Hi there, I used to be a successful Bloggers, but my Blogs belonged to my company and an external portal. So I decided to create my own Website with my own experience and work for me. We are 4 partners applying all known marketing methods: — Writing valuable comments in related Blogs (more than 50 blogs/day) — Actively participating in forums with a link back to my web — We have sent dozens of articles to mayor articles sites — We are paying a couple of journalists that are writing quality and original content for our Website. Minimum 3 articles/day. — We upload pictures in galleries. Include also videos. — We link articles and pictures inside the site from a page to other. — All articles get twitted and gets published automatically in Facebook. — Most of the articles goes to Digg (without a single click back). We also promote the content in www.meneame.net (Spanish version of Digg) — We have applied a SEO optimization for the site. All articles are getting reach in our keywords — We have run a couple of PPC campaigns in facebook, Google and Yahoo. — We have created a group in Yahoo and an application in facebook. — We paid a banner in a couple of niche related websites The site is about 5 months old and do not get more than 70 visits per day. The mayor concurrent in our niche gets 80 millions visitors/year. So I wonder if all those advices to market a web are real and serious. I wonder if those super methods to get traffic are just selling smoke… Is there anything for real in all this? How long does it need s a web site starting from scratch t get massive valuable traffic? If we did not quit yet is because we fear to quit just when the success is about to get to our project… but the economical support is getting to the end faster! Could anybody have a look into this site and see id there is something wrong in it? www.skapada.com Any tip will be appreciate
I took a look at the site and an English speaker would have no idea of what the site is about from the front page. You need someone who to completely rewrite the English translation of your site i.e. the "about us" page makes no sense. Perhaps you should work on improving the content on the site before you market it.
Do you mean, a successful site needs to be in English? But what if my target readers are Spanish speakers (more than 600 millions people in the world) !?
I don't care who you want to target. When you go to the default page, half is in English and the header description is in Spanish. As an English speaker, the home page tells me absolutely nothing about what the site is about and my first instinct is to leave. You asked for suggestions in English and I'm telling you that the site does not appeal to anyone who speaks English as the translation doesn't make sense. If you don't want English speaking visitors, then I wouldn't worry about it. I also wouldn't bother doing press releases in English - and ones that are very difficult to read.
Hi Sir, The question is: I do not get traffic regardless the language. Another thing would be that I get tons of traffic and the traffic left (as you did). But our problem is that it seems unsuccessful all the effort to get traffic into our website (english, spanish or chinese; we do not get visitors by using those techniques!) Maybe now is better understood the question: Is there other ways of marketing?
All the link building you have described is considered of low value. What you need are authority sites linking to yours. An authority site is one that already ranks well for the keywords you are targeting, the higher they rank, the better. Google gives site age importance. It can take a year or more before you can expect to rank well for competitive terms that will bring you good traffic. The better your site, the easier it will be to get links and have people naturally link to you. Pay attention to your bounce rate. A bounce rate of 50% or more means you likely aren't doing something right.
The other thing I would ask how you did your keyword research, what keywords are you targeting, and what is the competition for those keywords. Depending on the competition you may need to rinse and repeat everything you have previously tried for months and maybe longer.
I don't speak spanish so I have to go by the visuals on your website. It looks like a kind of travel guide to cuba. Where is your traffic coming from? You said you are doing PPC and SEO - what websites are actually sending you traffic and for what keywords? 70 visits/day seems low for a PPC campaign that you are running on Google, Yahoo, and Facebook - what's your daily budget and how many clicks are you getting? What do you want people to do when they get to your website? You are probably getting traffic that isn't targetted.
Hi Christian, yes the site intend to be a traveling guide to Cuba (which will expand to the rest of the Caribbean island when successful). At this moment our goal is to get user registered so, the community increase our data base with their own pictures and comments about visited places. Our campaigns were targeting Spanish speakers from the State of Florida USA, where there is a huge Spanish community (Cuban, Dominican and Puertoricans) and the city of Madrid in Spain (off course Spanish speakers). We are focusing in keywords combination: Map of+city (in Spanish). We are setting 10 USD/day. We have got a CTR of 0.31% by Yahoo 0.18% and Facebook was a total waste of time, no a sinlge click. BUt the point is that not just the campaigns are unsuccessful, but the submit of articles, the comment in blogs and the SEO optimization did not bring any change, therefore we are wondering what we are doing wrong since in this forums and dozens other we read all those "tricks" seems to be successful and the way to tons of traffic.
You should release articles on spanish speaking websites, and seek traffic sources from major players in the hispanic web.
