Caputuring Our Target Audience

Although I briefly touched upon the means through which we are going to wine and dine our target audience with once using our web feature, luring them there is a whole other issue.  

A ring recently designed by google showing the amount of hits your site has

Capturing a target audience with web content seems to be a 'chasing the magic dragon' kind of topic with each of thousand or so guides that populate googles search pages swearing by their unique theory of doing so (in the process, reminding me of the apparent abundance of ways that online ads suggest you too can lose 5 kilograms in one week!). However, unlike the littany of paid-per-view weight loss guides, there are some truths that are consistent between each one that we have decided embodies best practice for our web feature in particular. 

Using a site approrpiately entitled, "The Bloggers guide to SEO" (and the fact that they must be doing something right if they have managed to get themselves finely perched on the first page of a google search), the optimisation of SEO and use of key words or phrases to attract a particular target audience is translated into terms that even the non-tech savy can understand. They, in summary, suggest the use of site specific key phrases that give your subject matter a wide range of matches (for us, streaming, television, netflix, australia, quickflix) which will potentially involve the casual tech-interested search and then a range of more exclusive search terms like (netflix in australia, television streaming australia) which (obviously) connect people inquiring specifically into the topics covered in our web feature back into the site. 

To gather and exploit these trending terms, Google Analytics has become our best ally. As we haved developed our page  and continued to do so, it has been a requisted that we keep a continual eye on the popularity of search terms and related phrases to our peice.  

Doing a search on these terms yeilds less than 5 pages specifically relating to our subject matter which means our SEO mountain shouldn't be too hard to climb. Whilst potentially rudimentary for some, those uneducated (us!) will find it a huge leg-up in actually getting their page seen if they are effective in the world of SEO and key pharsing.  

Google's page on Blogger goes further in-depth concerning coming out on top in the search engine they created and further than that in generating page hits through, what could very easily be Google's motto, thinking outside the box. The page provided an interesting and comprehensive study of a number of different means companies and online entities had achieved and maintained success. This was quite a game-changing read for our web team when considered what our design philosphy and in-house style would be like. Concepts like 'piggy-backing'  are worth a look alone and their stressing on the importance of creating a unique web identity and strategy are all part an intelligent and achievable framework which we will surely keep at the heart of our design and content production. This is to say that, whether successful or not, we are going to try innovate above pre-existing pages rather than just stay in tow!

Readers, be sure to let us know if there are any other design philosophies, websites we should turn our eye too! 

Blogging Our Ideas – The Research Process

I have to admit, I approached blogging the development of our ideas rather hesitantly at first. Being new to the blogosphere or blogipelago (Dean, 2010), I wondered how this approach to research would actually benefit our end product; it seemed cumbersome, aesthetically driven, time consuming and little better than the old facebook group in terms of communication potential.

3 weeks in however, I’ve come to realize the enormous benefit that the blog has had to the development of our concept. Our blog has very much followed the tenants of early blogging discussed by Jodi Dean in The Death of Blogging. These blogs, numbering only 23 in 1999, ‘were logs of websites, signposts left by a previous navigator of the internet to those wanting to follow that path. The compiler of that list, the blogger, would also provide commentary on why things were and were not interesting, useful or reliable…’ (Dean, 2010)

Throughout this process we have been signposting our ideas, bouncing them off each other and above all being forced to write posts. This I feel is the key to our experience of blogging, the lassez faire approach to social media sites leaves little incentive to publish research on time, and a far smaller degree of adequate peer review. By publishing our findings to our blog we have opened up discussion, encouraging other members of our team, the public (we hope), our lecturers and class mates to partake in the conversation. Simultaneously it has forced us to consider our online aesthetic, the design of the blog forming somewhat of a draft for our final web feature.

I’ve been converted. I’m no longer a blogatheist and I’m looking forward to many more weeks of drafting, finalizing and discussing our web feature.