If You Build It, Will They Come? SarahPalinWillFixEverything.com Goes Social.

Last week, I mentioned that while my site SarahPalinWillFixEverything.com was a viral success, it has failed to generate lasting pageviews.  Traffic spiked early and dropped fast, but not before 500+ people admitted to Facebook that they liked it.  “Was there a better way to engage this audience?” I wondered.

photo credit: Nevada Tumbleweed

Enter: Pligg

Pligg is a very cool open-source social CMS.  Unlike WordPress that focuses mainly on original content and blog publishing, Pligg was designed to be much more social, much more like Digg.  There’s commenting, link submissions, and voting.  And it’s free.  They charge a fee for modules that add more complex layers of functionality.  I stumbled across it a few months ago and have been wanting to try it since.

How Long Does It Take To Copy Digg?

Well, I started around 8:30AM.  I removed everything from the current site directory — for a period of time, visitors would have issues.   DreamHost, my hosting provider, provides one-click installs, so I clicked and they installed Pligg.  At around 8:35, I had the site installed and looking very generic.  For the next hour or so, I modified the theme a bit, added an ad slot, tweaked the URLs to make them more SEO friendly, and added Google Analytics.  It went pretty smoothly because I had played around with a test install over the weekend.  I was 98% complete by 9:30AM — 1 hour later.  Check it out here.

Where Will I Get Content?  Where Will I Get Users?

Pligg allows you to feed RSS feeds automatically into the system.  I’m doing that with a number of feeds (note: you have to copy the module that does this from version 1.0.1, because it’s not included in the current install).  This creates SEO-friendly pages ready to be indexed by Google.  Hopefully, these search-friendly pages bring in more organic traffic than I was seeing before. And hopefully, Sarah Palin and political content continue to engage people on web.  We’ll see.

What’s next?

There are a few things I could do to tweak my Pligg site.  I’m not thrilled about the entire design.  I could add a few more ad slots.  There’s a bug in the URL rewriter that I could track down.  I’m not going to tackle any of those things … yet.  I’m going to see if this has any legs first before I invest additional time.  I’ll know more in a few days.