Campaign Strategy Overview - Choosing This Website
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In my last post, I mentioned that I would be discussing some of the strategies I took in promoting my campaign for Huber Heights Ward 3 Council. I figured the best place to start explaining is this website.
The Domain
Why did I choose joe4huberheights.com? Most importantly, because it was available.
But I also chose a dot-com extension versus the hundreds of top-level domains available because it is the most familiar to people.
And the 4 between my name and the city’s name helps break up the words so that it’s easier to read.
Now, I suppose I had a choice between joe4huberheights and huberheights4joe, but I felt it more appropriate that I was running for the benefit of Huber Heights, not that Huber Heights existed for the benefit of me.
I could have also used my full name - perhaps joehendrix4huberheights or even josephhendrix4huberheights, but that’s getting a bit long-winded. Plus, using just the simple nickname version of my first name seems much more personable.
And there’s the nickname I use across the Internet - JoeHx. A Google search for JoeHx or even an Amazon search for JoeHx shows a bunch of the crazy stuff I’ve been up to.
But I was running not as my Internet persona, but as a citizen of Huber Heights. Besides, joe4huberheights is easier to remember than joehx4huberheights.
So joe4huberheights.com it is.
Completely On My Own
I didn’t pay anyone to create this site. I wrote it all on my own. All I paid was $12 to Google for the domain. Head on over to the expenses section of this website and all you’ll see regarding this website is the $12 transaction to Google on February 17th.
Hosting is free. How? Via GitHub pages. This is actually the fourth site I’ve made with GitHub pages. The other three are:
The latter two have been a bit neglected; I blog semi-regularly (mostly on money and technical topics) on the first.
If you want the technical details, GitHub Pages uses a static blog generator known as Jekyll. But once it reaches you, it’s all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I use very little JavaScript on this site. The only bit I do use is for Google Analytics, so I know how much traffic this site gets.
If you want to view the “backend” of this site, it’s publicly available on GitHub.
The Styling
Or, why yellow?
Yellow because it’s my favorite color. And yellow is my favorite color because it’s my mom’s favorite color. And because most people’s favorite color is not yellow (most people’s favorite color is blue).
Yellow, along with purple, is also a libertarian color. As stated in the FAQ, I’m a libertarian.
I could have used purple instead of the black, but I felt that black contrasted better than purple.
The design - my name in yellow text surrounded by a black box with the remaining text in black with the yellow background - is mostly based on a political yard sign I saw online. I just liked how it looked.
Submitting to Indexes
For the most part, you never need to submit a site to indexes (like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing?). They’ll find you.
But there are a few places I make sure have my site indexed. And making sure it’s indexed is as simple as searching for my site on the indexer site.
Here are the index sites I submit a brand new site to:
I also set up a Google Webmasters/Google Search Console property for the domain.
Getting Backlinks
Most reading this won’t know what backlinks are. You probably do know what links are.
Links are that bit of blue text that you click on that takes you to another page.
A backlink is a special type of link that takes you from one domain to another.
For instance, if I link to google.com, that link in this sentence is a backlink to Google from this site.
Backlinks are the core of how Google ranks pages - the more backlinks, the more likely a site will appear on their results page (note: a lot has changed since Google first started doing this, but this is a simplified explanation).
So, I mentioned this campaign site on at least two posts on my regular blog:
I also answered as many requests for candidate information as I could. This netted me a backlink from WDTN.com. I also have a backlink from Vote-USA.org.
I also filled out my profile on a wiki known as LPedia.
Finally, I submit these various blog posts to reddit (mostly on my profile to avoid spam issues), Mix.com, and Muck Rack.
Additionally
I make sure the entire site is archived on the Wayback Machine, as well as process each blog post through Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and Twitter’s Card Validator.
That’s it for today. Next time, I’ll think I’ll talk about my Facebook strategy, and why I didn’t set up a Twitter campaign account.