Monday, February 6, 2012

Making the smallest of difference matters

backYou may have noticed some recent changes to feedingbabycalves.com. There is a new look to many of the pages especially the main posting page. You may have also noticed that the month of December and beginning of January had no posting updates while the last few weeks there has been two a week. On the outside what viewers see hasn’t changed all that much as far as information on caring for bottle calves. 

On the inside the part about how the site works has had some major changes. Basically the site has went from stand alone website pages to live open feed pages. Why make the switch? I had to do something. I will be losing the original feedingbabycalves.com website in April. Not by any fault of my own but the web hosting by Microsoft will be switching over to a new Microsoft 360 hosting. Feedingbabycalves would have to be completely reworked.   Instead of switching to Microsoft 360, I opted to get an early start and move the content over to Google’s based site.

I was busy making the switch in December and January and didn’t have time to post any updates. Now that I have the site up and running again I’m doing some catching up. I almost decided to let the site fade away into the sunset. I wasn’t sure if the site was worth all the effort and time I was spending towards it.

I started the site after reading an article about how some people have found financial success by building a website based on what they were passionate about. I thought “Great I’m passionate about cattle and bottle calves so I should have a huge hit.” Well, it didn’t turn out that way.  Only 2% of the population is involved in agriculture and out of that number less than 1% bottle feed calves. That doesn’t leave a very big audience for those interested in my site. So feedingbabycalves is never going to be the next big web smash hit. No web dollars in my future.

But along the way I did find out something cool that made it worth the effort. I was able help people with their bottle calves.  I received hundreds of email questions and many on the message boards. Over 300,000 visitors have viewed feedingbabycalves.com and over 1000 have signed up to the contact list for emails. It must be making a difference somewhere.

Even making the smallest of difference matters.

So I decided to keep on with feedingbabycalves I have learned just as much as I have advised.The information may have a small audience but it still is worth having a site to share about bottle feeding calves.

I would like to get some feed back from you on how much I should be posting. I don’t want to wear out the welcome. So I placed a poll question below with four choices. I would like it if you will vote for the answer you would most like to see happen. I will adjust the posting according to the poll.

Thanks to all the viewers, Those that have been following for years and those that have just signed up. With this new format I’m starting over but at least I know what to expect this time.