Hey guys, i have read a lot of threads on this site, getting some really good tips so thanks to everyone involved. This is my first post. I have 2 sites that i want to start getting traffic to, both are still incomplete. I am not trying to get rich quick or anything. I am passionate about both topics of my sites, and very much willing to put time and effort into them. I am a web developer by trade in the education sector and want some advice as to how people usually get traffic. Some specific examples on the type of content you provide would be great. I keephearing about how people are getting like 700 hits a day quite easily, but have no idea how you went about it. my sites include www.sleepempathy.com - a site which is aimed at uniting insomniacs from around the world in a combined effort to help each other. the other is www.vceforum.com - a site aimed at Year 12 VCE students in Australia where they can chat about subjects, download exams and talk about university preferences etc. Any help and suggestions would be great. thanks guys!
Find links from sites in your field by approaching other site owners. But make sure you link from home pages or other prominant positions. Offer links in exchange or pay for these inbound links and you will be off to a good start. For the VCE site, put notices around at schools or send details to school student advisers.
whats the best way to approach other people? what would you say to them? are people genuinly willing to do this? why would they want to link to me? am I too pessimistic?
another question: with a forum site, if there are no posts or no members... if people find the site eventaully, but see that no one even uses the site, they also will not partake... how do you avoid this? starting posting dummy data and users?
smithyd This all takes patience! The first weeks of a forum's life are tricky at best. It can take lots of work to get an audience. Once a core group takes up residence, you are in good shape. You might want to add security, backups and anti-spam self study to your list of things to do if you will be administering a forum, they can be very time consuming and frustrating. Can you call in favors to get a few people to post in your forums temporarily? I have had my best success by using a variety of tools to generate traffic, and you usually can't always predict which one will work. Mass directory submissions is one, online or other press releases can help, article submissions, etc. Getting the site's mentioned in blogs and other forums helps too. Don't forget to add your links in forum signatures! I am assuming your audience for at least one site is younger, so social networking tools might be a good option. You might want to look at another tool- www.squidoo.com. This resource can bring you traffic, and help in a number of ways.
Well, getting and keeping forums happy is an art unto itself. Personally I say: don't start marketing your websites until you have at least some content. There is a good recent article on A List Apart on how to get an active forum: www . alistapart . com/articles/greathost
You are like me. You spend a lot of time thinking about what you will do instead of doing. If I have learned one thing in my couple of years in web development it is to just do it. Email webmasters of websites in the same category as yours and ask if they are interested in selling links or trading links. A lot of the time you will not even get a reply but if you send enough requests you will find some good links. Best of luck, John.
Do they all post in the middle of the night? Sorry, I couldn't resist that. Have you considered writing articles with advice for insomniacs (with a link to your site) and posting them on EzineArticles? Although each article will only give you a little traffic, about 50 a month in my experience, it soon adds up if you write 2 or 3 articles a week.
If your websites are really new, I doubt youll get much responses from the webmasters you contact. You should maybe get your friends and relatives start some discussions in the forum. Start some niche topics which are not covered on other forums. You will start getting traffic from search engines soon. About the other site, start adding information and content to it. Get your sites at a more *useful* level before you start looking for links for your sites. Once people start coming from the search engines, you'll see that the activity on your forums will start increasing. This all takes time and patience. I woulent suggest you go for paid links all of a sudden. Make your sites more rich with content and then go for paid links, so you get your return of the investment. Good Luck!
700 hits is quite easy. This just refers to every request for every page, image and other objects. This isn't the same as 700 uniques as this would refer to the number of individual users who visit the site. In other words, if you have lots of images and other objects on one page and only one person visits the page in a day it will log up several hits but only one visitor.
whats the best way to approach other people? Just contact them by mail. what would you say to them? Present yourself and your site. Just ask for a linkexchange. are people genuinly willing to do this? If your site looks good and you have good or unique CONTENT...yes they will. why would they want to link to me? See above am I too pessimistic? no, you are a beginner. (as I am also) But if you are really passionated about the topics on your site and are not just willing to make easy money...just continue to work on your sites. Make them bigger, create unique content and use forums, mails and directories to make people aware of them. It's a slow process but the best way in my eyes. When I started I had also to ask people If they were interested in my site...after a year people are asking me to link to their site (and now I'm starting over again with the English part because outside Belgium nobody out there knows me or my site. ) give it some time and hard work and you will see visitors come. Wish you good luck
Glad I helped you. DP is a great forum to find answers on technical issues and some really good "tricks". I learned a lot already bij reading the different threads. But...sometimes I miss the passion of the beginning website owner who is doing this all just for the fun or to share his knowledge. In my opinion you first have to know something in depth, or be passionated by something or somebody, before starting a website about it. (I'm talking about non-business sites) I think the net is becoming saturated by useless and annoying websites. No offence to anybody of course
Omg, your doing exaclty what i am doing now, I have 2 site which are incompelete, and im still working on them best10s.com ===provide all kind of top sites(cool sites for student and kids) top10s.net ====give students some information about top majors and material to study and related jobs.
maybe we could report back to each other to see we are going? esecially with the education sites.. i went to both and took a look. Good luck with them... i am a php programmer so i am tending to build my sleep site myself, and i want to make it have a bit of a niche... but the vceforum.com is just using phpbb since is quite str8 forward... good luck! and thanks to everyone fo their help here... i will report back! cheers