I have a small budget, about $40 per month, to spend promoting my social bookmakring site, SoLinkable. I'm not sure how best to spend this money. It's made it to PR3, so I seem to have some backlinks, but traffic is still a little slow. There is only a small group of dedicated (and I use that term loosley) users. Otherwise, I'm getting about 100 UV a day, but they mostly just drop by to promote their own site/article and then head out on their way. So I guess my real question is this - How should I spend this money to gain traffic, membership, and overall increase usage of my bookmarking site? Any ideas and help would be greatly appreciated. Oh - and feel free to check out the site
I would probably spend more time publishing interesting posts on your blog about SoLinkable, and create some links (or banners) to your social bookmarking site. Blogs generate a lot of traffic, and if you write good posts about your niche, you will get targeted traffic. Develop your blog, you might want to use your budget in order to do that, and create some banners for your website and put them on your banner. This way your visitors will have no way of not seeing them and hopefully they will be tempted to click and visit the website. I would probably buy a book about SEO, and one about blogging. The first months budget would at least cover 3 really good books. Once you have read the two or three books during the first month, I would use the blog like Tim Linden (the owner of StartXchange) is using his in order to promote his Traffic Exchange. You could use your budget to hire freelance writers as well (if you don't have the time to write yourself). You should get a lot of good articles about social bookmarking for $40 a month. - jens -
Post in blogs and submit articles to Digg to start with. Then Look for some Traffic exchanges that allow you to buy extra ad credits. They don't cost much overall, so $50/month should get you alot of credits.
I agree with Slymarketing. You need to post articles on your site to give them a reason to stay. You need to post a new article at least every other day at a minimum. This will build your subscriber base as well as get the word our about your site. Create value and they will come and hang out. If you don't want to write the articles your self, use your budget and hire someone at DP.
i spend $33 a month on article marketer.com to promote my articles. Ive found it a good service so far
Get a part time job and change that $40 a month into $400 and then advertise. Sorry, but that $40 a month will not take you very far. Well, I can only assume that you want more traffic than in the one digits, and without a high bounce rate.
Thanks for the suggestions, I've never really thought about using the blog to drive traffic to the site. I've only used to the blog to keep the readers up to date on changes/improvements to SoLinkable. Great idea. Thanks a lot. I believe that my budget this month will go towards a contest here on DP to create a new logo for SoLinkable (the current one is uuuuugly - I made it myself). I think that if I pretty up that part of the site it will help me in the long run.
If you are reading this thread, DeniG, THIS is why so many will always have a dead site by using the methods we talked about earlier.
Yes definetly use a blog. Then write and distribute articles and comment on blogs and continue forum posting. Then pay an article marketer to distribute your articles. It can be done with little money it just will take more work
I second Chancey here. I'd also not spend the $40, but rather focus on all the free tips & tactics you can use. There's plenty of ideas in these forums already.
Useless eh? How much would I need to spend to see some results? What do you think the average webmaster spends on advertising per month (I think maybe I'll start another thread asking this question)? The free methods are what I've been using up to this point. They actually work pretty well, and I plan to keep using them. I've met some very interesting people out there in the blogging world, people that I never would have met had I not started SoLinkable.
You could join Blog Mastermind by Yaro Starak (the cost is less than your budget). This way, you'll learn a lot about blogging. But DP is also a great place to learn... it just takes a little more time And, Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick have launched Become A Blogger Premium, a video site about how to become a professional blogger. I am a member. I am really looking forward for the advanced stuff, but so far it's been mostly for people new to blogging. - jens -
SEO SEO SEO. You don't really HAVE to spend money on the internet to make money especially in the start. I would say just focus on gaining pagerank through all of the regular ways. Also grab a myspace page, twitter account, etc and start promoting it through there but do not spam anyone. There are a lot of ways to get things going and even look for off-line marketing opportunities, run online contests, etc.