Tips Promotion Techniques I

November 16, 2005

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The following are experienced people (each number is a reply/post on the forum check the last paragraph of this articles is the source):

1. Depending on your site, I think offline promotion is very underrated. When I was finished working on my school districts site not many people came in and looked around. SO since my target audience filled a 20 mile radius I decieded some offline promotion was needed. I found a place that would make me 1000 pencils with our name and URL printed on them for a real cheap price. I also bought 500 buisness cards avertising the site and district. I handed them out to all the schools and placed them out during conferences. People gobbled them up like crazy and soon big things started to happen. We increased out hits from 300/d to 1500/d and got a few articles in the news.

2. Link exchanges through a 3rd-party site (where you sign up, other people sign up, then you exchange links) has not worked very well for me. The other sites that SAY they want linking so far have not reciprocated. That’s been a real disappointment.

However, I have had some good success with finding sites that are good matches, subject-wise, through the search engines, then linking to them and asking for a link back. For one of my sites I’ve had some nice, really helpful responses from other webmasters, with a significant proportion of traffic coming through those links. Of course, there are some webmasters who will just never write back, but the proportion is far less than with the 3rd-party link exchange I’ve tried to do.

Banner ads–of course, the trick is to find a really targeted site with high traffic that doesn’t charge a huge amount. I like sites that charge per month rather than CPM. Per month is less expensive. Currently I’m experimenting with text-only banners and getting a click-through rate of about 1%. I have just started that experiment, though.

3. I would have to say that my signature has been stronger for business than anything else I’m using.

I post it EVERYWHERE!

In the last three months it has generated one full design contract, two monthly maintenance contracts, plus several free lance quickies (CGI help, logo design, and a few others).

I take part in several Q&A message boards. I can answer a question and my next fifty hits come from the thread. It’s amazing. Most just poke around, but as mentioned, there is business out there also.

4. In my opinion I think about every method can be a way to boost your traffic. There is no such thing as a magical method to increase your traffic : Of course search engines can be the largest source but nowadays it’s very hard to get in the top 10 of a SE ( although I have some sites that are performing very very well ) .
Now suppose you are no SEO expert and you don’t get anything coming from the SE. Trough experience I have seen that viral marketing and affiliate marketing are the two best ways to get quick results :

Concerning affiliate marketing I don’t think I need to explain how this will increase your traffic : The trick is to set up an affiliate program that works and interests other sites. The big disadvantage to this method is that it isn’t free.

Viral marketing on the other side is a very powerful way to generate more traffic : There are just too many different methods to start your own viral marketing strategy and I won’t go into details here. Every site can work out a suited viral marketing strategy. The keyword is creativity : I have already developed some pretty strange viral marketing methods for companies but they were all very pleased with the results : It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it generates results…

As for the “dont’s”, there’s only one method I strongly want to warn other webmasters for : Never ever submit your sites to FFA pages and never even consider to spend money on companies that will get your link in ” 75000 search engines and link pages” ( Haven’t we all met such a service ? ) They are less than worthless.

What is viral marketing?
Viral marketing is basically word of mouth promotion. Lets say you have a website, someone visits your site, thinks it’s cool and tells one of their friends about it. That friend looks, also thinks its cool and tells a couple more friends about it and so forth. Viral marketing gets its name by the way the information is spread exponentially like a virus.

There are lots of ways to virally market a website. The simplest method being a Tell a Friend page that sends an e-mail to an address you enter. Affiliate programmes are also a form of viral marketing, where websites pay other site owners a percentage of their earnings to market their product or service for them.

5. Tip for increasing ezine list subscriptions: On one of my sites I recently instituted a popup like the one used here at SitePoint to offer newsletter subscriptions. Subscriptions have increased probably 500% since then.

- Pop ups to advertise e-zines and other pertinent site features are a very good idea. I’ve had similar success using them. One thing to remember though is that people don’t like pop-ups they’ve seen before. They tend to get annoying after seeing them once or twice. Try using a ‘pop up only once’ type Javascript which pops up the window then sets a cookie so a person never sees it again.

6. I totally forgot to add that pay-for-placement search engines (such as GoTo and FindWhat) have been very successful for me. What I like about them is the quick turnaround–your site can be listed and start getting traffic in a week vs. possibly months in the regular search engines. And generally if one plays it right, a good amount of very targetted traffic can be gained for a very small cost.

7. I don’t know if this tip falls into the distinct catagory of promotion but it should improve your search engine listings which in turn will improve your traffic and besides, I want that prize so here it is anyway

The only time my web stats show requests for the 404page is when a spider has been visiting. This is because I don’t use a robots.txt file which is the first thing the spider wants. I don’t have any members only areas etc so I don’t have a need for the file. This got me thinking if the spider gets the 404 error page because the robots.txt file is missing would it be possible to use this to an advantage? I created my own 404 page and placed a short message and a link to my homepage for any 2 legged critters that happen along but I also placed discreet direct links to my hallway pages. If this works (and I don’t know yet because I only did it this morning) you could place links to “deep” pages that never seem to get crawled or any other pages the spider never seems to visit.
I don’t know why this wouldn’t work and if it does it should mean a better chance of getting the spider to index the pages you want it to.

8. Partnerships, partnerships, and did I say partnerships? If you’re a new site, link exchanges, etc. won’t be good because bigger sites won’t exchange links with you.

Let me tell you one thing. Partnerships aren’t just link exchanges and banner exchanges, nor full-fledged putting the sites together. I found this out the other day.

I offer this one site content on a weekly basis, and in return, I am getting roughly 250 subscribers a day just from them. Provide content regularly for ad placements, or anything unique you can think of that fits with the description of your site. Once you have at least 1,000 subscribers, you can send out newsletters on a regular basis and expect a good return. Of course, you still need to send out newsletters even if you have 1 subscriber. Who know, it could be a big guy with lots of friends who will give you tons more subscribers!

9. How about a new twist on referal scripts?

You know those scripts that allow your visitors to tell their friends about your site by putting in an e-mail?
Why not give away $100 on a monthly basis to people who do this? The more they send, the more entries they get into the contest.
Others have seen this work wonders.

10. There are 4 major search engine submission points that generate the bulk of all search engine traffic, and they index very quickly:

a) Yahoo.com - about 50% of all search traffic. Use the business express service which costs $200, but is worth every penny. Provided you have a good site, you’ll get on in a week.

b) Looksmart.com - Their database is shared with MSN and dozens of smaller ISPs and engines. It works and costs the same as Yahoo. AltaVista and Excite also share some of the Looksmart database.

c) DMOZ.org - The Open Directory Project feed the search engine used by AOL, NetScape, Lycos and some other big engines (in whole or in part). This submission is free, but it’s often hard to get on.

d) GOTO.com - This is a pay-per-click engine that is partnered with about every other engine out there (except Yahoo). This can get expensive if you don’t watch your bids, we have some clients spending over $30,000 monthly. Just keep a close eye on your profit margin.

These 4 submission points will reach about 90%-95% of all the search engine potential, and FAST. Runners up are Inktomi (submit through Hotbot or canada.com), FindWhat.com (another pay-per-click) and Sprinks.com (About.com’s pay-per-click). But just getting on isn’t enough, you need to get on good. Make sure you have a key word in your web site title and the description you submit. Not just in the meta tags, but on the site itself!

Source: Sitepoint.com

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