lol true but the best is more content for your site = more people . Seo does help your bring visitors it all depends if your forum is intrested or not
i guess I don't understand much about SEO that's why I gave it up. I have a fair number of links to the site. I made it more "google" friendly too.
how much traffic do you get from MySpace? I have one set up with a couple hundred "friends" but it doesn't really bring in a lot of traffic.
Another thing to note: What kind of server you have and what's the load like on it? This comes from personal experience - I had a site that was well placed on Google and was getting about 3k uniques. I tried a lot to increase the traffic, but it didn't work. After sometime I realized that my server max outs at a certain time of the day (peak time). I upgraded my server and bam....I bumped my uniques to 5k+ in 2-3 days. Also, SEO takes some time to kick in traffic (approx 3 months). You need to be persistent with it. Hope this helps.
Since your getting 12k daily.. you should be making at least $50 daily. think of a huge promotion.. like some contest with a really big prize($300+ worth). Market it like crazy ($300+). Pay people at big gaming forums to post your link. (Join forum, make a poll in the off-topic section polling "Do you have a paypal?" See who does, and offer some $ for them to post your contest link. After the contest, people will remember your site and will come back if they liked what they saw. good luck.
Wyla: That is a good idea. I would recommend an ipod as award or perhaps 3 ipod shuffles instead of $300. An ipod can do motivate a lot of people than $300. my 2 cents.
Yea when i said $300+ i meant something worth $300+. Cash is usually never a good thing to set as a prize. Then you get conflictions on how to send payment, maybe they dont have paypal, maybe in country that doesnt accept paypal, maybe they dont have bank account, etc. Prize, they give you address and bam they get it.
Trade links and try to BUY a space on a magazine that tells the best websites of the year or somestuff like that so u will be getting almost the max that u can get of traffic on ur website.
Great ideas everyone! Thanks a lot. TheGuy Hmm the server idea is an interesting one. I have noticed problems when digg comes. Sometimes I suffer the "digg effect" for a few hours, but otherwise I haven't noticed other server issues, but you have me thinking about upgrading. Maybe it really is time. I heard that Amazon was going to announce selling computing power for 12cents an hour, could be cheaper than getting a new server. Wyla Contests seem like a good idea. I've done quite a few where we've given out game consoles, games and stuff. I never really noticed the burst when I did a contest, but you have me thinking quite a bit... Maybe a larger contest with a PS3 or something like that would attract attention. Thiagoo Buying space on a magazine is interesting. I don't read many magazines other than Time and Businessweek so I doubt I would advertise on those. Are you thinking of magazines dedicated to Webmasters?
Amazon has closed Beta program for their EC2. It is 10 cents, with some charges for bandwidth. It is great stuff and seamlessley helps cope up with the Digg effect. I am waiting for their mysql stack on EC2. It will be really fun then. Also, Media Temple's Grid-Server is a good option as well.
If you are willing to give prizes, keep it games related and if you are willing to advertise, advertise where the visitors you need are going ( gamers forums ) Good luck
Thanks for that - I will go take a better look. The trouble is my industry probably wouldn't know what to do with it!!
Make sure your site does all the things to convert one time visitors into repeat visitors. Work out what your search traffic is. If you are getting 6,000 per day from search traffic all you need is for 33 of those visitors to become repeat visitors everyday. These types of daily visitors are known as addicts. If you convert 0.5 percent of that 6,000 or 33 visitors each day to addicts by the end of the year then you'll have an extra 12,000 visitors per day after a year. What do you have to do to turn casual visitors into addicts? Check out what Chris Pirillo does http://chris.pirillo.com/. He makes boatloads of cash at his lockergnome sites and they're related to computers.
What Hon Daddy Dad said. Part of being successful out there is doing the numbers. You literally have to be part accountant! You are now at a point that you are simply going to have to use pay ads. Or a advertising agency. Sites like iVillage, Askmen, menshealth...and others use them. They have millions of monthly hits. How do you think they got so big anyway? Don't knock pay per click ads. Try them again. They do work. But this time get others to critque them. Would they click on 'em? Also get plenty of critiques on your site. Get word of mouth going. Put a "send to a friend" form right in front of their face, at the bottom of your pages. Make it easy for them to contact others about your site. "digg / slashdot / stumble upon multiple times lots of social bookmarking partnering with other related webmasters did some branding of the domain and so forth" You can no longer double, triple that? You can do contests, but the odds are that they will take the prize, and keep on walking. Oops! Your goal is to make money, not give it away to possible moochers, site hoppers who don't stay at any one site for very long. But hell, try it. See what happens. "pick up on your key readers and bring them into the site itself. Have them act as your promoting agents." What do you mean? Hopefully this will help you... http://www.thelist.fm/marketing-advertising.shtml Bottom line...you are going to have to advertise until you bleed.
"partnering with other related webmasters" You mean link exchange? How has that worked for you? Or was it putting ads on one anothers homepages? "did some branding of the domain and so forth" Can ya explain more on that? What do you think were the top methods that brought in the most hits? Thanks.