I made a rule for myself, when I began this site as a vision improvement resource.

A number of colleagues and friends advised that this project would drive me mad as well as empty my bank accounts. As I am a bit of a cautious individual by nature, I looked for a compromise – hear their concerns, but also not be dissuaded in bringing this resource online.

My compromise rule was this:

I’d donate my time to the site. All tangible monetary expenses, would have to be covered by donations or some form of paid program.

In the beginning, there actually was no paid program at all. It was all free.

But then I quickly started to learn that my friends were right. Aside from the massive learning curve, a site like this is an expensive undertaking (for someone like me, without a relevant skill set).

The cheap hosting turned out to be a big mistake.

So did my idea of figuring out all the necessary code and design on my own. Many sleepless nights ensued, trying to fix broken things, and recover lost content from backups.

Over the course of a year, I spent quite a bit on professional advice and help. I also mis-spent even more, on what I later learned appears to be common in the field of Web related providers – a whole lot of people know a whole lot less, than they lead on.

Hosting, Support, Programming, and Design Isn’t Cheap.

I kept being told by various people, that you can run a site like this for nothing, by using open source and templates, and cheap hosting. I found none of this to be true, for myself. Having tried that route I found that I spent far more, than if I had just paid for quality resources from the beginning.

If it hadn’t been for the ongoing encouragement from many of you, I would have likely stopped, quite some time ago.

Once the infrastructure started to be under control a bit more, I started to look at promotion.

This is still very much a work in progress.

I keep changing my mind about the value of search engine optimization agencies.

First, I went with some insightful advice on just writing good content, and letting the search engines sort out the rest.

This has not worked out that well.

Maybe my definition of “good content” doesn’t reflect reality. Maybe all the online quackery about eyesight health deafens the dialog with their heavily promoted (and questionable) content. I still don’t know the answer.

Hiring a handful of agencies over the past year and a half, I learned than they can easily do more harm than good. Search engine rankings actually decreased, after the “work” of some of these (expensive) agencies.

And then there is all the paid advertising.

Once the site contributors amounted to enough to pay for the infrastructure, I started to use all the remaining funds on various paid ad channels.

This too, fraught with scams and questionable value.

Facebook lead the charge in disappointments. I can’t say why they are not fixing it, but Facebook’s paid advertising is badly broken. There are a large number of long and well researched articles all over the Web on this subject – and something I learned also the hard way, after having spent quite a bit on Facebook ads.

Keep in mind, my goal is to use your contributions as efficiently as possible, to increase exposure on this topic. I don’t have any personal interest in gaining from this site, financially.

This though has not turned out to be easy.

Online Ads Are Neither Simple, Nor Inexpensive.

I was referred to “ad networks” by an agency I had hired to help with this project. Using traffic analytics I learned that more than a few of these ad networks don’t deliver what they promise (or what we pay for).

Google ads are also very interesting, and yet another fairly complex subject.

I am finding that several vision programs spend very heavily on advertising. While I haven’t tried their products their claims are dubious, and some of their “medical doctor references” absolutely don’t check out. But they spend dizzying sums on online ads, so their business scheme must be effective.

You might have noticed the ongoing (sometimes small) changes to the site itself.

While some of these changes I don’t feel strongly about, I am learning about what causal visitors, especially paid traffic, respond to.

The ultimate goal is for the site to continue to increase in reach, while breaking even financially.

It is not at that point, yet. I am breaking my rule of “donated time only”, but at least to a decreasing degree. If all the agencies and contractors would deliver on their promises, we would be much further ahead – but it appears that most things that I don’t learn myself, end up being wasted funds in terms of “outsourced advice”.

There is also the question of other exposure, that I get via e-mail every so often.

While this might be interesting, I don’t want to become the figurehead or pivotal role of this project. It’s a bit if you set out to build a robot, you don’t want to be inside of it, doing all the moving around yourself. You want it to be autonomous, and largely replace some human task.

In this scenario, I want the site, and you as readers and contributors, to be the heart of this project.

The reason isn’t selfish, just a matter of physical limitations:

Today, if I get 100 e-mails, I can answer those. The site has a tiny amount of traffic, relatively speaking. If tomorrow it “catches on”, and the traffic increases ten-fold (which would still be minuscule), I might get a thousand e-mails a day.

Obviously, I can’t manage any meaningful increase in traffic, being the pivotal role of the site.

For this reason, I continue to insist that the Web Program, the forum, and the blog are the core resources. Sure, I will gladly provide support. Though hopefully with growth will come more savvy contributors and administrators in the support forum who can help answer new participant questions.

If Alex is the resource, the site’s growth opportunity is (very) limited. If the site itself is the resource, it can scale almost indefinitely.

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So when you don’t hear from me for a day or two, it isn’t that I disappeared.

I might be pouring over Google Adwords many confusing settings and rules, statistics, keyword quality scores, visitors metrics, page views, and conversion rates.

I might be rewriting content, to see whether it is increasing engagement.

I might be trying to balance the spending on various ad channels, or arguing with contractors, trying to put your paid contributions to responsible use.

All in all I would say that 80% of the work is actually of absolutely no tangible vision improvement benefit.

Though on a positive side, I continue to check things off the list, and move on to new challenges (from the infrastructure, to now more of the marketing). I’m here working on your behalf every day, to make this a resource that others, looking for vision improvement just like you did, can actually find and use.

How You Can Help:

I appreciate everything you do.

I like your e-mails that might just say “nice job on that article, also here is some misspellings”. These are more fun to read than the excuses from the advertising guys.

I love it when we get good questions in the forum, and good answers from you, helping out new participants. That is truly fantastic, and I am very grateful for your time there.

If you are into code, or design, or marketing, and have specific feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear from you. For me it is a matter of using paid program contributions efficiently, so it breaks my heart when money paid to some contractor turn out to be wasted.

I also really like some of your e-mails and forum posts, exposing specific issues on the vision industry. Having tangible references helps new readers assess the merit of what we talk about here. Just like Magda’s recent comments, these are priceless facts to add to the discussion.

That’s it, for a bit of “accounting” on what is going on behind the scenes.

Next we will get back to some vision health topics, as always my aim is to have at least two to three new articles here every week.

Enjoy!