We want houses that are listed on the site to fix their main home page with pictures and all the correct info. and link their web page for maximum traffic. Join the National site at 50% off and at same time join STARR Sober Living Network so users are guaranteed a full visual experience seeing your house - or instruct us to remove your information entirely.
For the simple logic behind why Sober Living Halfway House Search’s website placed our name and number into the manager’s contact spot, skip down to part II. There has been a moderate to low level of concern, and this news article explains why any negative reactions about the format can be dispelled. If you are interested in how and why the whole site originated, read section I also.
Part I
I could go nuts and explain the hundreds of ways this project could be approached, and all the things I have thought about in the past 18 months of development, but one need just accept three basic notions:
1) After being on Wall Street for 20 years in a professional business environment, after I got into owning and operating sober houses in Pasadena over several years, I became more and more shocked at how disorganized and what disarray the whole sober living sector was in. There was no single database for sober livings and nobody even knew how many there were. Not a single solitary Internet or real life phone book, or even an AA attempt at listing houses around the country existed. I know from personal experience that sober living makes the difference between whether you are going to stay sober or not. Yet what – 1 in 5 people maybe does it? We all know the 15,000 treatment centers or whatever the number is all recommend it, but nobody follows through or really even pushes it. I can’t tell you how many patients at hospitals I had coming to one of my houses the next day, who never made it up there. I viewed this as a sad state of affairs.
2. It surprises me that the Treatment Centers do not follow up with their patients regarding sober living, but it doesn’t shock me. You know why? Because the entire business of sober living — the whole industry – is completely unregulated. Because os that fact, nobody can be absolutely certain how each house is run. So treatment center A is not going to fully get behind house B, because if the center pushes Mary to go to House B and she gets beaten up or God forbid raped there, she will turn around and sue the treatment center. So the treatment centers, to avoid liability, circulate old, almost underground lists and leave it all up to the patients to get there. Effectively, EVEN THOUGH IT WOULD BE THE BEST THING FOR THEIR PATIENTS, treatment centers themselves have no upside in seeing that a patient gets to a sober living house. So I began thinking of ways you could get that database and make it attractive, and take the responsibility away from the treatment centers of recommending houses. If a really terrific site existed that held all the houses, they could push harder for people to go and just say go to Sober Site ABC (ie. US) and FIND A HOUSE! If houses were presented well and thoroughly, more people might go to sober living or halfway housing and therefore have more success recovering. THAT excited me.
3) These thoughts stewed for a little while until I literally had a vision one day. I knew that I could pull the database together, and I knew I had the technical know-how to direct developers, and I had a visual picture of how the site should look and the business wherewithal to run the business. The more I thought about it , the more I was certain I could play a major role in helping pull this industry together. After years of making 6 figures on Wall Street and feeling no self-satisfaction, suddenly I realized I could do this and in so doing help make the world a little better of a place, and make a decent living (hopefully) doing it also. What a dream, for me! It would be worth the risk, certainly. I drew up a business plan and resolved to dedicate the rest of my life to working in recovery. I’ll just say the vision is a little broader, where the search vehicles are really a way to traffic, which will give me the opportunity to put a potentially terrific resource site together, and that is the long term plan. I have also spent thousands of hours studying SEO to make certain we could achieve the Google rankings we’d need, though that is one of the more expensive aspects of building the site properly.
Part II
Without going through all the strategic thinking, I quickly realized I would have to arrive at the marketplace with a significant percentage of the houses in the country, or nobody would take our site seriously. I could talk about how big we were going to be all day long and convince 1 out of 10 people that maybe we could pull it off. Or I could arrive on the scene with the data so everyone new I was a player, and knew that after 18 months of planning I’d be here to stay. Clearly, it was a 100% correct decision to take the heavy workload approach and launch the site with an impressive load of data.
So how was I going to list this data? Well I could do 1 of three things:
- I could input the manager’s name and number along with the house.
- I could leave the managers name and number out of the sheet.
- Or I could put my own name and number in for the house data I had accumulated.
If I put the managers name and number in, I feared my whole concept of presenting a sober living house with an elegant pictorial and descriptive format would be ruined, because people would use it like telephone white pages. That is happening right now despite the way everything is listed. The notion of the “experience” of having a comprehensive page to show off a house and get more people to sober living could be lost easily using approach #’s 1 and 2.
We need managers to see their page and want to be a part of the largest database in the US and the power that will come with it — or instruct us to remove the data and lose all referrals. With over 6000 page views in December 2010, And OVER 10,500 page views In January, people must see that we are attracting a lot of guests and their families who are searching. By incoming phone calls, the numbers are about 50-50.
Thus in order to assure a going concern and give the site its best opportunity — AND make some referrals to the homes, the logical approach was to put my name and number in the contact area. If the site advanced quickly on Google, I could simply take the calls, give out the manager name and number, and make a note of the fact I’d made 1, 2 or 3 referrals before calling the house and telling them about Mary Smith? I sent her2 weeks ago, etc. This way I could prove to at least some managers that the site was worth buying into–already. And that is how and why my numbers are in the contact spaces.
What do I want? I’d like it if everybody put the correct data in and paid for space on our site tomorrow, as we are being aggressive with discounts right now.! But it will take longer than that so I must be patient. I also realized if anyone was really bothered by it , I could just take their site down, period. But I reasoned most houses would be happy to be getting the free exposure. If I want to be the dominant search engine in the country I have to do what no one before has done – show up with a working database (note that about 3 out of 4 houses don’t have a web presence. If you search the site now, you’ll note there are a number of houses without a formal display picture.) We thought it would be at least partially functional if we put part of a house’s data into the site, but allowed the managers to see how beautiful their pages would be if they simply completed them. We have arranged the detail pages so that any house with an address can be seen from the street via Google’s special street view. It allows you to zoom in on the doorhandles of the houses in most cases.
Please look through the site and consider making YOUR house page beautiful — because another bonus is we index that page by house name, city and zip –so if you have a house in Albany, New York and somebody searches by sober living -Albany– you are also going to show up due to our efforts and strategic thinking for a second crack at people searching. Nothing about the power of thr national STARR Sober Living Network and what we hope to accomplish politically, strategically, and legally related to upcoming self or more likely Federal or State Regulation, but that’s news for another page.
