How do you beat the defeated feeling?

This will not apply to everyone, but...
My question is, how have you overcome the feeling of defeat when developing your site, and no one you share it with seems to see your vision for it?

The situation that raises the question:
So I am trying to market my page and created a couple of memes and spreading it through some related groups within facebook:

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It's been less than 24 hours, and in total has accrued a few hundred likes, and from what I can tell has gained about 3 new members.
I am experimenting with Google Ads as well, and it seems to be costing me between $.50-1.00 per ad click, and has resulted in no new members. It was just a test which will be cancelled as soon as my '$100 free credit' is up.

In two of the FB groups (with the most likes) it's almost like my site name on them is unnoticed and they're encouraging each other to join MeWe.com for livestock sales, etc... which is the niche I was developing my site for. FB has eliminated the ability for farmers to be able to sell/trade livestock with one another. So there is a need. 

I visited MeWe, signed up... and man... it is a well made and established site that I was unaware of. For now, they are allowing animal sales, firearm sells, basically eliminating the very need that I thought existed. My stomach just sank at the thought of having spent the past Month developing the site. 

On MeWe (& FB) groups, they allow the admins to develop and questionnaire for entry. This would be a nice feature for Una Groups:

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I'm not giving up. When starting out I dedicated a year to this, to see how it goes and where it takes me. I'm just trying to see if anyone else has been here, and what put you back on your feet? Right now my legs are wobbly. TIA.

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Replies (11)
    • You are expecting much from everyone else. That may be the cause of your disappointment. How about extending the time you set for success? I ran a forum site for five years before others began to chip in. If I had abandoned it in five days, I would never realize that it was possible to have some success.

      There is also the issue of time, which is a scarce commodity because of our occupation with social media. Unless it is a life and death issue many people just do not have the time or it is not the priority. At least not yet, until your site become an online staple.

      Put some gas in your tank and keep going. Pick up a hitch hiker along the way!

      • I agree with Mark Purser's statement below. Meditation is the place where you can position yourself as the foundation of the site. Each site even the very professional ones requires some steady person(s) to keep it going. If you put a ship out there on the ocean, sooner or later there will be barnacles clinging to it. But you have to give it some time.

        If not, the ship will drift and may be beached, where barnacles cannot dig into it. Meditation can help you to review your motive for the site and allow you to tank up on the energy needed to establish the foundation.

        ~~~~~~~

        • Mark Purser
        •  
        •  · 11 Sep 2019

        Genesis - I wrote a paper once of the use of meditation to support the creative process - the exec summary is that it helps a lot, any activity that requires a mix of focussed attention and lateral thinking (including web development) is greatly supported by meditation.  But the catch is that it only works if you do it :)  I'm sure Michael Beloved will support me on this!

        • FaceCrook is evil and slick

          • Think about the motivation behind your intentions. Did you want to create a more open alternative to Facebook Or did you want to create a specialised community catering for specific niche?

            WeMe and thousands of other sites trying to stick up to Facebook for the most part just build the next big player in social networking industry. As soon as bill start rolling in they will have to make compromises. Then, when editorials pressures, complains, police/court orders and civil suits come, they will have to start limiting freedoms. They will have to do this in a scalable fashion, which means sweeping decisions that hurt some good members. These challenges are exactly the same as Facebook facing, and trust me - Facebook didn’t close groups because they didn’t like them - they closed them because it was not worth the trouble of managing them. WeMe and the likes will have the same problem, but without massive bank accounts. how to solve that? Put ads and Sell data (which works for FB only because they have massive private deals and ad targeting AI) or charge for membership (in the world where ppl are used to free social networking apps, all readily available). This Is why we don’t recommend starting generic social networks, but always choose a specific niche.

            Now, if you are building a site, specifically and only for chickens sales, say. You structure it in the best way suitable for this particular industry, including helpful information, member entitlements, member vesting procedures, etc. Your site would then become an authority source/platform for this particular subject - in people’s minds there’d be FB/WeMe/etc-groups for chicken sakes and the _your site_ as go destinations for anything that has to do with chickens. Then, if you want to step it up, you may be able to offer sub communities environment for current FB/WeMe groups operators with clearly better control and opportunity for reaching to their group members, perhaps revenue sharing, etc. 

            Mind you, that advertising your site on matching FB groups, while seemingly Obvious, is not an effective marketing move - FB is well aware of potential dangers of leaking members to external communities and their feeds are tuned to minimise impact - you will be paying for “results“ such as likes and views, but will never see actual visitors, let alone members. We tried it many times, and ultimately successfully proved wrongdoing to FB and received refunds on all advertisevent expenses. 

            If you are group admin on FB or hope to promote through organic (not boosted) posts, your chances are even worse - FB suppresses exposure of unboosted group posts in members groups. You’d be lucky if 10% of your group members will see the group post in their feeds (and they rarely go to the group itself to checkout what’s new - they just roll the feed0, even lower than that if the post contains links to external resources, and even worse if those resources are identified as “undesirable” (ever noticed how sharing YouTube video on FB creates a tiny embed and gets no likes, while same video directly uploaded and shared gets all the love?).

            if you have to advertise on FB, do it through organic marketing - create FB-native posts and videos, that are interesting/controversial , and mention your brand without direct links, and you may well get much better outcome.

            Also don’t worry about WeMe - these sites have been popping up by dozens every year, and if at some point we get a generic social network that is popular AND ethical, it should mean good news for all small/individual/niche sites and communities because it would give fair go at promoting those tailored experiences on the generic forum. Think about them as of infrastructure needed to reach out to people - much like internet providers, search engines and hosting companies. 

            Nobody can stop you from creating the best place for people that are passionate about something you know, understand and want to support..

            • Facebook sabotages other brands that are in competition, I've also seen this happen many times before. They force the money out of you and it really is a downer! Rather create your brand on your own site whilst using these other sites for organic marketing. Spot on! 👌🏾

              • i find you have more chance with google google has so much out there. there whole business is reliant on the success of other businesses granted they own youtube but there in the search engine game and that will never change. FB on the other hand started as a social network and strives on creating new features and funneling money from businesses and if its another social platform bury it no one does it better than FB. there the worst company known for being greedy so in my opinion if i had to chose marketing a social platform on a search engine is much better than a social platform that sees you as a potential threat thats just my opinion.

                • Very good advice!

                  • You're definitely on to something here! 👌🏾👌🏾

                    • I greatly appreciate all the input and advice.

                      I still stand by my original purpose and focus on creating my site. My wife and I talked about it last night and were going over pros/cons, the benefits of our site versus others, and at the end of the day it still fulfills a need; we will still stay with it and continue moving forward regardless. 

                      I am not giving FB a dollar of marketing. In 2012 when I started my business I tried FB for marketing and saw then it was a sham. I need to look into authoring and sending the newsletters to the current base. I have planned on writing some Articles as we are certainly personally involved and enjoy many aspects of Homesteading (raising chickens included).

                      I watched 'The Mind Explained' on Netflix recently, there was an episode called 'Mindfulness' that discussed Meditation and its effects and that's something I have never tried before, nor really gave it any thought. Here in the states it has a negative association by default for some reason, but it's growing for sure. I will give it a go! 

                      • Just keep working, harder, harder and harder. Don't quit. 

                        • I had also these felling, my site is only 5 years old and he has those ups and down, just keep working hard and forget about fb ad they are evil today.

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