In your opinion, what is the first crucial step to marketing a brand new site? Is it using of the services of a fellow DPer and get your site submitted to 300+ directories? Submitting to paid directories? A press release? Submitting to G,Y & M is the obvious answer
Submitting to paid directories, Submission to directories and also Submitting articles all the three are a good a good options to promote a site but not start off with it. I think a press release would make a good effect Go for a press release and then on any of the above stated things.
Assuming the site is complete, submit a PR then pay for submission to free directories. I usually stay away from paid directories unless they are niche. General ones seem to be a waste of money. (many like them though) Next, I get my links on some good sites to get those bots rolling in and go from there. That's usually day 1 of marketing.
All of them combined - you need a marketing plan to set goals for each of the options you select. Track them, otherwise who cares?
An easy way to get traffic is putting link in your forum signature, and/or at the bottom of e-mails. That actually works.
i submit to a few good directories general and highly targetted niche directories and exchange some relevant links that will bring small traffic aswell as help get indexed then get started on a good press release and submit that to usual free places that give good results also social bookmarking sites if the site fits all that above takes quite a bit of time... but its free and should give good results it always does for me
Add content and don't promote the site until you have enough content for people to find the site useful. You'll find that if the site has good unique content, then people will link to you without even requesting a link in return. Once you've added the content, submit the site manually to the directories, high PageRank directories, or directories that are being promoted and maintained and not old stale directories. Write a few articles and submit them to article submission websites, then write a press release and submit it to PRweb.com. Someone mentioned Google - whilst yes, getting links will mean your site is indexed in Google, its going to take up to 12 months to rank for competitive keywords in Google due to the sandbox effect.
Press Release, Submit Articles, Submit to directories and most important of all use social sites like Digg and delicious.
Sites like Digg might bring traffic, but it's worthless traffic, because it's unlikely going to increase your sales or income.
True but with a new site, the aim is to try and get branding, making your site known. IMHO, a new site should not aim for income (in the beginning) but getting recognized like when you are new to a sports club. In the beginning you just get to know the people (socialize) then try to be better than them.
Has anyone really gotten a good response from the Press Release of announcing a new web site? I find that extraordinary. First that a newspaper editor would actually print it, and second that readers of the newspaper would actually go to the web site. In my experience a PR is fairly useless and a waist of time/money unless you are announcing something that is news worthy; and the creation of a new web site hardly falls into that category. Assuming that the web site being complete, means that it includes about 20 pages of value content (Not verbiage and crap like that PLR stuff), which have about 300-700 words each, and some nice images for illustration on each of those pages... assuming it is a real website... I would start with a google sitemap.xml, google analytics to see where I'm going, and submission to the web engines, and then to specific high yield directories such as DMOZ. Then pay for smatterings of PPC ads. Using the traffic coming in from the PPC's I would watch very closely what the visitors do on the site and where the web site seems to generate the most interest, and then build that interest area up. That's were I would start.
Does using the services of DPer really boost your traffic? Is it worth the pay? For starters, I prefer to opt for free technique.
Well if you're not writing about something newsworthy, it's not really a press release in the first place... it's essentially newswire spam. But at the same time, if you have nothing newsworthy about your site, why are you launching it in the first place? If you don't have something unique or work with the "build a better mousetrap" philosophy to make improvements over your competition, you obviously don't know enough about the market to be launching a site for that audience in the first place, and it certainly won't be worth most visitor's time ("you" not meaning you personally... but collectively). If you put in proper planning and make an honest effort to create something of quality, rather than being "just another site," then yes, a simple press release can be the best thing to start with. Why start with it? Because once you've been promoting too much elsewhere and already have an audience built, the "new" angle is completely lost on you. But the key to making them work is not to use them as announcements of a new site, but to tie that launch into something in the news, or something else making it more newsworthy. But that's the thing about PR... it can be extremely cheap, or even free if you know how to do it all yourself, but you have to be willing to invest time and creativity into finding a worthwhile angle. I think most sites have the potential to do that. But a lot of site owners don't want to put in the effort of finding or creating that angle, so they look at press releases as just another backlink tool - which really ticks me off as a PR professional... but I'll spare you that rant today. Jenn