Overlooking competition (especially when they are successful) is not a smart action. When we are this close to a parabolic bull market for altcoins where money start pouring in, we must have gather all the advantages we can to decouple ourselves from $BTC cycles. There are three primary niches that I see as capable of decoupling at the moment. Blockchain based social media is one of them. The fact that we are on a blockchain should not be a thing that get ahead of us dominating the niche. We must be able to eclipse the likes of Substack, Medium and all the other text based social media sides.
One could bring up the fact that no decentralized social media has managed to go mainstream. Although that is true, there are some pseudo decentralized social media projects that managed to get the attention of cryptosphere while the the blockchain with 8 years of history failed to generate the same level of attention.
Analytics from Semrush
There are many tools to analyze web traffic, keywords and various other things that help with Search Engine Optimization. These are not perfect tools. Nevertheless, they can provide useful insights. Let us begin with Steemit.
These are decent statistics for a blogging website that look and feel old and lacking in advanced features. I don't even know how the organic competitors end up being what they are for any of the front ends I checked the statistics of.
Comparison With @peakd
These are a tiny fraction of what Steemit has managed while keeping the website almost the same as what it was during the time of fork. Justin Sun has done a great job with capital allocation. He settled for milking what has already been built since 2016! I do think we will be able to win in the long term. We even have an idea of how much we need to catch up with,
- Backlinks
- Authority Score
- Organic Search Traffic
I do think that long history of backlinks + age of the website has a lot to do with the current success of Steemit. Feel free to do more research on your own. HIVE has a variety of front ends to choose from.
Comparison Withe @ecency
I do not consider different front ends as competitors. I go out of my way to make sure I use multiple front ends and help them with their user statistics. There seems to be a significant correlation with Backlinks, Authority Score and Organic Search Traffic.
INLEO Statistics
Semrush showed 3.9 million Backlinks and an Authority Score of 19. Organic Search Traffic was only 132 (which should not be correct IMHO). @leofinance team is using Simple Analytics which is a more privacy friendly alternative to the commonly used Google Analytics. I wish more websites used Simple Analytics or similar alternatives.
Pay attention to the top countries for each of the front ends. Different front ends have had different levels of success per county. If we take a look at all the countries that come to the top and focus extra effort to growth in those geographies, we should be able to achieve faster growth.
Eg: @peakd and Steemit gets a amount of its traffic from India. Other front ends should be able to find ways to become popular in India since all front ends share many similarities between each other. Even BLURT should find these strategies useful.
SEO Course for Beginners
Do not take this as a burden on yourself. Think of it as a game to rank better on search engines and help the growth of your favorite decentralized social media project. Do not overthink the lessons or try to get everything right on the first try.
This one is a much shorter collection of tips that can help authors rank better. As the video state at the end, combining these is the best way to achive success. Do not think of these techniques as a thing that exist in a vacuum.
There is no one size fits all solutions. Different cultures and demographics are going to have different preferences. Factor in this information when you write your articles. There can be many different styles of content that can bring in viewers.
Few Quick Tips I Have Been Using
I make sure to stuff the image names with keywords related to the article I write. Search engines see the file names. Combine this with a strong opening paragraph related to the title and you have begun your SEO journey. If you can keep users on the page for longer with useful content, it is going to improve the metrics for the front ends. I have even written about HIVE creating a news focused front end which was received well. This is a way to bring in revenue from outside via ads. Take note that I have linked to many other HIVE articles on this page. I will cross post this article to STEEM with all the links pointing towards HIVE.
Hive has never really had a real marketing push and the big thing with STEEM was it did reach critical mass and had enough inflow from SEO that if they would have put in Ad Revenue right at the peak of 2017/2018 it probably could have reached escape velocity but when it was just tied to the speculation of the crypto that broke it's back and then the community fractured so many times over and what is left is hard to generate enough traffic for advertising to generate enough revenue to create a flywheel effect.
Above is a reply I got from @brianphobos under an article I wrote about Google Trends among other things. I have been a part of this blockchain for over 7 years and I HODLed $HIVE $LEO @splinterlands investments and many more through all the bear markets we have gone through. I want to see HIVE + DAPPs to achieve massive success.
I'm Doing My Part! All Your Help is Appreciated
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
Wouldn't it be cool to have a WordPress plugin that would make it a front end for Hive. A wp-dapp, so to speak.
I have suggested similar things before. https://dblog.org created by @engrave offer something similar. Give it a look and show it to friends who would prefer a customized website rather than using general front ends.
If they use the same blockchain, then they are really not competitors.
If they use a different Blockchain, then they are competitors.
They can be both over time.
We saw applications switching blockchains.
For example Musing switched from the Hive blockchain to the Avalanche blockchain.
It was not a competitor of the Hive blockchain in the past, but nowadays it is.
DTube also switched from the Hive blockchain to the Avalon blockchain, but you can still post from there to the Steem and the to the Hive blockchain, so it is somewhat interoperable.
DLive first used the Steem blockchain, then the Lino blockchain, then (following its acquisition by BitTorrent in 2019) the Tron blockchain.
And of course our most known example is Steem Monsters/Splinterlands, which switched from the Steem blockchain to the Hive blockchain.
I did not even know about Musing and l checked it out. It looks like SCOT Tribes on HIVE-Engine wit far better onboarding. All communities need to have their own Token. Only few of these will become success stories. On HIVE we have LEO, WAIV POB, SPT, ARCHON and a few others. Most of these Tokens will not have any significant marketcap.
Hive is failing at getting eyes on the dapps. It's crazy that St--mit gets more views and we have to try to fix that. Of course we should be linking to our feeds and posts from other social media and I do that, but I do not have a big following on those. I use a mix of front ends too. I have recruited a few friends, but that gets harder as many are just not interested. I would hope that the actions of Musk will drive more people away from Twtr and we need to get some of those on board here. It can be tricky to build users as you need that critical mass to have enough interesting content and we need viewers as well are creators.
If each of us do something to help then it adds up.
!BEER
I have the same problem. I hardly have any friends to begin with. I'm not even posting on other social media. I had given up on those even before I found HIVE (STEEM at the time).
The best path towards retention would be to focus onboarding entire communities at once. Anyone create their own censorship resistant community on HIVE. This is a great selling point to any niche that is fed up with traditional social media.
I've said a few times that we could benefit from niche communities. That could include other crypto communities who don't want to be on FB or reddit. We need people to take that leap into something new, but Hive is well proven as a stable platform.
I'm 100% with you on this!
With peakd integrating ads on site now it's a good incentive to share our content further and to try and increase the SEO factor of what we are doing.
Every little bit helps to bring in more views.
The best part is that such growth is exponential. What we need to do is aim for escape velocity where we can generate large amounts of revenue independent of cryptocurrency markets. The great thing about ads is that we don't have to convince the visitors to come and create an account and buy HIVE.
What SEO is?
It means Search Engine Optimization. Watch the videos I have linked in the article.
Thanks for reply
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BEER.The problem with organic search traffic is that search engines will rank sites lower when the same content is found on multiple other sites too. Which is an essential part of our blockchain with multiple apps model, of course.
That won't be a problem anymore for Steemit, where all alternative front-ends left, as far as I know.
I agree that we need a news-focused front-end to make Hive more interesting to read. But we shouldn't need ads when we're printing money. We need a decentralized platform because targeted advertising leads to optimizing for engagement, which in turn leads to conflict.