My experience with IdeaOffer to gather ideas for a blog

I recently posted a project to a site called “IdeaOffer” to receive some ideas about Bridging the Gap. It was an insightful experience. I learned a bit about using online tools and services to engage with other people’s ideas and received some insightful feedback on the site.

To frame the idea, I provided the following short-term objectives for this blog:

• Increase visits,
• Increase search engine hits,
• Increase page views,
• Increase interaction with the site through comments,
• Attract additional guest authors .

I was looking for ideas to help me accomplish the above objectives while focusing “on building a high quality site that naturally attracts business analysts” and I listed the focus of the site as “helping professionals become better business analysts and advancing their careers.”

The feedback came in three main categories: design enhancements, content, and promotion.

Design issues:

• Remove or de-emphasize the ads, especially the google ads.
• Make the header more attractive (I’ve already made a few changes, there is still some work to do).
• Make the layout of the main body of the home page more clear.
• Incorporate the header colors throughout the site design.
• Widen the featured posts section.
• Redesign considering user experience / readability to make it easier to scan.
• Add a favicon.
• Add an image or video on the home page to make it more appealing.

Content ideas:

• Conduct a “Bridge the Gap” survey to identify what is needed to build the bridge, let readers deliver broken items and write posts about them.
• Build a repository of real-world deliverables from practitioners.
• One non-BA said the posts were confusing and cured his insomnia.
• One person complimented the content and encouraged the continuation of good, relevant content that provides value.

SEO/Promotion/Traffic generation ideas:

• Change URL so it doesn’t use hyphens. Hyphenated URLs tend to be associated with spammy sites.
• Talk about your blog when you meet people.
• Spread the word on other domain-specific websites.
• Publish guest posts on other blogs.
• Subscribe to HARO and become a source of information for queries, linking back to your site.

Random idea:

• Build an iPhone app

I also ended up with a lot of feedback that wasn’t really in the form of ideas. Some people complimented the content. Many of you, in true BA style, asked me questions. I tried to be as clear as possible about my goals, but there were legitimate questions. It is a challenge to provide concrete ideas on the basis of a web page worth of descriptive content.

Many assumed my goal with the site was to attract clients, although I had provided a different goal in my idea description. This was interesting feedback, because it revealed that although I state my goal is to help business analysts, I still promote my professional services on the site.  There is some legitimate confusion here as to what the goal of the site is and I hope to correct that over time.

I ended up choosing the “Bridge the Gap survey” idea because it really answered my goals the most clearly and was truly a unique “idea”. I said I wanted to increase traffic and interaction among business analysts. Most of the ideas offered fairly generic advice for building and promoting a website and really didn’t speak to this at all.

A lot of the feedback reinforced what I already knew and some I am executing. I am struggling with many of the design issues because I am having trouble making the changes in the Thesis framework.  But these changes are planned and coming, albeit it slowly.  Many of the SEO and promotion ideas are fairly common knowledge if you read any site about blogs.

So what is my impression of IdeaOffer? While I think this is an interesting experiment, the reality is ideas are cheap and easy. We all have more ideas than we can implement given our resource constraints. The challenges I have are in execution or in coming up with truly unique ideas for moving forward, very little of which was represented in the feedback I received on my project.

And if I am really looking for ideas, I feel the best ideas come through collaboration. The site doesn’t really offer up much in the way of collaboration.  The ideas I received were under a pure “gatherer” model and not a high-value “elicitation” model. So I struggle a bit with the business model for seeking ideas on a complex topic.

But I am still interested enough to see where this goes. I encourage you to check the site out if you haven’t already.

Related posts:

1. Looking for your ideas to improve Bridging the Gap
2. Bag of tricks #4: Be a sounding-board for ideas and requirements
3. Learn to sell your ideas with The Art of Woo