Whats the best way to promote your site?

Leela · 12-06-2005, 01:02 AM

What I meant is how do you get more traffic into your site?

I just started a message board and would like to know how to get traffic flowing and more members?

I know spruce it up some which I'm planning to do but where do i advertise or not advertize,ect?

**John Scott** · 12-06-2005, 01:14 AM

http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/...o-v7n-way.html

http://www.v7n.com/search-engine-submission.php

Cheers

Leela · 12-06-2005, 01:20 AM

Thanks!

kwvarga · 12-06-2005, 02:45 PM

the BEST way, is probably to get a 30 second ad during the superbowl.

**John Scott** · 12-06-2005, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theSpear

the BEST way, is probably to get a 30 second ad during the superbowl.

Yeah, that's cost effective.

techniner · 12-07-2005, 10:56 AM

30 seconds... thats like 450K or so...

chump change....

Sabeur · 12-07-2005, 01:48 PM

U need something unique about your forum, some sort of subject.

I.e. this forum the subject is to do with WebMasters.

Leela · 12-07-2005, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mini-Host

U need something unique about your forum, some sort of subject.

I.e. this forum the subject is to do with WebMasters.

I'm brain storming a few ideas out...I even have a suggestion forum for people to suggest on there too. Thanks!

Sabeur · 12-07-2005, 02:50 PM

glad 2 help.

Think about :

Games ( PSP, game cube etc.)

Movies

Books

Webdesign

News

Webhosting

Education

I hope that list helps.

Michael Allison · 12-08-2005, 04:20 AM

Actually, I think a 30 second spot during the Superbowl went for 1.3 million last year...

Just a little outside my budgetary constraints, ya might say.

Oh, here's one that nobody knows/talks about - wikipedia. It's worth looking into.

Also, be careful about linking to FFAs and spam sites. Google is cracking the whip and it's gonna get a lot tougher on low-value sites with unoriginal content. Linking to low page ranked sites can hurt more than it helps. One of the factor's that they look at when determining page rank is the page rank of sites that link to you.

-Michael

shahab6 · 12-09-2005, 10:52 PM

You need to try everything, and the thing that work the best for you, you stick to that.

MaxForce · 12-09-2005, 11:53 PM

Hey, I ve been reading marketing posts for sometime and was wondering, why doesnt anyone recommend offline advertising as advocated by Al Reis and also done by eBay and Amazon?

Sabeur · 12-10-2005, 04:04 AM

because it will cost alot and this guy only wants a forum, not a big company/site. I sometimes post flyer and i see it helps my site and its fun to see local people on my site.

MaxForce · 12-10-2005, 10:22 AM

but then what about targeted offline advertising ?
e.g. Auto forum advertising in auto related magazines? Surely it does not consider as a lot of costs?

(Sorry, I just dont get it...)

DOS · 12-10-2005, 10:33 AM

I suggest filling up your forum with some posts first. People will want to join more if they see some discussion happening. Post yourself and do post exchanges with other forum owners or just buy posts.

Ferre · 12-10-2005, 03:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MaxForce

Hey, I ve been reading marketing posts for sometime and was wondering, why doesnt anyone recommend offline advertising as advocated by Al Reis and also done by eBay and Amazon?

I do.

Most people over-estimate the costs and under-estimate the effects, IF done in an efficient manner.

Say you have a skaters community forum that you want to promote, when you spend some $ on flyers and stickers with a catchy text and your logo + URL, when you have the stickers, spend some time to send them to skate shops, and go to some skate shops and leave flyers there, and sticker a sticker on their door, you'll be amazed how popular your skate forum will be.

What I say is that you need to find the places to promote your website offline, but there are many, all depending of what your site is about.

Our ministry sites gets tons of traffic because of offline advertising, it's also a great way for branding

This is for real:

It does make people do searches, this kind of stuff.

Oh, and I have to add that I never have spend a dime on online promotion, that's easy to do without spending any money, but I did on offline promotion, with very good results.

shahab6 · 12-10-2005, 05:28 PM

PPC and expire domain traffic is the best way to advertise

Stats_Man · 12-10-2005, 10:16 PM

I would start with a customer in mind from the beginning. Something along the lines of: I'm going to join Share A Link Affiliates and sign up for all of the furniture advertisers they offer. Then I get accepted by The Bombay Company, Ethan Allen, Whicker Designs, and Sharper Image. All of which are paying fantastic commissions for every sale I can muster. Now I'm off looking for what key words people use when hunting furniture online, what webmaster newsletters target furniture shoppers -- home and business designs -- etc. I'm researching what's missing all the while I'm searching ways to advertise. If I find a gap in the furniture network like: WOW these folks could sure use a Forum to discuss the various aspects of furniture! Then I would make a forum dedicated to the various topics of furniture. Now follow the How-To-Write-A-Web-Page guide that JohnScott provided you in the first response. Create your furnitureforum dot com website accordingly. Submit everywhere, reciprocal link everywhere. Write a press release, weekly newsletter articles, and send flyers to every offline furniture magazine. Be sure to use creative marketing to expand the furniture marketing mix too.

