this post shows, some people don’t really get what the site is all about.
– Have some sort of voting plugin to encourage more interaction. The vast majority of visitors don’t leave comments, but clicking a “I like this” button takes a lot less effort.
– Have more obvious social buttons. There are social buttons at the moment but I doubt anyone uses them. Maybe a huge “Stumble This!” would work better.
– Have a Facebook group. This would take quite a bit more upkeep – I mean, you have to get people to join, get them to add content, etc etc. I barely even use Facebook any more so this would be difficult for me.
– Utilise Twitter more. There is a Suggestoftheday Twitter account but it’s following….erm…me and Frog. I do use Twitter but to be honest, I’m at work all day so maintaining another Twitter account would again be difficult. Unless I just made an effort to check it every few days…
– Make money off it. There are some poorly-targeted ads on the site at the moment…(how do you target adverts to such a random site anyway?) Unless I went for something like Firebox affiliate ads which, assuming all my visitors are the kind of people who use Firebox, may work better. Because the site is so random and, well, *pointless*, it’s hard to justify the extra effort to build it up. If I had a plan for monetising it, the effort would be justifed.
Those are my thoughts so far! The ones that just need a plugin installing will probably get done, but like I said, Suggest of the Day needs a goal. I just need to work out what that is :s
I’d put pictures of Barry Chuckle in the current ad space, make a shrine to the man, the legend! Surely that’s the obvious route to take?
Tricky one really. Its either the type of site that you keep on maintaining as it is, so that you build up the traffic, links and authority for the domain … or you go for more targetted “suggests” that you want the site to rank for and to monetarise. If you find some more mainstream, commonly searched suggest terms and add some general content / thoughts to each post to give them some body rather than just the screenshot then the ads will be more targetted to what you are aiming for. I find that my “how to make…” posts work well for traffic.
Alternatively pick up some of the negative suggests results that follow some companies around… that include “rip off” “fraud” “scam” etc and then offer reputation management services off the back of it.
Just my thoughts!
Becky
@Becky I hadn’t thought of doing negative suggests but like you say, they’d certainly let me do more editorial/add content and get more targeted traffic and better rankings for those terms too. I bet phrases like “[company name] scam” get a fair bit of traffic too!