I have been learning web3 for two years, and along the way you get a lot of ideas. So it might seem I took seniorweb3 on a whim, but I have been collecting my thoughts and scouting the market for a long time. I suspect I might be able to make something work, here.
The success of the project depends on wether I (we) can attract seniors to the site. I don’t have an advertizing budget to buy traffic, so I will have to get them from search traffic. Lots of them, thousands of them.
That seems impossible. “senior web3” is 10-100 searches per month in Google. How are we going to gather thousands of seniors from that ? We are going to try to get some get traffic on the longtail search.
Google Adwords keyword data
Google Adwords keyword tool suggested 838 web3 related searches, with a volume of 50.000-500.000 searches per month.
These are the top seaches with traffic indication :
| web3 | 10000 | 100000 | ||
| web3 company | 10000 | 100000 | ||
| web 3.0 | 1000 | 10000 | ||
| web3 js | 1000 | 10000 | ||
| web3 meaning | 1000 | 10000 | ||
| web 3 meaning | 1000 | 10000 | ||
| internet 3.0 | 1000 | 10000 | ||
| web3 token | 100 | 1000 | ||
| web3 technology | 100 | 1000 | ||
| web3 crypto | 100 | 1000 |
As you can see the top searches (‘web3’ and ‘web3 company’) account for half of the traffic. And if you saw the searches, the majority are searches by coders, like ‘web3 python’, ‘web3 examples’.
So lets forget about half of the traffic (the two main searches, as we won’t be competing with the ‘big’ domains for ‘web3’ and ‘web3 company’). Lets forget about another 70% of the searches being coder searches. And then we end up with 15%, 60.000 searches per month, from people other than coders.
I want a share of these searches, like ‘web3 meaning’, ‘what is web3?’. The more longtail searches like “web3 hardware wallet”. If I can get 1% of the 60.000 searches, 600 per month, that would help to develop a growing community. I would settle for 600 fresh leads every month. That might be enough to make my plan work, I think.
The Yoy of backlinks
Yoy might help me get some backlinks. To compete for traffic in the search engines, I need ‘authority’ on these web3 terms. And that often requires backlinks from the web, pointing to this site as ‘source’ or ‘destination’.
How do I get these web3 backlinks ? That is where YOY come in helpful. Having a web3 smart contract token ‘on the site’ strengthens my profile as ‘web3 domain’. It can give me some backlinks on ‘web3, token, crypto’ from the cointracker sites, Twitter, Facebook, blogs. Any link is welcome.
It helps improve the ranking of my articles and that will help get me some of that elusive ‘high value’ traffic.
I cannot beat the big sites to the main search traffic, but I can be #1 of the longtailers, the small searches. 10-100, 100-1000 searches per month. There is far less competition, no one really targets them. Even with little ‘authority’ on web3, this website could take #1 position for a lot of these ‘little’ searches.
That is one reason I wanted the YOY token online. Because it helps me position the site in the Google Search Engine.
WordPress as platform : the broader Web3
WordPress (PHP) is lame according to a lot of people, especially in the JavaScript corner (with all the web3 and react devs). I develop the site in WordPress, because it works great in a search engine.
And who says WordPress is not Web3 ? The term web3.0 was originally conceived as the ‘semantic web’ back in 2014. A web of ‘meaning’. A quote gets a <quote> html tag. So all search engines and text processors know ‘this is a quote’. WordPress immediately positioned itself as ‘semantic publishing platform’. In that sense of Web3.0 (the Web of Meaning) WordPress users have been building Web3 for the past ten years.
In the blockchain context, however, Web3.0 is the Web of Value, with wallets and tokens and blockchains. It has the same ‘deterministic’ nature as the Web of Meaning. It is just a different technological angle. And where WordPress is not currently part of the development of the Web of Value, in the broader context of web3 as ‘the semantic web’ WordPress is also Web3.
It is part of the same broader deterministic web development.
WordPress and Web of Value integration
Being both part of the Web3 development, in time, they will mingle and mix. WordPress’ integration with the Web of Value has only just started. There are maybe 4 or 5 real Web3 plugins for WordPress. There is still little familiarity amongst the WordPress site owners with Web3 “Web of Value” technology. There is little demand for Web3 plugins.
Growing demand
But companies like Nike are starting to use NFT’s and ‘gating content’, so Web3 “Web of Value” is already entering the mainstream. That might create some ”keeping up with the Jonesses’, and shop owners will want NFT’s for their “fanclub” and to gate premium content.
DePay allows any feeless token with a 10K liquidity pool to be used as payment token in their WooCommerce plugin. Web3 “Web of Value” needs these shops, a place to spend your tokens and hang out in your token community, online.
For now the demand for Web3 integration in WordPress is very small, negligable. The demand for Web3 integration from the WordPress shop owners is however slowly starting grow. With Web3 with NFT gating becoming a mainstream tool and companies like Nike opting in.
WordPress and economy of scale
WordPress offers ‘economy of scale’. Developing web3 plugins for WordPress is faster profitable with 200 million potential WordPress customer sites with a common package and plugin interface, than with 10 million React custom coded sites that require custom implementation, without a common plugin interface or delivery system.
It costs 5 minutes to install a Web3 WordPress plugin for a “noob” in WordPress. That costs maybe a dollar. In five seconds you can uninstall it. It takes a React dev two days to implement the same functionality in your custom coded state of the art Next.js site, for 1600 dollars. To restore the site you will have to restore a backup.
With WordPress, the entire delivery is automated, and we make use of ‘economy of scale’.We split the bill. A plugin can cost 30.000-50.000 to develop, and once there are 300-500 customers that are willing to pay 100 dollars for the plugin, the plugin is developed. The developers make one version and as everyone runs the same framework, it works for everyone.
That is the WordPress effect, economy of scale. We split the bill for the development of the plugins.
So I am expecting that market to start picking up as well.
And in a few years, where other project now invest tons in a custom React sites, I am going to sit back and wait for the WordPress devs to port the Web3 apps and functionality to WordPress, and can buy the functionality for 100 or 200 dollars per plugin.
In practical terms, I cannot wait forever, I need a BNB Chain token gating solution in a few months time. There is such a content token gating WordPress plugin, for Ethereum projects. So I know it is technically possible. It is what I wanted. It just doesn’t work for BNB Chain. I want to have a word with them and hear why it doesn’t work for BNB Chain. If there is no big technical problem, no reason why I cannot work, I think I can make it work and make a rudimentary solution for my own site with BNB Chain.
But for now, into the night…