I would not create a perfect solution (unknown forum) to a possible problem (unknown theme) and then go looking for who needs the solution. It's sort of like coming up with a cure for a disease that nobody has. So how will you get rich or pay your bills or break even from your web business? What is your knack or your ambition? Affiliate promotions? Advertising portals? Reselling Go Daddy web hosting? ....

etech-peter · 12-12-2005, 02:51 AM

For getting more traffic to your site add a lot of quality content to your site, if the content is helpful to the visitors they will keep coming back. The more content you have in your site, the more keywords you rank for and thus you get more targetted traffic from search engines.

aboyd · 12-14-2005, 06:02 AM

It's funny. Back in March I went through all of this worry about how to grow my Web site. Getting people to post was like pulling teeth. People would see that I didn't have a lot of members, and they would flee. Bad cycle.

Now, I have almost 1800 members, and when a new member doesn't get his activation email within minutes, he or she will send me a handful of panicked emails. If I go away for a few days, there will be 100 new members when I get back. Frankly, I'd gotten used to this.

Now I'm launching a new Web forum, and I have 12 members, and getting new members is like pulling teeth! Again! So I'm thinking about what I did with my previous site. I have a few thoughts.

First, people are attracted to a crowd. So the more members you have, the more members you'll get. It's partly from activity -- lots of posts -- but also partly psychological. Seeing a forum with 25 members is kind of sad, it makes people want to go elsewhere. I just removed the member count on my new site for that reason. On my other, older/successful site, I think by the time I hit 1000 members, the momentum was in my favor. I'll get my second 1000 members in half the time it took to get the first 1000.

Second, your members are your advertisers. They're going to tell their friends about your site. Again, this is sort of a momentum thing -- once you have a lot of members talking about your site, you'll get a lot of new members. In the beginning, you have to artifically stimulate this activity with things like "email this topic" links. V7 has this under the "thread tools" link. phpBB can do it with an optional add-on. My new site currently doesn't have this option, so I know I need to add it soon.

Third, a good design really does help. Once I fully customized my home page (and later themed the forum itself), it was a little easier to sell people on the concept. My new site could take some lessons from my old site, in that regard.

Fourth, yes, you actually have to go through the grind of submitting your site to search engines, directories, and so on. I used to use automated tools, but they were worthless. With my successful site, I spent a 3-day weekend visiting directory after directory, adding my URL to any that were free. Now for my new site, I have to do this all over again. This is partly important to give you page rank, although to be honest, Google is wise to this stuff now, and doesn't really count directories much. But also, some of the directories will actually drive a few visitors your way. My logs show that I get about 1 to 5 visitors/day from all those directories combined. That may seem to be not at all worth the effort, but consider this: I worked my butt off for 3 days straight 9 months ago, and every day since, those directories have sent me a few visitors without any extra effort on my part.

Fifth, signatures cannot be underestimated. You must must must find a dozen forums that are close to yours (maybe not direct competitors, but complementary in some way), set up an account and a good linky signature, and start posting. What's important to note is that it doesn't work to post in unrelated places. For example, here on V7, my signature has links to non-Webmaster stuff like Narnia & writing. I won't get much mileage out of this post, as I can't expect Webmasters to be obsessively attracted to things outside their interests. However, I also post at some writer's forums, and after each post there -- assuming it's good -- I can expect to see 5 to 20 visitors to my site.

As a side note, you have to be careful about the forums, size-wise. In my bookmarks, next to each forum I've added a ranking. The ranking is a rough mashup of both how many members the forum has, and how many visitors they send my way when I post something good. I direct my time to the ones with the biggest bang for the buck. That's a little harsh, because discriminating against small sites is EXACTLY the problem your small site is experiencing, but you need to concentrate your efforts on the places that have interested people.

Some smaller sites will do trades -- you post 50 times to theirs, they'll post 50 times to yours. I consider that an excellent deal.

Also, there is one guy on one of these Webmaster sites that does forum posting for a living. You buy 100 posts from him at a time. He's willing to give himself multiple-personality-disorder for a day, and post from 3 or 4 different accounts. I also consider his service to be worth it. It can help you to get over the initial hump (I think until you get about 250 members, you're humped), and it can bulk up your forum. I've never used him, but if I track him down again, I just might.

Hmm. What else did I do? I did Google Adwords. Still do. But Google is starting to charge more, so I use them less. I use the Yahoo/Overture ads more now. There, I can still get decent placement for 10 or 20 cents in most cases. Search engine ads are very important for a new forum, especially if you're sandboxxed by Google for a few months.

Lastly, you HAVE to have a value proposition. I forgot about this. With my new Narnia site, I wanted to get people talking about the actors of the new Narnia movie. So I used their names as keywords to trigger my ads. I got 200 visitors in the first weekend from that. 200. Guess how many signed up? 2. I wasted tons of money. Here's what I did wrong: I offered nothing of value for them. I wanted them to come to my site and start conversations. But there were none that already existed. So they saw me advertising "discuss actresses Georgie & Tilda" but when they got to my site, there was no Georgie or Tilda discussion happening. They would have to start it. And apparently, they all bailed instead.

My fault.

So I killed those ads. Now I'm getting more clear on what I do offer already, and I'm only advertising that.

Anyway, there's more, but this is far too long already. I hope you can learn from my mistakes. Basically, know your target audience, talk to your target audience, and give something worthwhile to them. Good luck. To both of us.

-Tony