I have a Chicago sports site and am looking at more ways of promoting it, improving my marketing skills and SEO. www.chicitysports.com is the site for reference.
Forum signatures and social bookmarking sites are good way to market sports site, try using orkut too
whenever you post something new on your site, post link to it on twitter you could also buy direct real human traffic to your site
wow that's a very nice lookin site you got! are you commenting on other sports blogs? Leave your link in your comment signature. Also do lots of chatting in sports forums and again leave a link to your site. Keep working on SEO and publishing lots of content for your site. Maybe start a link roll to with other sports blogs so you can increase your back links. Also I'm not too sure how feasible this is but maybe you could get your website published in some local Chicago magazines or small scale news papers.
Content and on-page-SEO looks good. The trick now is to get other people talking about it and linking it As Le Dangles suggested, try posting in sports forum with an attractive signature link.
Hello marcusio, If you're looking for some free methods of advertising this contest, I'd recommend the following. Create A Facebook Fan Page (Like newera said) Create a professional looking landing page that immediately informs viewers about your contest. Also, be sure to add a lot of people that are already fans of sports-related pages on Facebook. Everyday, you could throw a few posts in your stream about updates in your contest, the number of people entering, etc. Tweet About It If you don't already have a twitter account, you should create one since you're advertising a service. Design your twitter background to include information about the contest so your viewers can get informed as soon as they see your account. If you don't have design experience, I'd gladly design it for you. Post About It In Forums If you're a member of a few popular sports-related forums, you can always make posts about your contest, or mention it in your post signature. If you only have one or two posts in the forum, I wouldn't recommend immediately telling everything you're having a $1,000 cash prize contest because most people will probably think you're trying to scam them. Build up some credibility first, then go for it. Create A Mailing List You could try using a mailing service like Mail Chimp and have people sign up to enter your contest. Create a killer landing page to really entice people once they first view it, and tell them that they'll be entered in the contest if they just provide their first name and email address. This way, you'll be able to email updates to people, which will get around to their friends, and you'll also have a list of similar-interest fans who you can promote other sports-related products to. I hope this advice helped. -Benjamin M. Jacques
I think for your kind of site social media is the way to go, as suggested already forum marketing could be a really effective tool, as could using social bookmarking and blogging sites. Generate some 'noise' about your website without blatantly promoting it and you'll start to see a steady stream of traffic.
There is one other thing you could do is write some sport articles which also mentions some of the products that you are selling, you can then add them to some top electronic articles sites This will also add credibility to your business and you will come across as someone that knows what they are talking about. Jenny
great looking site. like others pointed out, a newsletter might be useful to set up. you could also bring some discussion/latest comments to the front page under the "join the community" to show your visitors are important. I was checking my old traffic tips thread and noticed that interviews could be one more thing to help market your site. like said, great looking site.
I would create a Facebook Fanpage as mentioned above, then making some groups trying to reach users with interests in your niche. Paying a little for some social ads could speed up the Fanpage recruitment speed