Karen Hamilton, developer of a special-interest website for Toronto-area women in their 40s and 50s, thought building a community online would be so simple.

All she had to do, she thought, was build it and they would come. And so www.thebestkeptsecret.ca was born, an online community for smart, successful and independent women celebrating "that fabulous but invisible stage of life," as Hamilton called it.

Topics would range from wearing age-appropriate clothes, to coping with menopause, to places to go for help when dealing with aging parents. It would be sprinkled with humour, with regular features such as, "Swapping stories and secrets over a glass of wine." And it would be born out of her own experience — she had left behind a career in information technology to focus on raising two young daughters.

"I realized there were a lot of women like me who wanted to start a family, [had] aging parents and no desire to go back to full time work," she says.

But having a good idea is not a guarantee of success, and she found it rough in the early going. After spending a year in development, she launched the website in September 2007 with a public relations firm in tow. Despite the initial hoopla, both subscribers and advertisers were hard to come by.

"Quite frankly, it didn't work," she says.

Undaunted, Hamilton resorted what she calls "guerilla marketing techniques," eschewing traditional advertising and public relations, and relying instead on the promotional power of word of mouth. In hindsight, she says she had to learn the hard way that when it comes to publishing on the web, there is no quick road to success.

Among her discoveries:

• Build a personal profile: While it was difficult to get the attention of the mainstream media, Hamilton did find a receptive audience writing for community and neighborhood papers, and speaking to local women's groups.
• Take advantage of technology: Linking up with like-minded sites and including lots of references to other electronic sources — especially to lesser known causes such as Ovarian Cancer Canada — has really helped, Hamilton says.
• Seek sponsorships, not advertising: Traditional advertising is not always available to website developers and the big companies tend to be interested mainly in an audience of millions, but there are tons of smaller sources of support, she says.
• Building a network of skills: There is only so much one person can do, and Hamilton draws from a loosely knit association of professionals that ranges from web designers, to regular contributors, to brand management specialists. She gets the skills she needs without the expense of a full-time staff.

And now after some tough slugging, Hamilton says her online community has momentum. She sends out a weekly newsletter to 450 subscribers and gets about 4,500 visitors a month to her website. With an open-rate between 50 and 55 per cent, her online newsletter's readership numbers are well above the average.

Only recently has the site turned the corner, and while one option may be to get acquired and be kept on as partner, that could be a long way off. As the sole operator, the short-term focus, she says, is to fine- tune the basic editorial concept. There is a lot of competition in the women's portal space — all the women's magazines have their own websites, and recently Yahoo announced an area just for women called Slice — but she wonders if the all-things-to-all-women approach really works. Hamilton believes instead in the importance of a local focus.

"I want 40-something Toronto women to turn to us when they need to know where to find jeans on Yonge Street that fit their changing bodies. I want to be top-of-the-mind when someone needs to find an elder-care consultant for an aging parent."

Also, she says, many women's group publishers seem to want to cultivate the idea of a breed of super-women, but this approach doesn't reflect reality and the daily pressures of life. She seeks to insert "healthy dose of wry cynicism," and says the best learning comes from honest heart-to-heart talks with other women, and it shows up in the blogs.

"I would have thought the best advice might come from the experts, but they're the ones who often need the heaviest editing," she says. The best blog material, she says, comes out of a conversation or an e-mail, the very real stuff of day-to-day existence. Hamilton's experience has been that people interact in the real world first and then go online later, rather than following the approach of most websites which put all the emphasis on meeting exclusively online.

The blog that stimulated the most reaction, for example, was "Dear Oprah Winfrey. Give me some slack." Too many women's television shows and magazines seem to want to keep it light, lulling readers into thinking the 40s and 50s will be the most fabulous times of their lives, she says. Writes Karen Hamilton: "Dear Oprah, how are you? I am fine ... well actually, I'm not so fine considering... if anything in the spare five minutes I have after the kids are in bed, the dog has been walked, the dishes are done and the e-mail has been checked — I've lapsed into a comatose state."

Hamilton is betting more women will identify and see themselves in the woman she is describing than the role models created by television. And whether it's describing what it's really like waking up with hot flashes and night sweats or dealing with the pain of divorce, it's all about providing useful advice — or as happens more often than not, providing an electronic link.

That divorced woman seeking wise financial advice may find what exactly what she's looking for at a website located through entries on Hamilton's site. And that is what being part of an online community is all about.

The author is a Toronto-based freelance writer specializing in technology.

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