Born of Frustration
Did you know that the Poconos are a suburb of New York City? Few people do. But, there are thousands of commuters who sacrifice a three-hour round trip to blend the salaries of Manhattan with the actual houses on multiple acres of land in Pennsylvania. It is a tough life, and one commuter decided to speak his mind.
PoconoCommuter.com started as a way for Wayne Meyers, the website's founder, to vent his frustration at what had become a brutal lifestyle. He spent more than ninety minutes going to work each day, and the same amount of time on the bus home. What Meyers did not realize was that he was not alone. In fact, frustrated residents of Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Long Island decided to work for their weekends by accepting long commutes in trade for lavish but affordable homes.
Meyers' website started as a simply coded, flat website featuring little other than his observations on the daily grind to Manhattan and a message board for his fellow commuters. It grew into a "must see" for the masses who shared his frustration, and the traffic on the message board grew. PoconoCommuter.com has grown into the lives of its visitors, even leading to biannual picnics among its readers!
How PoconoCommuter.com Started
Commuters in any major city are intimately familiar with the agony of sitting in traffic jams, moving in inches per hour, and wondering if the gridlock will ever break. You will hear the same stories from people in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. The problem is becoming universal. The Boston Globe noted that the class of "extreme commuters" – people with daily one-way commutes of ninety minutes or more – is growing rapidly (full article).
Meyers decided to patch together a simple website to express his frustration with this situation. Originally developed with basic HTML, a pinkish background, and an incredibly simple page layout, PoconoCommuter.com chronicled the woes of the extreme commute from Stroudsburg, PA to Manhattan. The website required hardly any investment, and it served no revenue-generating purpose. It simply represented a way for a frustrated citizen to be heard.
That changed quickly.
PoconoCommuter.com grew into the central meeting place on the web for the multitude of Pennsylvanians who shared Meyers' concerns. Traffic grew wildly, and advertisers approached PoconoCommuter.com for the chance to promote their companies. Meyers, having no serious intention of turning PoconoCommuter.com into a profit machine, offered reasonable rates for ad placement, and interest in his website by advertisers grew rapidly as well.
Reinforcing the Mission
PoconoCommuter.com is a community-focused website, existing strictly for the purpose of helping 10-thousand people feel better about their commutes (complete article). Despite increasing financial success, Meyers elected to reinforce the reason for which PoconoCommuter.com was launched. In 2005, he organized the website as a non-profit entity. With this decision, Meyers made it quite clear that his only interest was to serve the community.
Also in 2005, PoconoCommuter.com executed an extremely simple redesign, essentially changing the color-scheme of the website. Instead of remaining pink, the site adopted a palette anchored in green, based on that used by PoconoRecord.com, the community newspaper's website. Adopting the "local colors" reinforced PoconoCommuter.com's focus on the community. The website endeavored to become intertwined with the look and feel of the community that it served.
A Real Online Community
With more than 500-thousand page views per month for a relatively small community, PoconoCommuter.com demonstrates the ability of the web to bring people together. Sophisticated programming and eye-catching graphics help a website succeed, but they are not always essential. Sometimes, the point of a website is sufficient to generate interest.
PoconoCommuter.com does not succeed according to the standards traditionally used to measure online businesses. Its Alexa rating is just under 1 million. The website generates approximately six-hundred-thousand page views per month. While advertising rates are kept private, PoconoCommuter.com likely is not generating a significant rate per thousand impressions (CPM).
"Then how can you call it a success?", you ask.
Meyers' ambition for PoconoCommuter.com was not to generate a profit, as he demonstrated by organizing as a non-profit in 2005. Instead, he wanted to create an online community, to bring together people with similar interests. An estimated 10-thousand commuters trek to Manhattan from the Poconos every day. This means that the average Pocono commuter views PoconoCommuter.com sixty times a month, i.e. twice a day. Simply put, the average Pocono commuter visits PoconoCommuter.com in the morning and in the evening – corresponding to the schlep to work and the schlep home.
That truly constitutes proof of success.
Lessons for Small Businesses
PoconoCommuter.com does not deploy sophisticated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, nor does it pepper the web with banner ads or text link advertisements (such as Google AdWords). Instead, PoconoCommuter.com grew rapidly through word of mouth among the members of its core market. By focusing on its mission, PoconoCommuter.com became a business success virtually overnight. The website delivers pertinent content that is apparently vital to its readers; it has become the staple of their professional lives.
Of course, small business owners do not have the luxury of not caring about profits. Unlike Meyers, we rely on the revenue generated by our companies. While we cannot embrace his attitude toward profits, we can apply some of the techniques he used in becoming an important part of his readers' lives. PoconoCommuter.com delivers a timely and important product to the commuters of the Pocono region in Pennsylvania. He gives his customers some that matters to them, something of considerable value. Consequently, he owns his market.
Small businesses would benefit from a similar approach to their markets, especially on the web. Customers measure your success based on their ability to satisfy their wants and needs through you. Too many online businesses focus on Alexa rankings, monthly unique visitors, and daily page views. Alternatively, emphasizing the ability of customers to solve a problem or meet a need through your website will translate to financial success for you as well as "consumer" success for them. As you become a part of your customers' lives, success is virtually assured.
Copyright 2006 Daniel Scheff
Dan Scheff owns and operates a custom web design firm in Massachusetts. |
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