Improvements, Marketing & Growth for Idle Finance

[DenisDevcic]

Hey everybody! I’m new to DeFi. Been introduced to it by @unicorn
Just had some experience with the coins since 2017. But now I’ve seen the true path

Inspired by the current state of things (huge space for improvement) and some initiatives I’ve seen on the forum (such as Idle Educational Content topic: gov.idle.finance/t/grant-idle-educational-content-1/350/6 which is an important part of this analysis).

Anyway, just a couple of tips to get your viral engine of growth going (I guess that’s the objective). As I’m in digital business growth, here’s some low-hanging fruit I can point out, as well as some more strategic ideas where/how to grow the project (mostly using the website as a hub). As I can see the metrics of the website growing, at some point the whole thing needs to get organized.

Basically one front-end dev is needed, one copywriter, and probably one social media person over time.

→ Some low-hanging fruit:

• Unifying the domain name. Right now the contents of Idle Finance are split between multiple subdomains (main one is idle.finance , the Forum / blog is gov.idle.finance , and most of the resources are split throughout multiple subdomains). Google considers subdomains as separate standalone sites. Google doesn’t associate all the authority collected on one domain with the subdomains. So all the keywords you rank for and backlinks you collect are spread out on multiple assets. You want to have them on once central place by using the same domain but different subfolders. (Don’t forget to implement 301 redirects if doing the migration)

• Do “basic” on-site SEO such as implementing meta atributes for individual pages using the appropriate KW-s (keywords)

• Activating Google Search Console (to see what queryes people are using to find your site)

→ Long-term

• Many sections need improvement - such as FAQ section, adding some more social proof, better internal linking between the pages, how does the newsletter work, what’s the main objective of the website as right now it seems all over the place…

• The whole website is very Ajax heavy. Google can’t read JSON javascript object notation (majority of the time). Making many of the parts of the website non-indexable. i.e. Google crawl bots can’t “see” the contents and can’t put it on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Essentialy, nothing can be indexed as there are virtiually no pages/plain text content. You just have data base request (depending on what is clicked, and Google crawlers don’t “click” anything)

• Website speed improvements (uses experience factor and Google ranking factor). Current state is pretty much horrible (see the full scan here: Latest Performance Report for: https://idle.finance/ | GTmetrix ; Spoiler: it’s all RED and it’s supposed to be green… some other tools can be used as well). Because it’s basically built in Jquery. Meaning it doesn’t have a JS Framework. JS by itself is very “heavy” (i.e. slow) as it was built from scratch (generally considered bad practice today).

• Advanced on-site SEO (optimizing the content of each individual page, i.e. not spamming it with KW-s, but improving the content with them to provide better value and experience to the visitors)

• Off-site SEO (acquiring backlinks to increase authority)

• Organize the informational architecture i.e. the website hierarchy - right now it’s kind of a mess. As everything was probably built on top of the previous thing.

• Organize the content with a content hub. Good examples: www.drift(DOT)com/learn/chatbot/ , winefolly(DOT)com/wine-basics-beginners-guide/ , moz(DOT)com/beginners-guide-to-seo
  It ties on basically directly to this thread [GRANT] Idle Educational Content #1 - #6 by Biaf but it’s supposed to be more researched organized, coordinated and managed. Though all of this doesn’t matter if the technical part of website isn’t sorted out first as Google and other search engines won’t look kindly on the technical aspect of the platform that content is being served at.

• As somebody who just started with DeFi, I’ve noticed the whole content right now is too “experty”. i.e. has a very high learning curve and focused on people with already very deep knowledge. And that’s fine. But you want to provide that “top of the funnel” informative content to introduce the interested people to the abstract concepts such as DeFi. Solution: Produce evergreen content to satisfy the user in whatever phase of their buyer journey they are at (Awareness-Interest-Consideration-Purchase); As I said: I’d suggest now focusing a bit on the KWs on top of the funnel, the awareness phase where the person is still learning that they have a problem; with a query like “What is DeFi”).

• Set up the Analytics tag and setting up the settings in the Google Analytics; To track how well the marketing is working, how well the objectives are being fulfilled, what are the bottlenecks of user’s journey to conversion (sales funnel) etc. That would be extremely useful to make conclusions about user behavior and to serve as a base for data-driven decision making in regards to acomplisih objectives - (growing community with high quality people?)

• Competitors research, KW research, backlink research… And strategy for all of that, as you want a planned, healthy and constant growth.

That’s just something I dug up via a short research. There’s A LOT more stuff to be done long-term. Let me know what you guys think.

P.S. sorry for inserting the links by using the (DOT) as I can only have 2 links attached as a new member.

