Suggestions for promoting a tea website.

[nicknick]

Hi,

I would like to know if anyone has any ideas from promoting a tea information website. http://www.plentea.com/

It doesn't sell anything and is only designed to inform. It only makes money from the google ads so we'd like to get as many visitors as possible.

It has been listed in Open Directory and we're trying to get links but they are proving very difficult to find.

Thanks,

[Dominic]

Firstly, there are tons of things on amazon you could sell with that site...

You will probably get a bit of traffic from kids doing assignments on how tea is made or something like that.

You could do something that might get viral promotion... about how tea is better than coffee and have pictures of someone drinking 1 litre of coffee then spewing up or something crazy like that.

In terms of content, I'd look to the producers of tea and do interviews or factory tours etc. You may get some advertising spend from them too.

[e10]

Well, you look like you have ever tea topic well covered but what struck me wandering through the pages is that you should have more intro to each article. It seems to be all headers and no content without click, click, clicking.

You know you will find a ton of specific product sites that would be good link partners. From olives and olive oil to herbs and medicinal effects of different veggies.

Your tea recipes could be offered as articles to recipes sites (like mine )

[nicknick]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick feedback. I totally agree about the intro text. We really need to change that. We'll probably start changing it in the next day or two. I'll also look into your other suggestions as soon as possible. Thanks again for the great feedback.

[nicknick]

One more thing. Do you have any luck with Amazon? I looked into their affiliate program but wasn't sure it would be worth it since people actually have to buy in order to get paid. Do you have any success with it?

[Dominic]

Originally Posted by nicknick

One more thing. Do you have any luck with Amazon? I looked into their affiliate program but wasn't sure it would be worth it since people actually have to buy in order to get paid. Do you have any success with it?

Yes I do. Pick the items your visitors would be interested in and promote them - see how it goes.

[wkw]

Nice site Nick. What a coincidence, I've had a tab opened in firefox for a few days now pointing to www.digitalhomecanada.com, and when I visited your site, I saw a familiar favicon.ico show up in the tab...

Did you "nick" theirs, or the other way around, or are the sites affiliated in some way?

It really is a very well organized and ascetically pleasing site. Did you work on the design yourself? I think because of the quality of your tea information you ought to be able to get some quality back links from related web sites, and get your traffic up. The more visitors, the more opportunity you have to make some commissions. Even though Amazon's commissions are low (what's 3% on a $30 sale...) they have in their favor a massive selection of goods, and the Amazon Web Services API. Consider setting up a new section of the site -- say, "Products for Tea connoisseurs" (or some such) and use AWS so you can display appropriate products from Amazon's catalog blended into your site's style. I think having those pre-maid amazon iframes would look ugly in your site.

I hope you'll keep us updated on your attempts to monetize the site.

[nicknick]

Hi wkw,

Thank for the positive feedback. The biggest challenge so far is getting visitors to the site. It looks like Google has indexed the site but we're only really getting hits from MSN for the most part.

The favicon.... Yeah, it's not stolen. I was just too lazy to replace it. The fact of the matter is that this site has a lot of content and will continue to have content added and I don't have the time to keep updating it. So we added a content management system. It's called Mambo. that is where the favicon.ico comes from and the other site is most likely using the same system. I should really change it but it's taken a lot of time to figure out how to make the site SE friendly. But I think I'll get to changing it. Haven't had time to design a logo either.

I'm actually more of a designer by trade so learning the back end has been harder than for some people on this forum that seem very comfortable with coding. In any case, thank you once again for the feedback and I'll keep trying to make the site generate some income to pay for itself.

take care,