I want to record the lessons I’ve learned so that I don’t forget them. I also want to make sure others can benefit from my mistakes.

• Be ready to work tirelessly to assure the site doesn’t cave under pressure - It takes more effort than you think. Will worked very hard on getting queuing working. Even so, we had thousands of dropped calls. You get *ONE* chance to wow users with your product. If it doesn’t work the first time, they’re not coming back - ever.
• Monitor incoming links - Use software like Google Analytics to monitor incoming links. Know where your traffic is coming from…. by the hour.
• Do damage control early & often - Be prepared to respond on all other blogs and places that mention your product. Thank the reviewer for their time and the readers for reading the story about you. Y ou should be thrilled! Then roll up your sleeves and get ready to handle a bunch of negative comments. Address each one if possible and invite others to come back to your personal/company blog to continue the dialog
• Create many ways of providing feedback - Having a blog to link to, a contact form, and an email address is only a start. Consider having a phone number and a message board. Your web business lives and dies on customer feedback, so keep them happy.
• Create ways for your users to come back - We had no bookmarking feature for our site relying on users to manually bookmark our site. Big mistake. We’ve lost out on thousands of visitors because we didn’t offer these features earlier.
• Ideally have a strategy of monetizing the influx of traffic - the first wave of traffic pretty much caught us unexpected. Before I go telling anyone else about this service I want to have a way we can monetize all the calls we’re making.