28
Jan
2014
By Calvin at 17:39 GMT, 12 years ago
Me and Ben were bowled over by the amount of interest my news item Ten Good Reasons to Link to The Crime Prevention Website received. It generated extra visits to the site and lots more people signed up for the Newsletter. On Facebook the news item reached 379 people – a record breaking total for us. So thank you very much indeed for your support!
I’d thought I’d follow up that request for help by letting you know what I do most Wednesdays and you’ll see why creating a successful website is not at all easy and why your help is so much appreciated.
Last Wednesday (I'm sounding like Jethro here) I wrote to 18 Neighbourhood Watch websites; the locations of which I will keep to myself, but they are in several parts of the country.
To a very small extent, unpaid links help both sites with their ranking positions on search results, but as my site ranks reasonably well already, any new links with Neighbourhood Watches don’t make much difference. The main reason I do it is to spread the crime prevention message, as otherwise there would be little point in my efforts.
So, if any of you were thinking about doing the same as me and creating a single issue website about something that you care about I thought you might like to hear about the response I got from my 18 sent messages.
Five of them didn’t get delivered (quite normal). Two were to email addresses I found on Local Authority pages, indicating that the local authority was no longer supporting Neighbourhood Watch like it used to (cut-backs). One was a contact box which wouldn’t actually send the message (I think the website was defunct) and the other two were to individual’s email addresses which no longer worked.
Of the 13 left, and based on some work I did on this last year, I knew that on average 4 of these would only get as far as the addressee’s junk mail folder and wouldn’t get seen. Most people forget to check their junk mail, which is a shame because you’d be surprised what wiggles its way in there!
So, that was 50% down before anyone got to read my message. Of the 9 left I noticed that 2 of the NW websites didn’t seem to have much activity. You can usually tell by looking at ‘News’ or ‘Newsletters’ to find that the last post was April 2012 or the next meeting will be June 1 2010!
Of the 7 left I already knew that at least one would not get read in full due to the recipient’s suspicion about receiving a message from someone they don’t know, especially a message with an attachment (I’ve sent everyone my ‘Ten Good Reasons to Link’ PDF brochure to explain what the website’s about).
The remaining 6 messages might have been read in full, but now I’m at the mercy of the recipient.
Some will dismiss my request because we’re not ‘official’ and by this I mean we’re not the police and we’re not Ourwatch, which of course I don’t claim we are! Others will have a very provincial view about websites and will only ever link to local sites, even though my site is linked to by their local police. One or two will take my request to a committee meeting and so I could be waiting for a response for several weeks or even months. If I’m really lucky three might respond and eventually two might link up.
I’m not disheartened by this, because when it comes to crime prevention and the internet, people do get suspicious and I am a complete stranger after all, so I totally understand.
What I find astonishing then is that to achieve our current links with 43 active Neighbourhood Watch sites and 14 Community sites I reckon I’ve sent about 1,000 individual emails since April 2012 (We don’t do mass emailing)
So how did my fishing trip do last Wednesday?
I got two replies and two Neighbourhood Watches linked up. And take it from me; that’s great news!
Think of me on Wednesdays....
Ten Good Reasons to Link to The Crime Prevention Website: http://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/b/632/crime-prevention-news/2014/jan/08/ten-good-reasons-to-link-to-the-crime-prevention-website/
