The many adventures of bootleg marketing

Ok, so I started a website about a year ago dedicated to outdoors type activities and sharing information. I made it in drupal as a project to help me the ins and outs of that content management system. My thinking was that if I were creating a website I was actually going to use, I would be far more inclined to pay attention to it and learn the system. It worked, I now know how to use Drupal, so that end of the spectrum was accomplished (well kinda, I still pick up more and more about it every time I go to do something in it, as it should be) but the problem was I was left with a site I wanted to make usable, but had no users.

What good, after all, are message boards if no one is there to message on them? And there is no user driven content with out users to drive it. This is where I noticed my first of many mistakes, which is OK because that's how we learn. That mistake was I created an area for user generated content with out the users, the only content generator was me, and the scale was far too big for me to handle on my own. So instead of scalling back the website into a managable means, I instead turned to the time tested advertising. After all, like they say, "if you build it, they will come." Well it was built, but they weren't coming. Perhaps they just lost the memo...

This lead me to mistake number two.

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