Community Hints & Tips - Promotion & Marketing

**Fruit & Veg** · Feb 8, 2004 14:26

perry45 - some sites have a tracker logo (from a free program) on their pages somewhere which you can click on to see their stats. I've found it a very useful way to nose around.

Another method of finding links can be to do a link check on your competitors to find out who's linking to their sites. Then you can contact those sites and ask them for a link to you too.

**domainer111** · Mar 29, 2004 09:28

This is a really cool idea for a "sticky" thread...thanks to all

**Ogito** · Apr 4, 2004 14:28

Great thread!

a very useful way to promoting a web site, especially for a new site, is banner exchange. Make a catch eyes banner, subscribe to a some banner exchange web site with good ratio with free impressions (1000-2500 imp)

**alexdio** · Apr 17, 2004 05:21

I think that the best way is get into Google, MSN and other big serch engines. If you promote services create similar sites and make affiliate network (this is what we trying to develop for our porducts). Do not use pop-up advertising - it will not give you any return. Also good thing Google AdWords (the best ROI). I thought that

About Overture. http://www.Overture.com was a good advertising place. Right now i don't like it. Try to search for web form processing sites in http://www.altavista.com and you'll see that my easyformit.com is in top 3 . I get only 3-4 vistiors from it.

Banner advertising works but has bad ROI.

**thebeatsuite** · Apr 28, 2004 05:09

Hi,
I find giving away free stuff has worked well for me in the past, it does need to be useful.
My new site will give away free sounds,music and tutorials for media developers as how best to apply music and sounds.

This way you give people something useful for free, they may share it with colleagues of friends.

This builds friendships and is another point of contact for a would-be customers.

**downloads_be** · Apr 30, 2004 05:15

I've triend many things but good content is the best way.
Good content means a lot of visitors are satisfied with what they see and will

a) become a returning visitor
b) tell their friends about your site
c) maybe even link to your site if they have an own place on the www

**bsl** · May 1, 2004 09:22

off line promotion for community pages especially if they are georaghically close works very well.

**ladyhawke** · May 4, 2004 12:24

We had good luck in designing a two page color flyer in PDF format that can be printed out and distributed. We flooded some national trade shows recently and got pretty good results from this method. The down side, is that it was a bit costly to print them out on decent paper and mail them out, but we got three strong advertisers out of the exposure. We also experienced a large bump in the membership in our forums after these shows occurred.

Another good way to increase traffic if you run forums, is to offer monthly forum contests. Giving out good prizes is always a plus and word of mouth is one of the best ways to increase traffic.

**kall** · May 9, 2004 17:16

This thread is full of good ideas...we use cafepress.com to provide personalised merchandise..and were able to easily get some promotional stuff to give away to local radio stations and the like.

**vprp** · May 14, 2004 17:41

Originally Posted by ladyhawke

We had good luck in designing a two page color flyer in PDF format that can be printed out and distributed. We flooded some national trade shows recently and got pretty good results from this method. The down side, is that it was a bit costly to print them out on decent paper and mail them out, but we got three strong advertisers out of the exposure. We also experienced a large bump in the membership in our forums after these shows occurred.

Another good way to increase traffic if you run forums, is to offer monthly forum contests. Giving out good prizes is always a plus and word of mouth is one of the best ways to increase traffic.

yes, i totally agree with this. offering prizes targeted at your market will attract more new people to sign up and will also encourage existing members to frequent the board more often.

**Andy Forsberg** · May 18, 2004 20:38

Originally Posted by jstraathof

I've got one promotion tip, try to get to your competitors stats, then see how they get their traffic, it works very good ! (You'll be amazed!)

Great idea, I used to do this all the time!

**Andy Forsberg** · May 18, 2004 20:42

Originally Posted by Majglow

hmm...

So far, the best success I have had is with google. My website has a couple #1 spots for key phrases (dunno how). We get a 50-100 new visitors daily.

My site has the advantage of keeping people (85% of my traffic is return visitors).

Anyway, we are gonna print out business cards and try those. I want to print out fliers and give them to electronic music record stores & DJ equipment stores. See if that works.

I'm also gonna try to get featured in DJ magazines and such. Alot of my ideas have come from reading this thread, which I have read from beginning to end.

Anyway, wish me luck... If you have any ideas on how I can promote my site some more, please let me know.

-carl

You can swap links w/ me =P

**DanMan108** · May 25, 2004 16:44

I'd say work with people who can help you reach a common goal. For instance, I run http://geekvertise.com. I grow sites for customer gain, which also leads to personal gain . :-)

In the same time, I trade links with customers so we both benefit.

**boagworld** · Jul 16, 2004 09:49

For me its articles. We write a lot of articles on our website and even more on my personal site. This works on a number of levels.

Firstly articles are keyword heavy and so get picked up by search engines very well.

