suggestions for promoting my ecard site?

[bumpyride]

Hi,

I've been running this ecard site since Jan 2000 and get a steadyish 500-900 hits a day at the moment.

The ecard market, like pretty much all others is pretty much saturated and there are thousands of sites offering the same service.

However - I feel like my site is different (ha! don't we all?!) from the bulk of ecard sites, in that the designs are pretty off-beat and not too cheesy / schmaltzy.

Trouble is I feel like after years of tweaking around with things like CSS / keyword placement / meta tags / link exchanges I have pretty much reached a plateau and apart from busy times like Xmas and Valentines, the site just ticks along.

While this is okay, I'd like to find a way to get more traffic (again: Ha! wouldn't we all?!) without having to pay for advertising.

I get most of my traffic from Google search referrals. When I first started I would never have imagined I could have got to 7th out of 82 million on Google for "ecards" - but despite that, such a broad search returns few hits.

I am tantalisingly close to getting in the top 10 on google for free ecards (11th at the time of writing this)...

So anyway, I'm not sure how I could:

a. Move up the "free ecards" search results list
b. get additional traffic from other means

Any help or advice most gratefully received.

Thanks

Jim

[macfraser]

Have you submitted your site to all of the freebie sites out there? Getting listed on thefreesite, should push your numbers up a bit initially - it gave me a pretty decent boost for a couple of weeks when I got listed on their newest freebies page. I have found that I still get a decent amount of daily traffic from thefreesite when people use the freebie search on their site and bring up my listing.

[JerXs]

I think a new look might help. It just doesnt look like an e-card site. I just redesigned one of my sites because the look was just not fitting and a week later I am already starting to see improvements. Design isnt everything, but when your talking about a first impression, that split second when the image of your site says what it is or says what it isnt layout and design are everything.

It is a nice looking site no doubt, but it just doesnt look e-cardish, I clicked back before I dug in.

[kennethtan]

Your site have google pr 5 and i am sure you have some backlink from sites which have high page rank. Em..maybe you can create a blog in order to let visitors to post their suggestion and comments. Creating a pool is a great ideas to do a complete survey regarding what kind of ecard that they prefer.

Just my opinion.

[raphael9999]

is the 500-900 hits per day returning users or new visitors? do you update your mailing list? i think keeping your visitors updated will greatly increased your traffic.

most of the e-card site i visited has a colorful site, if you can tweak the colors a bit will make more impressive.

just my opinion. thanks.


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[bumpyride]

Thanks for the suggestions folks.

Maybe I do need to redesign. My problem is the site is more than an ecard site, as it has photos / wallpapers / flash etc. on it. Perhaps it isn't clear enough what it's all about, as there are mixed messages rather than a big bold THIS IS AN ECARD SITE?

Or then again, maybe my ecards are rubbish?!

I've tried in the past to introduce some kind of user interaction with the visitors, but mostly people don't comment or feed back at all. Also added a mailing list, but nobody signed up for it, so I removed it.

And! I added the option to post comments on my news items - no action. I also installed a WordPress blog, but it just got totally blasted by comment spam.

Of the 500-900 hits to the homepage a day, I get people sending only about 100 ecards a day, so not a great conversion rate.

I submitted my site to thefreesite.com last week - no reply yet!

Perhaps I should focus on the redesign, and try to make it look a bit bolder and more striking, rather than low-key, as it is now.

Thanks!

Jim

[akathatoneguy]

Have you submitted your site to all of the freebie sites out there? Getting listed on thefreesite, should push your numbers up a bit initially - it gave me a pretty decent boost for a couple of weeks when I got listed on their newest freebies page. I have found that I still get a decent amount of daily traffic from thefreesite when people use the freebie search on their site and bring up my listing.

Freebie websites are a great idea. That might get him in the top 10.