As I mentioned, I got my degree in 1999. I have a PhD in Chemistry, which sounds like a really strange thing to have as a background for writing blogging software, so that's a story for a different time. Just bear with me, though, as that piece of information is important background for what I'm going to talk about.
I tend to think in terms of science. Chemistry, physics, thermodynamics. Not stuff that most people sit and ponder, and I'm usually pretty ok with that. I was thinking about web traffic, and how it relates to what I already know, and I came up with an analogy. Imagine that you have a big stew of chemicals. All kinds of random stuff thrown into a vat and mixed up. There are going to be an incredibly wide range of reactions taking place in there, some of it good, some of it bad. Some of it will be stuff that you actually want to have happen. As your original reagents get used up, eventually the reactions wind down and you get a bunch of products. The reactions that went on in the vat were competing with each other to use up what you started with. Maybe two totally different sets of products needed the same building blocks, and one won out at the expense of the other. That's called competing pathways.
Now throw in a catalyst. A catalyst is something that itself doesn't get used up in the reactions, it just changes how fast a particular reaction goes. Maybe you can throw in a catalyst that helps the reaction you want, and it can use up the building blocks it needs faster than the competing pathway, and you wind up with more of the product you wanted. It doesn't have to slow down the other reaction, just speed up the one you want.
I'm a big fan of win/win solutions, but I'm also very aware that we live in a finite world. There's a limited amount of time, and a limited (but growing) amount of web traffic. You can build a great website, but that by itself won't necessarily drive traffic. There are a lot of eyeballs out there, looking at the web, and you want to get as many relevant ones looking at your site as possible. Those are your building blocks. Good tools can act as a catalyst for this. You don't have to damage anyone else's business to do this, you are just making it more likely for people to find their way to you, and enhancing your share.
That's what we do. We provide a catalyst.
