Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

In a previous post I talked about the importance of understanding your business competition but not being scared off by it. Now I want to talk about how this understanding can help shape your strategy for entry and set you on the path to success.

Getting back to our experience in starting singletracks, we first set out to be a mountain biking “portal” offering everything from bicycle auctions to forums to classified ads, e-cards, gear review, and trail information. We even incorporated a good bit of this technology into the site using free, off the shelf perl scripts. But after a year or so certain parts of the site weren’t generating traffic or content, namely those features that required scale (like auctions and forums). We rethought our reasons for building a mountain biking website and realized our main passion was sharing trail information with others.

With a new focus in mind, we stripped all the distracting features and concentrated on making trails easier to find, rate, and manage. Our competition (MTBR specifically) wanted to be all things to all mountain bikers and we saw an opportunity to offer a more useful alternative trail information resource. We added features like training logs tied to trails, trail wishlists, favorite trails, GPS trail data, trail filters, photos, and tons of other features that other mountain biking sites simply didn’t have the time or resources to address (especially since they were also managing hundreds of non-trail related features).

Our focus seems to have served us well as we’re still around after 8 years online. Our content continues to grow and improve and we’ve finally found our niche among mountain bike riders who are searching for quality information on new and exciting trails around the world. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and in the time we have spent focusing on building new trail features, we have seen competitors follow our lead in adding features to their own websites (like Trails.com, among others). But once you choose your direction of differentiation, competitors will always be playing catch-up since you will be in the lead.

So I boasted many months ago that singletracks had never been form-spammed but my installation of BBlog was getting form-spammed every few hours. During this period even my new Word Press blog received its fair share of spam posts (though these were easily deleted and never made it to the live site). Then it happened: singletracks started getting spammed!

The form bots were able to choose the pull down menu on the review page for their location (for some reason all were choosing Austria, which was neither the first nor the last location in the list). Anyway, the posts came about 1 a day and they all seemed to be targeting the same trail page: GMA Trails in Cumming, GA. At first I thought it strange since the GMA Trails are probably one of the least popular trails on the site (in fact they are closed) but then it hit me: the spam bots were looking for Cumming (get it?)!

I noticed the same pattern with my Word Press posts; those with provocative subjects (like Internet business ideas) attracted the most spam while others (like Backpacking in Texas) drew no attention. Boy, those spammers are smart!

In the end I decided to require users to be logged in to post reviews on singletracks, ending 8 years of anonymous posting bliss, but no worries. Almost every forum I’ve ever been a part of required users to be registered and logged in to post so why shouldn’t singletracks be the same? Well played spammers, but I’m afraid you’ll have to find a new way.

It’s as if Overture can read my mind! Just as I try to login to reduce my Overture budget due to a lack of positive results, the system is unvailable. Actually I would estimate I see this message about 20% of the time I try to log in and it’s a bit disconcerting.

The other stupid thing is that there is no message on the home page warning you that the system is unavailable - you are only told this once you have successfully logged in. It’s as if they are hiding the fact they are unreliable from potential advertisers who may not yet have an account. Plus it is a little scary since it appears you are logged in with no way to “log out” of your account - you’re only presented with an image telling you in 6 different languages that they are unavailable. I have been trying for the last hour with the same result. WTF? Maybe I should just ratchet my budget down to zero and throw EVERYTHING to Google?