Two weeks ago, Lisa Hudson (one of our loyal readers and occasional contributors) was digging up YouTube files of TV commercials from her childhood, like this quaint gem from Enjoli perfume. That got us thinking about another spot from that era, a Faberge shampoo commercial featuring a very young Heather Locklear and a concept we now call viral marketing.
So what does that have to do with the headline of this post? The commercial is a pretty good explanation of how MyVeronaNJ.com got to its latest milestone, 1 million pageviews, a number we reached early last week.
When we launched in December 2009, on a day about as cold as this one, we told two friends. And they told two friends, and they told two friends and … well, you get the idea. The funny thing is that, more than two years into this crazy adventure, people are still telling their friends. On any given day, 30% to 40% of our traffic is from newcomers. The rest of you cheerfully admit to having something akin to a crack habit. You can’t start your day without MyVeronaNJ.com. (If you’re really dieing to see how our pageviews have grown, quarter by quarter, check out the chart on our page for potential advertisers.)
It’s been fun to see which stories you like to read the most. We guessed–correctly, it turns out–that Verona people like to read about sports. But we didn’t have entertainment or food among our original story categories, and you showed us from your reaction to stories like this one, on our local “Jerseylicious” star, and this one, on the story behind the Claremont Diner’s cheesecake, that they needed to be there.
A week ago, we were thinking about both newcomers and devoted followers at our very first MyVeronaNJ.com retreat. We brainstormed ways to get our readers more news and information about Verona, and ways to help Verona business owners grow as the economy recovers. And what we came up with are some ways of helping that you can’t do with a piece of newsprint and, frankly, that we couldn’t have done on a Web site when we started. Technology that once was priced for a big media company budget are now well within ours. We’ll be rolling out the first big surprise in early February and we’ve got a pretty aggressive schedule of advances in the months that follow.
We’d like to think that the increase in this year’s pageview count will be something like a Fibonacci sequence, a string of numbers in which each new number is the sum of the previous two–0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89, … and so on, and so on, and so on.
So go ahead: Tell two friends.