Secondly other people like linking to your articles so that helps your link popularity

Thirdly I have had some of our articles posted on third party sites which increases our exposure even further. In actual fact today has been a good day for that. We are focusing at the moment on the higher education sector and we have just got the leading site in the sector (the one that all university decision makers refer to) to publish one of our articles. It will sit on their homepage for a month. It would cost a fortune for that kind of advertising

Fourthly articles demonstrate your capabilities and knowledge which reflects well on your brand.

Finally articles are a great way of generating repeat traffic. Take sitepoint.com - how often do you come back to this site to read their latest article. I dont know about you but I am here most days!

**fremin** · Jul 21, 2004 15:02

By far the easiest the thing to do is hold a raffle/contest and give something away

**s_spice113** · Jul 22, 2004 07:12

Originally Posted by fremin

By far the easiest the thing to do is hold a raffle/contest and give something away

What have you given away in the past?

**fremin** · Jul 27, 2004 14:14

Games, Hardware, Subscriptions..anything..

**shabbirbhimani** · Jul 30, 2004 21:19

Hello All

I think no one has mentioned what I use to get new customers.

I use Yahoo, AOL, ICQ chat rooms and look for a decent room and help out people there looking for programming help and let them know about my site and they just love to join my site.

Thanks
Shabbir Bhimani

**Trashcan** · Aug 11, 2004 17:49

Keep this thread going guys! I'm gobbling the info up!

~Trashcan~

**Fluffykins** · Aug 12, 2004 01:45

Off Topic:

Wow. I'm so impressed this thread is still going!

Ady

**melfan** · Aug 21, 2004 08:33

In my region I have a different promotional approach. We call it as Internet Cafe NET Ads. We provide free Internet Cafe Management Software to Internet Cafe that have at least 20 PCs and located in strategic location. In return the owner will allow us to display our ADS in active and idle mode. In active mode user will see a small AD bar on the top of the screen and in Idle mode a rotating AD will be displayed in full screen (look Likes screensaver). Currently there are over 20 Cafes that used our software and the number is still growing.

My 2 scents!

**downloads_be** · Aug 23, 2004 04:15

Last weekend there was a big event called "Fata Morgana". The place where I live had to be transformed in Rio de Janeiro in 5 days so I decided to help.
I placed some ads on my site to find people who wanted to help and distributed T shirts with my URL on.
It was even on TV and guess what, I've had a new visitor record on Sunday.

try offline promotion, you won't be disappointed

**alxe** · Aug 25, 2004 17:44

Fantastic stuff - I was ready to purchase one of those "how to promote your web site" programs for a couple hundred bucks. From this thread I have written 10 very specific things that I am going to try to boost traffic. Thanks everyone for posting!

**health_maker** · Aug 29, 2004 23:35

i have been around sometime with various websites, some of these:
news4sites - 2-3 billion hits a month
suitablematch - 20% conversion rate
healthandyoga - current; 150,000 hits a day, and a very high conversion
my opinion- nothing works like online marketing for a website
my efforts - have been towards increasing revenue & increasing traffic to increase revenue
My marketing efforts have been:
1. cobranding - create duplicate/mini/micro sites for selected sites to integrate - quite successful - increases traffic, increases revenue, also can start an alternate revenue stream
2. affiliates - provide various affiliates programs - single tier, two tier, multi level - a method which is quite popular but not very successful - i would not recommend third party affiliate programs
3. newsletters - this channel has ample scope - increases content for the website and also opens other possibilities such as - ad swaps with other related newsletters, third party ads on newsletters, viral marketing, etc - have used it successfully to increase traffic two to three times
4. links - a. link exchange - link farms are a strict no-no for me however relevant they might seem - create a directory or a resources page to allow for listing of websites on your site b. inbound links - give website owners a value added propositon for placing your link on their site like 1. affiliate link 2. as an example, at healthandyoga.com we created a yoga glossary for website owners to link from their site etc.
5. Viral marketing - at asianmatches we implemented a very successful viral marketing system inviting each visitor to enrol three friends with matching criteria to regular membership in exchange for complete benefits - the response was tremendous; Refer to friend at all levels - entire site and individual pages is also quite effective
6. Ads - I have never tried banner ads

- Text ads can give a lot of traffic and a few conversions too provided your keywords are targeted and primarily your products/services are good; try prolonged adverts as this does increase brand awareness at least
7. SEO - this brings in a lot of traffic and a few sales too
8. Forums - participate in these forums ;-)

Of course, the learning process is always on - with new challenges every day.

warmest regards,
ravi tumuluri
healthandyoga.com

**GORF** · Oct 30, 2004 14:06

A quick and simple "extra" that I use is keeping multiple signatures in Outlook.
Make up little "ads" and save them as signatures, insert them at the very end of a reply email.

I run numerous sites. When I get an email from a customer of one site, I reply and use the appropriate signature for that site. But I ALSO add a small 2 line "ad" signature for one of my other sites at the end like this:

Best regards,

Tony
Company Name
tony@domain.com
www.domain.com

For great deals and more
www.greatdealsandmore.com

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