[tom]

+1 to everything here

[Davide]

I’m reporting here my answer posted in Telegram group, inspired by @unicorn considerations regarding the main differences between a Web2 website and a Web3 app.

A traditional web page uses the website as the gateway to onboard customers and to provide services. The more the page is correctly indexed, the bigger are visibility and revenues.

Here things are different: in Defi we see billion dollars TVL deposited through basic interfaces, sometimes even with direct interactions with smart contracts.
A solid smart contract structure with competitive APYs is more competitive than the first link on specific google research. Web3 protocols focus here the efforts because their permissionless products might be embedded into other protocols and trigger composable solutions. External tailored interfaces can embed the products too, or there are dashboards (e.g. Zapper, Zerion) that allow you to interact with many smart contracts from the same interface.

Despite that, the $ 500k bug bounty program’s last paragraph describes the hurdles that web3 apps have to face before going mainstream. Contract security is probably the first issue, as DeFi needs more solid infrastructures. Crypto natives can use raw interfaces, but this does not work for the masses: they look at the first website with a nice interface displayed on google.
We are probably still in the first wave, where crypto-addicted users represent the large majority of investors. Some TradFi institutions are coming too in Defi, and TradFi retail users might be the last player to join the ecosystem.
That’s why web3 protocols are caring less about indexing and SEO, even if this is a good moment to start thinking about the long-term strategy, and I think that the community might take into account your points when planning the retail phase.

[unicorn]

@DenisDevcic welcome to the community brother!

thank you for your feedback about the current state of Idle’s visibility. It’s great to learn that there is room for improvement and on that note I will try to follow in @Davide footsteps to make sure that you get how different DeFi thinks and acts when it comes to reaching a specific goal.

My 1st advice is to be consistent with the community: stay around, participate, add value and build trust. You will be rewarded because Idle is making sure that it a community led project.

Try to shill and you are done here
BS really does not fly here.

@Davide pointed out the reasoning behind the decisions, current setup and structure.
Web3 and Web2 are very different animals and besides all that already has been said, I would point out that I (and many others in the community) value the method of integrating Idle’s protocol with other protocols like “money legos” where each problem is seen as an opportunity to build solutions using other DeFi protocols and achieving deeper and deeper integration with the entire DeFi universe.

That being said, I would love to see all (some?) of the improvements/fixes that you point out in your initial post to be made using blockchain protocols instead of traditional web2 services/corporations/platforms/tools.
Idle has a B2B referral programme in the works (“soon”) and that could be used to create a win-win scenario with the other protocols/integrators.

In the end, after reading your initial post, I got more aware that is room for improvement and its challenges (after @Davide reply).

Its great to see a discussion starting about this because, like already noted earlier many times on Idle’s cafe telegram group, there are other projects (defi, tradfi and even scams) with bigger marketcap (compared to Idle) , that have inferior tech and talent, but that are getting bigger “normies” attention than we are.

DeFi is a niche but to change that one of the things we must try to do is to get more visible where new users research and look for stuff and that, today, is web2 (google,social media, bla bla bla)… if we can achieve that using blockchain protocols it would be super cool.

[Salome]

Welcome @DenisDevcic

Great post and analysis I see here. This is very useful insights into how IDLE can improve its visibility! In my opinion, it seems important to the growth of the protocol that IDLE is presented in an effective way.
Even if we “roll” differently in DeFi (new) users still enter through web 2 services like google and social media right now. If (new) users google for certain content/keywords about crypto they gonna find Binance, Coinbase and Co. but IDLE will not show up with the current visibility settings.

I would love to see more community feedback if this is something the Pilot League committee should look into.

[DenisDevcic]

Thanks for the welcome!

Awesome! Great that you see the potential of web2 as it’s unfortunately the only way right now Google can index the sites and make them accesible. They’re working on making more complex JS readable, but the current status is that it’s currently not readable.

Anyway that’s just the minor technical aspect of the whole improvement. There’s a bunch of other things to consider such as implementing analytics, content marketing, email marketing to estabilish a 1 on 1 communication and trust…

@unicorn

That being said, I would love to see all (some?) of the improvements/fixes that you point out in your initial post to be made using blockchain protocols instead of traditional web2 services/corporations/platforms/tools.

That’s an awesome idea. As I’m new to this I’ll look into this. But as anything, it can be learned. And I finally stumbled upon something that tickled my curiosity.

Let me just leave this here, which is the main reason behind all of the improvements suggested: The 5 Stages of Technology Adoption | OnDigitalMarketing.com

Getting to the Early majority is the objective. Something that Coinbase, Binance etc already did, but for a different “product”.

I think that we’re about here: