Almost four years ago I launched MySquibbles.com – a community for parents and teachers to find and share links their children enjoy. It was a great idea and would have been extremely useful, but it failed for several reasons.

Primarily, it wasn’t enough to draw visitors. Parents tend to frequent sites that have parenting information from articles and advice, to links to great deals. Without offering that content as well, Squibbles wasn’t a place you would go because kids are not online that often until they’re older.

The other problem was that the average parent going online with their kids is a target audience that’s very difficult to market to. They typically only learn about things through other parents, school materials, or parenting magazines. Without any time to market or promote the website, it was left online only to serve as a good portfolio piece.

I’ve recently moved servers and during the transition, I made the decision to take the website offline. I’ve kept everything in the event that I want to restore it at some point, but for now it’s no longer needed.

Everyone who works online is typically aware of the famous “20% Rule” from Google. When I was working for TechTracker, Wells Fargo, etc, I was always jealous of the idea because I had so many ideas of my own yet no time to work on them. I still managed to throw together some of the ideas that would help me the most, and some have been fairly popular.

When I began running Botsko.net full-time I had to keep up some of those personal projects (Formsaver, Squibbles, etc). Now that I’m my own boss I figured it was time to work out a system similar to Google’s. Because these pet projects have the ability to either bring in revenue directly or by bringing my name to the attention of folks around the world, I figured it was important to give up some client-work time to ensure these projects continue.

While it’s taken a little while to get the corporate-trained instincts out of my system, I’ve really come to like the system. Google began using the system because they figured it would a) make employees happy by letting them work on their pet projects, b) stimulate employees to come up with their own ideas and solutions, and c) give folks a break from their actual work.

Working on Formsaver or Squibbles can be a nice break from client work and it gives me some time to focus on how I would solve a problem. I don’t need approval for it, I don’t need to worry about getting a lecture about using the company equipment for personal use.

In the beginning of October, Squibbles was officially one month old. While it’s been difficult attracting the target audience it’s intended for (because they’re parents, not all-day internet users) I knew that an upcoming holiday would mean a lot of those people would be searching the internet for something I could grab a share of.

In the first week or so of October I collected a decent list of Halloween links including links to games, puzzles, recipes, and the obligatory pumpkin carving templates. It quickly entered the Google indexes because every few days the search giant checks out the site map file. A sitemap file is a specially-formatted file that tells a search engine which pages I would like it to index. Obviously, it takes me seriously as every single Squibbles page is now indexed. Squibbles was designed with SEO in mind. The URLs are very clean, the page titles are very unique and descriptive, and for the most part the site has valid xhtml.

On October 23 I saw an excellent increase in the amount of visitors, and I started getting several new user registrations (now the website is still an infant so these numbers are not mind-blowing in anyway, but they hint at what’s to come). I checked out my stats and sure enough Google had become my top referrer. My Halloween feature list was an experiment and it was very short, yet it was already bringing a lot more traffic through than I had anticipated.

This Halloween page was only two weeks old, yet Squibbles was already placing on the first and second pages for searches like “halloween puzzles and quizzes” and “printable pumpkin templates” respectively.

Lessons

The primary lesson is that if you do things the right way, things pay off. I’ve seen the success that a very small feature can bring when I anticipate which searches my target audience will be doing, and then tailor my content to meet those needs. I have an array of holidays coming up that will help me refine this technique. I will make sure I provide a wider selection of links, and I will continue to ensure that my titles are clear, my content is valid, and my site map file is complete.