What Is a Project on Spacehoot?
A Project on Spacehoot is akin to a portfolio item. You create a project on Spacehoot to showcase and promote your achievements and the achievements of your businesses. Projects are your portfolio items. They are the proof of your abilities and achievements. Projects are the tools that convince users of Spacehoot (both registered users and visitors from search engines) that you are capable of meeting their business demands.
While the projects you create on Spacehoot serve your purposes on Spacehoot, their reach extends beyond the limitations of Spacehoot. Your projects on Spacehoot are meant to target all potential customers you wish to reach on the whole internet! This is the first thing you must understand as you start creating projects on Spacehoot!
Benefits of Creating Projects on Spacehoot
Spacehoot projects help you to:
1. Turbo boost your reach and virality: Projects (or portfolio items, whichever you prefer) are a central feature of Spacehoot. Every time a registered user visits his/her stream, projects that match the user are displayed to him/her as suggestions. This free suggestion of projects increases your reach on Spacehoot, and helps you promote and showcase your projects to other users that you are not connected with. Spacehoot employs a sophisticated and accurate suggestion mechanism to match your project to other users who are most likely to be interested in them. As an example, if a user is a marketer, the most matching marketing projects will be displayed to the user. This matching is done using:
a. The general information about the user – For an instance, users who are social marketers will be suggested projects that contain words such as social, marketing, web, etc. This is because marketers are much more likely to be interested in, and to patronize projects that are about web and social marketing.
b. The location of the user – A user in Johannesburg, South Africa is much more likely to be interested in seminars that are run in South Africa. As such, seminars that contain the nouns “Johannesburg” and “South Africa” will be matched to these users.
2. Generating leads: All logged in users can “like” and comment on any project they view. The creators of those projects are notified by email when a comment is added to their projects. These comments serve as valuable lead generators.
3. Create engagement with prospect and customers: Projects comments can help projects owners to engage with the commenters and the rest of Spacehoot community. Unauthenticated users and guest visitors can also read these comments and thereby decide to visit the project website to initiate business dialogue with the project owner(s).
4. Locate and respond to opportunities: By monitoring comments, projects owners can gain valuable information about the features of their projects that prospects and customers are interested in. They can use this information to fine-tune their offerings, and/or to prune and discard redundant features.
5. Inbound marketing: Project descriptions can contain links pointing readers back to the owners’ website where they can obtain more information and support. This serves both to generate visitors to your website, as well as improve your websites search engine (SEO) ranking.
6. Increased confidence and trust: When you share your projects with pictures and reference links, viewers and readers are much more likely to purchase from you or patronize you or your business. By seeing what you have successfully accomplished, viewers will have more confidence in you and your ability to deliver.
7. Offer feedback: User comments on your projects can offer valuable information and insight about user frustrations. Project owners can use this intelligence to fine-tune their customer support and relationship management practices.
What Type of Projects Can You Create on Spacehoot?
1. Individual User projects: These are projects than can be created and promoted by, well, an individual. Examples are books you authored, musical albums, websites you designed and developed for your customers, open source and free software projects you created, free e-books and seminar materials you offer on your website, etc. Users can also share projects which are not wholly their own, but which they participated in creating.
2. Corporate/business projects: These are projects belonging to a corporate entity. Corporate projects are not exactly the same thing as the products/services your business offers. As an instance, “website design and development” may be one of the services your business offers, but a specific website you created for customer XYZ is a project you can create and promote on Spacehoot. Another example is: a printing company may offer printing services (service), but a particular book they actually printed is better suited for a project. Such a book can be shared as a project.
Tips for Creating Viral Projects
To succeed with Spacehoot projects, consider doing these:
1. Create a captivating name for each of your project: Project titles are the captions displayed within the stream views of your followers. You should consider a caption that will make users want to visit the project page. For example, you can use the title “Spacehoot” for a project (if you were the creator of Spacehoot.) However, a more descriptive caption such as “Spacehoot: A Professional Networking Website Designed by YOUR COMPANY NAME” is much more likely to attract the attention of a viewer. Also, always remember that the title of your project will used as the display titles in search engine results. Always create project titles that will interest users who may discover your Spacehoot projects via search engines.
2. Project Introduction/Marketing messages: This is the teaser that will be displayed to your followers within their streams. It is also the display message for project suggestions and search results – both for Spacehoot local search and for search engines. Please follow the same tips as the ones above.
3. Project description: This is the body of your project. A clear and detailed project description is much more likely to build confidence in you and your business. It’s your selling point. Provide clear feature descriptions, benefits, time and duration related information, etc.
4. Project cover picture: This is the large cover image displayed at the top of your project. It’s said that a picture is worth ten thousand words. Always consider uploading project pictures that will accentuate your message.
Conclusion
Creating projects on Spacehoot is an easy task which offers numerous benefits for you and your business. If you are already logged into Spacehoot, you can start creating your projects now by going to Actions menu and choosing Create Project option. If you are not yet registered on Spacehoot, you can use the Social Login menu above and register using any of the social networks of your choice. Or you can simply register here: http://spacehoot.com/Account/Register
