This week (February 10th to be exact) is the one year anniversary of www.undergroundfossilcollectors.club and I'd like to take an opportunity to post my thoughts and lessons learned over the past 12 months of running this site and ask for your feedback and suggestions.
Our little Underground Fossil Collectors Club started out as an experiment to do something I do every day at work (web site project management) and do it on a personal level. Like most projects you and I start out with high hopes and crazy aspirations, I can remember writing up a list of potential posts that I would create for the site. I had a list of 30 posts and thought that list would get me through March of 2010. My goal then was to post 5-7 items a week. Year to date I've had 39 posts, not quite 1 per week.
Once summer 2010 hit the posting numbers were not that great and I began to realize this site wasn’t a news site, so I could never compete with a Jalopnik or Kotaku, where they post everyday on new items or what’s happing in the industry. The majority of my interest in Fossil and probably yours too is Fossil items in the 1990’s. That’s when the advertising and watches reflected that 40’s and 50’s charm that I love so much. In my mind the purpose of the site changed from regular updates to creating posts that were timeless......okay so maybe timeless is a strong word, but I wanted to create a post that wouldn’t be outdated or lost in a few days. Blog posts tend to get buried in paginations and RSS feeds.
This line of thinking is leading me towards restructuring the site in the future so that it is no longer in blog format, but more of a total site with articles and information. This site does get good traffic on the older articles, but I need to get them front and center for good points of reference. I guess more on this as the year progresses.
I mentioned earlier this site does get a good deal of traffic -- considering everything that is out there and the fact that the site is one year old, I'm pretty happy with the results. Underground Fossil Collectors Club has seen 7969 Total Pageviews, 1494 unique visitors and the average visitor spends 3 minutes on the site and checks out 4 pages per visit. The most searched for item on the site is the Defender Series and airplane watches. Top referring site is Google of course. Oddly enough not one visit came from Yahoo.
Top countries that visit in order of number of visits:
United States
Germany
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Netherlands
Serbia
Romania
Philippines
Australia
When I started the site I had one goal in mind – to create an online community for fellow Fossil collectors. Fossil watches and their advertising memorabilia has always been a passion of mine and to be honest the online presence for this hobby was never really that great and I found myself doing exhaustive Google searches to find out anything I could on Limited Edition watches and random memorabilia I had. My hope that the Underground Fossil Collectors Club has helped you out in some way.
Lastly I'd like to hear from you. What do you think of the site? Would a revamped site be better than the current format? I'm also open to any suggestions for articles. If desired I can even grant access to create postings if someone would be interested in writing content for the site.
Drop me a line (my email is on the About section) or leave a comment here and tell me your thoughts on the site. Thank you!
Recently I created a Flickr group for the Fossil Collectors Club. I am not a big fan of Flickr, but it's the best photo gallery site out there that allows for groups and tagging. Currently we only have 13 photos out there. Let's fill it up with all your Fossil items. If you don't know how to use Flickr, leave a comment here and we'll get back to you.
Check out the Flickr group and add some photos!
http://www.flickr.com/groups/1325961@N25/
Also we are on Facebook.
I have created my first Facebook group entitled, "Fossil Watch Collectors Club" I was never a member of the official club that lasted thru the 90's, but I always thought it was a great idea and no better company than Fossil to have one. Fossil's products are unique and after 26 years in business there are some diehard fans out there, I being one of them. The collector's club was a unique offering and there were some great products that only club members received along with nifty newsletters. You can read more about it in the Facebook group.
Goal is to build awareness that there are some fans out there and hopefully Fossil takes notice. Expect minimal updates and emails from the group as it is just a cause to bring back the official club in one form or another. If you find things of interest or have items from the club feel free to post them there.
Looking forward to seeing what's out there. Click the logo to go to the Facebook group and join the cause!
I bought my first Fossil watch in 1996 and starting collecting Fossil watches and Fossil memorabilia around 2000. I’ve noticed quite a bit of Fossil collection chatter out there on the Web and lately I seem to keep running into the same people on eBay bidding on the same items I am.
From what I can see no real site exists where Fossil collectors can socialize online. I hope www.undergroundfossilcollectors.club becomes the Fossil collection hub with lots of input from various collectors.
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