I am looking for yet more suggestions on marketing my music community & arcade. I have seen an increase in traffic over the last couple of months since launch, through word of mouth - as we offer monthly prizes for the overall arcade champ each month; we gave away a Nintendo Wii the 1st month (as a launch prize) - the arcade got swamped - and I recently had to delete all scores (members agreed) so that new comers could have a chance to win new prizes - we are now giving away things like CD's or music vouchers for iTunes.. etc etc.. I have a budget for the site, as we build up content, such as interviews with relevant artists, we can see the potential and are confident with what we have. I've been given $500 to spend on a new and 'creative' method of bringing in more long term members.. rather than casual gamers.. Does anyone here have any bright spark ideas how this $500 could be best spent? I need to simply show what we have as a site and community to the most people possible. YES the genre of music is niche, as we have a strong brand in that world, we ran with it - but the site is for absolutely everyone! What do the DP contingent think? AdWords? Paid for banners? What would work to get most people stopping by? (and preferably staying!) Site: LINK
Depends on the content of your site. Are you selling 1 to 3 focused affiliate products? Looking to make money off traffic and games you have on the site? Are you selling any video games? Seems like you have community portal. Those are great for marketing on word of mouth, like forums and message boards. Make sure your pages are SEOed and start submitting to alot of directories if you haven't already. Got alot of videos, free music, and free games? These type of sites are good for networking with other community based sites that are similar. Look for sites like yours and work out a link exchange or even purchase a link if available for a descent price. Videos can be submitted to video directories and game can be submitted to larger arcade style networks which will in turn link back to your site once accepted.
Hi! thanks for feedback, repped you... at the moment, yes it is purely a community site with forums, chat, and video channel too - the arcade is a main feature and seems to be the major factor in return visits. I think I DO need to submit to more directories - do you or does anyone have a heart enough to tell me where to start!!! LOL - I'm not sure how to go about that.... Great idea and free I suppose which is always good... are there any more effective tricks that I could put into play??? .. with the money I have here burnin a hole in my pocket!
Games and video is always popular Have you thought about creating a promotional video? You could hop on elance and use your money to get a pro video made, then stick it on LeadsByVideo.com
Well....if that money is burning a hole, then use it to outsource your work instead of doing all these submissions and link exchanges by yourself. Outsource link directory submissions on sites like scriptlance, rentacoder, and elance. There are tons of people who do that for a living for cheap. Hire someone else to do your forum posting. Make sure they speak proper english and they use your signature on ALL posts. I'd pay around .03 to .05 cent a post. Then hire someone to do general link exchanges and find link partners. I then would take your free time that you are saving and look at some of the most used games and viewed videos via your web stat tool and then submit them to video submission sites and offer the games for free to other larger arcade networks in exchange for them linking back to you. You can literally spend under a few hundred dollars and get a team of 4-5 people working on your marketing efforts while you focus on what ever you like....site building, adding more content, etc. Life is short....do what you love to do and pay others to do the grunt work. This is my motto .
AHH, I'd not heard of that, I'll check that out thanks! And affiliatereadings - I think you're right; Im gonna have a look for someone to find links and relevant sites to build relationships with..... hmmmm, anymore for anymore????
Just did this LeadsbyVideo, interesting concept HERE is the video I submitted fo my site..... It will be interesting to see if that brings any hits in! Thanks again for the suggestions!
I suggest..doing some viral marketing using the Friends Community such as- Friendster, Facebook, hi5 etc. Get 10-20 kid ...pay them some money...and it will do the trick...Another method that i have used previously was--- I targeted 10 top bloggers who blog in WOrdpress or Blogger ...But they dont have the money....to buy a domain...(They just blog for the sake of blogging)......You can contact them...you can tell them about your site you can buy them a .com or .info.......and you can ask them to do promotion for you....
LOL! I will look at the Yahoo groups thing, thanks... anymore for anymore - I have already put into action a couple of things suggested here! Thanks everyone for your feedback
Thanks man! Yep we already did that - you can check it out on a few sites: here's the LINK to view it! Thanks dude
The best way to advertise is still google adwords. Google is where most people do their searching and you can target your traffic so that you get long term gamers. I would learn everything you can about advertising on google adwords and then start testing some different keywords until you find something that is working well for you. Benjamin
If you have anyone working on or with your site who attends college, you can have them post the link on their college's facebook pages, forum, or even possibly mention it in their school's newspaper. I got a big boost of traffic to our video game news/review site by having my college writers at a couple big schools do that. Of course, another way to bring in visitors and get the name out is to have t-shirts or something with the URL and have models or hot female friends wear them. It sounds bad, but it's worked at the last few E3s and Comic-Cons I've been at. People always want to post the pictures of the girls they see, and other than the cost of the shirt it's basically free advertising.
Yea hot girls always works! You're right - Ive dabbled with that kinna stuff before but not for a website.. I love your site by the way - it's top notch; one of the best looking I've ever seen. If you'd ever like to synsdicate your content - like maybe allow us to show game reviews from your site on hhsix - with your logo and links back to your site - I will PM you in a minute. Thanks again everyone! and ehingerenterprises19; you're right - I may give AdWords a blast and see what traffic comes in. Thanks