You want spanish-speaking Americans from a single state? Hate to burst your bubble but that's a really tiny market. While the total number of latinos might be significant, when you look at how many of that segment are interested in travelling to cuba you might find the market size for what you are doing is extremely small. Good god...good luck with that. Not only will you be competing with Google Maps (and Google Local, Google Streetview, and Google Earth), but you'll also be competing with all the major map sites like MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps, and many other major domains for those keywords. I feel your pain for facebook, it's a pain to advertise on properly. Where can I find some of the articles you've submitted, I'll take a look at them to see what you are doing wrong. It's possible that they are being picked up by not enough websites or it could be that you are wording them very well. As for the part in red, never buy into the crap that other people boast about. Every website performs differently. Just because one method works for one website, it doesn't mean it will work for another website. Furthermore, a lot of the stuff you see posted here and on other webmaster forums is total crap, it's just lousy marketers that are trying to promote their ebooks (bah!). How many articles have you submitted? Where did you submit them?
how old is your website? beleive me! it takes atleast 2 months to for good results to appear my soccer site is getting 25-50 visits from search engines after working for 6 months on it , its frustrating i know , i was about to sell my site. what i can say is get backlinks from .edu site , i have to search for that post where you can get .edu backlinks for free , pm me if you are soo interested i will search the post for you Edit: Ops! i didnot read that your site is 5 months old :\ thats pretty screwed up, all that work n no result, i feel your pain :$
Hi guys, thanks for the help, I appreciate it. All that stuff is applied in both languages (English and Spanish), the successful Blogs were not mine, were from my company, therefore I did not have to worry about promoting myself my articles and because they based their campaigns in a huge budget, which is not our case. Christian, Our strategy was later on to spread to whole Europe and Canada (main stream of tourism in Cuba now, since American are not allowed to travel there) and make a three languages site. But is resulted in such a big amount of work that we split it in steps. At the beginning we wanted to focus in the 1.6 million Cuban living in Florida which may be interested on in just for sentimental reasons and are the people that know the places and contribute to the data base. We will made a trial then directly to our target (translating the whole site into English is a huge amount of works, but we can’t comeback) and focusing in a bigger amount of users About the concurrence of Google and major sites. We do not expect to have a community of 200 millions users and compete with Facebook and Google. We are focusing in more detailed, reach and accurate content than Googlemaps (which has lot of crap, places in the wrong place and the opinion are just two sentences while we are visiting the places, taking pictures and making very professional reviews) But reading you I would understand that our problem is the chosen keywords. Then I would like you please to recommend where to find serious e-books or articles on how to chose the keywords. The part in red (read all those "tricks" seems to be successful and the way to tons of traffic.) was exactly what made us to stop blogging and think on it as a business. Even in this Forums every second thread is about how to get success, how to attract traffic and how to make people click like crazy in your ads. But by doing exactly what they suggested we did not move one step forward. We do believe that our niche has future (particularly because we are thinking in the whole area not just a country). That’s why we started this thread looking for realistic solutions. The only success we already had is to realize that all that crap successful histories like “get $$$$$ in 2 days†or “we send you millions on targeting traffic for a couple of cents†does not worth a read. I will keep posting this thread (mistakes inclusive). I think is more helpful to read an unsuccessful but realistic history. Thanks guys for your help. Please recommend where to find valuable info about choosing keywords.
Go here: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ Register a free account, and try typing in "cuba" into their keyword suggestion tool. That site is run by Aaron Wall, one of the top SEO guys in the world and his keyword suggestion tool pulls data from Word Tracker and a few other major databases. It's about the best you can get for free. Try a few different keyword variations, maybe some of the major cities in cuba as well. If you've got the money though, get an account at www.KeywordDiscovery.com, their keyword tool is amazing, but quite expensive.
Looks like you are doing lots of great things for promotion. Only thing I can think of is that the quality of the articles isn't enough to reach a real readership and spread naturally. Outside of that, the articles you do have may not be optimised properly, even though you said you are writing them for SEO purposes. If you write 10 quality articles about Spanish tourists to Cuba and what they can do, where to stay, site seeing, etc, you are bound to get some traffic. Or perhaps like others have stated, and your niche is just too small to reach a larger audience. It might be time to either make your website entirely English or Spanish, and rather than focusing on Map + City, perhaps Spanish tourists to Cuba recommendations, or other less competitive highly relevant terms. I would put the PPC to bed until the website is completely finished and continue focusing on free options such as directories, forum posting, and blog commenting. Double your efforts this month and see if your traffic doubles. If not, time to work smarter, not harder.
Que paso chico! There are very good posts here and I agree with most of what Cristian says and I thing the market for Cuba is relatively very small. If you are comparing your company's website, take in consideration the time that site has been running or if the company had any background. I could say that most of their visitors comes from word of mouth. Mike
As you already found out, the majority of what you have done does not work. Only the inexperienced, or, the downright dumb who keeps trying over and over again, thinks it does. Blogging and especially this crap Twitter does not work. Posting in boards is one if the worst ways. In fact, it is pretty much of a joke. Experienced marketers/advertisers don't bother with such noob methods. Writing articles and publishing them in those article dumpers, like Ezine, is mainly for affiliates selling stuff, not for getting traffic. Writing articles simply does not bring in the traffic you want. In fact, many times the majority of the readers do not finish reading. There is organic traffic, but it is minimum. And that traffic is higly overrated. Most are just bored, jumping from site to site. So, what is the answer? Advertise more, and be good at it! That's it. The only real way is to advertise in as many webmasters' sites as you can. And, of course, do not forget about offline. But first get your ads critiqued, Ask family, friends, coworkers, whomever for their advice. If they were interested in such a product, service, would that ad pull them in? You can advertise all day long, and in as many sites as you can afford, but none of it will do you any good if you have lousy ads. There's your answer. Sorry, next to word of mouth, there is no other way to get a lot of traffic, at least 1,000 daily visitors, on a consistent basis.
try to work harder... ROFL just joking. you tried everything to have traffic but still no traffic at all?