Let me know what you think.

This may work out for the best. If I make it more of a long term project, and worry less about getting new features rolled out every so often, then I will dedicate more time to getting the right mix of features… at least that’s one potential path. And if it takes me a couple years until I can back into it that’s fine. Letting it grow slowly and adding some years to the Lopico domain will give me a better place to resume when I do get a chance to put more effort into it. I can’t really say what the ultimate future is, but I will say that the whole experience has made me want to start more things… and if that’s the best thing to come out of Lopico I’ll consider it a success.

One of the biggest issues with any local review site is the content of the reviews. There are many issues involved, including among others: accountability, bias, saturation, and the reaction of reviewed businesses. Reviews on Lopico currently attempt to find balance through structure. When you review a business on Lopico, you’re asked to input both “what you like” and “what you would change” about the business. Lopico has always focused on the positive, as it is intended to be a directory of only favorite businesses, but the “what you would change” input also provides an outlet for constructive feedback to the businesses listed on Lopico. That’s the plan anyway. Things don’t always work out that way.

To this point my answer to the issues surrounding user reviews has always been providing structure, but that too has problems. I’ve been experimenting outside Lopico with a more free form method of writing reviews with my own Tumblr microblog. Truthfully, I like this method of reviewing better. I like that I can write as many reviews as I want about a business and I like that I dictate the structure. The challenge (and I think I have the solution) for Lopico is finding a happy medium.

I know I have some smart readers, even though comments have been slim lately, so tell me something you think about user generated local reviews and the best ways to tackle the problems

The easiest way for me to get rid of this problem is with advertising. I rely (most of the time) exclusively on organic results. When I advertise, I see growth in the markets I advertise in. This is easy enough, but unless the money spent to advertise leads to quality conversions, I’d rather not spend the money. I am sort of at the point of “grow or die” with Lopico - and to grow it’s going to take a larger time and monetary investment that I can provide right now.

There is something to be said for concentrating growth, then expanding, but I don’t know that Akron is exactly the market that can fuel the sort of growth needed to expand to other areas. It hasn’t been thus far.

How would you guide Lopico into new markets?

There are essentially five types of Lopico users:

1. Info grabbers
2. Adders / Businesses
3. Reviewers
4. Voters
5. Rock stars (people that do it all).

The info grabbers are fine - they make up the majority of Lopico’s visitors and they are the people most likely to click on ads - but I want more from them. The info grabber is not someone that is leaving the site in any better condition than when they arrived. These are the hardest people to convert. Their mainly just trying to get the info and go. I’m working on a couple of features geared toward this set of users. More features that don’t require sign-up, like the recently launched Reliability Score, will help in this area.

Then there are the Adders. These visitors add businesses to the site, but too often do little more. Some never come back. I have a pretty good idea of how to fix this problem and it will likely go away before long. This is often where businesses tend to fall - they want their information listed, but have little desire to participate in any social aspects.

The next toughest group to convert are the reviewers. These users tend to only write reviews and rarely if ever vote. This is great, but I’d like the next step to be taken. Reviews make for interesting content and comprise a large portion of all page views on the site… but these people have accounts and I feel I could get more out of them. I have a couple of ideas here too.

Voters are usually pretty easy converts. Well, the heavy voters anyway. There are people that will go on Lopico everyday to vote, some stick around forever, some come for a month or a couple of weeks and then move on, but these people definitely add value to the site (in more ways than you might think). Best of all, the amount of time that these users spend on the site usually leads them to engaging in other activities such as writing reviews and commenting. I have ideas to boost this as well - and hopefully you’ll see all of these ideas come to light in the next version of Lopico.

Finally the Rock Stars. These users take advantage of all the features that Lopico offers, BUT… they need to be converted backwards. These are typically not the ones that generate any revenue for Lopico. So, they are my favorite users - but they do the least for me in terms of direct monetization.

That was a little long, and certainly could have been three times as long, but that’s a general run-down of my users. Comments = rewards; put your best foot forward and let me know what you think I could do to convert more users in any of these groups.

NEO2.0 is my newest project - I think it has potential, but needs a LOT of work. For NEO2.0 to really work I need to have more time for it, and I only have so much time to work on my own projects. Cutting back time from Lopico will help. I also registered a new domain for another new site today that I think has a lot of potential. It’s focused on something that interests me more right now than the local vertical.

So… what do you think?