As I touched on in my previous post, the most important thing when building a neighborhood website (or any website for that matter) is to have a plan for getting people to visit it.

This is the number one reason why neighborhood websites fail – everyone puts all their focus on building the site itself, with no thought of how to get people to use it, or how to get people to keep coming back.

Our current service for neighborhoods allows you to quickly setup a new website in about 5 days. (The actual time is more like 20 minutes, but the paper work and emailing back and forth take a little longer.) We’ve made setting up a new website darn right simple and easy.

We’ve also devised a proven method for getting a majority of your neighborhood online, which basically entails mailing everyone in your neighborhood a unique ID number (PIN) that they can use to register. It keeps things private and exclusive, and you can track who’s online and who’s not. (See my previous post for more information on this process if you’re interested.)

Where we’ve fallen short, however, is relying on our customers to send out the “PIN letters” that contain this critical login information. Asking our customers to figure out how to complete a mail merge is just too much. And because we have to do it multiple times in order to get 60% of the neighborhood online, we think it’s time that we offered an alternative to our customers.

It’s still in planning phase but soon we’ll be able to offer our customers a service package of systematic mailings to get your neighborhood online. More or less, if you don’t want to do the mailings yourself, we’ll offer a cheaper alternative with our bulk discounts. In addition, you won’t have to think about when to mail the letters, or worry about how to complete a mail merge.

The systematic part is the schedule on which we plan to deliver letters (or postcards) to your neighborhood. By signing up for this service, not only will you get the best price and peace of mind, but the PIN letters will be mailed on the most effective schedule for getting your neighborhood online.

For our current customers, please email me if you’re interested in taking advantage of this new program or have feedback on how you would like to see it work.