After 3 solid months of development and testing my niche web 2.0 network is ready. Considering I am working with a very small advertising budget, I don't want to dump all my money in google ads. I have submitted my site to few web directories and getting a bit of traffic coming in slowly. What is the best way to people to come look at my site, participate and give feedback ? Thanks max
The best way is to get listed in the google search for you keyword/keywords. It is the slowest way and this is where most people give up on Internet busineses. It can be slow, but it is worth it in the end. You would rather be making no money now and lots of money in a few months than a bit of money now.
should I focus more on optimizing my pages to the niche keywords or should I focus on the core business and let google find me.
I'd need to see the site to advise you on that. What is your core business? Simply the only way to get high in google is get lots of backlinks from related sites.
Article marketing is one way. Write articles on the subject of the website and submit to sites such as ezinearticles and add a link in the author bio box to your website. Google gives weight to the number and quality of oneway links when ranking sites in the search results. You may well also get traffic from people reading your article and then clicking the link to find out about your website.
If your site is trule web 2.0, it may have a good appeal from social bookmarking traffic. Try this social bookmarking list, and sort it by pr for the best/most active social bookmarking sites. Since bookmarking your own site is free, you can use your advertising budget elsewhere. Good luck
Advertising is only good if your ad costs are less than the money that you can bring in through people coming through the ads. Its the quickest way, but its also the way for people who want quick money and aren't prepared to wait. In my opinion the google search is the best way. It is what I have done with my sites and I know it works well from the revenue I generate.
I would suggest social media. If your site is good enough, it will get popular with low paid advertising. Digg, Stumbleupon, technorati, mr. wong, delicio.us,... One big help is to try and have bloggers blog about you. As many as possible: no matter whether their sites get 500 visitors a month, or 50,000 visitors a month. Slowly, other bloggers will talk about it, and the snowball gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger...