opening the door(way)s

[rcjordan]

Tomorrow, I'm going to a meeting to set up the groundwork for a large network of towns, museums, aquariums, etc. to post their content directly on my guide sites (no charge, either side). They all have their own sites, but they fail at gathering the traffic and the leads that my sites produce. With previous arrangements I've noted, time and time again, that their first instinct is to try and cannabalize my site traffic and induce the visitors to use their site. I've controlled that so far by mandating navigation, layout, and suggesting topics. That said, I'm not sure I care any longer --I've got the traffic, the sites are a long-term success. Since this isn't a situation where I'm concerned about inappropriate content, I'm thinking of simply throwing open the site and let them go for it however they please.

My question to WebmasterWorld is, given a situation like this, what would you do? Dictate some nav cross-links? Run house ads?

[lazerzubb]

Well a inbound link here and there is never wrong, i think it's a great way of reaching a new audience though, also can't you get some line saying "YOURSITE official provider for Library, university etc" you know the PR stuff.
Otherwise more content = more traffic, and you never have enought traffic do you?

[rossH]

this thread didn't do much did it?

You have a situation I want eventually - if it were me I'd give it out the way you are (kind of a tithe to the community), but I'd still try for a whole greater than the sum of the parts - maybe rig a search tool across all the guest sites, with a nice Powered By sig, or run Features of the Month, little promotions.

An ad network with the non-profits rotating through would be great for them, and might get them thinking a little more competitively (i.e. creatively instead of graspingly)

If I were giving it away as a good deed, and had your skills, I'd be tempted to energize the gift, in ways like above. I think you'd have more fun with it.

And I think you should keep recognition, and stay in charge of the project, since you're best qualified to administer it.

[rcjordan]

>much

Not in public, elsewhere we've batted around different aspects of it --mostly CMS issues.

What did happen:

Basically, I convinced them to spend their entire grant (a little over $10k) on content development. They can't argue with the numbers I generate, so they defaulted to my (ugly) design, nav menus, headers, whatever. They need a simple CMS system, I found one that would do and have been tweaking it for the last few days. Everything is "GO."