I'm trying to get some ideas for promoting my new site. The majority of my revenue will be coming from AdSense (and I'll be playing with ebay afilliates soon). Average click profit is $.16 with a handfull $.30-$.80. Is it worth trying a $.05 CPC campaign for specific search terms to target customers to click on ads for the more broad and higher paying search terms? I would assume that people that click on ads on G would be more likely to click on ads on my site, but not sure if $.05 is worth the chance to make $.16 or maybe a bit more. What about paid directories? I'm already in Site-Sift, what other <$50 paid directories have good overal PR and are search engine friendly? (I'm constantly submiting to free directories, of course) This thread is not really site specific, just looking for what people are doing with their advertising budgets, but my site is in my signature if you're curious.
I would definitely go with press releases.... create some news worthy stuff and send multiple press releases... instant traffic and when properly done some lasting links.
I've thought about a press release, I even talked a friend of mine in journalism school into writing one for me... I just don't see how newsworthy the creation of a classifieds website for restaurant equipment qualifies as news... my friend suggested going the "young entrepreneur" route, still don't think that is very newsworthy...
How do you create press releases? I don't know any XML or RSS. Prweb requires contact info which we wouldn't want to give out.
It all depends on your goals for the site. If you primary source of income from the site will be Adsense don't bother using Adwords to drive traffic and hope that turns into clicks...it doens't work. You'd probably be best off buying some low priced text link ads on other related sites and building up your organic traffic from the engines.
Thanks, GuyFromChicago, I figured that'd be too easy. I think you're right, I just need some more text ads.
It depends totally on the site, if you can use techniques such as word of mouth and viral marketing, a small adwords campaign can really get the ball rolling. If my site wasn't completely unique, I'd just buy some long lasting PR links that provide good traffic.
My suggestion is based upon all disclaimers "what would you do" and "not really site specific"... I guess if there is nothing unique (newsworthy) about your website for restaurant equipment, I would spend the money the let someone do some "research" (whitepaper?) and put that up on your website, and write a press release about that... Search for e.g. PrWEB on this forum, there are some excellent threads.
I know that for 30$ i can get 600 flyers printed double sided color. I would get 1200 flyers and hand them out personally to people of my target audience. Then I would rely on viral marketing to do the rest, with the remaining 190$ i would spend 80$ on placing banners for one month one some very high traffic sites. The remaining 80$ i would use to buy me 2000< words of content to place on my site so that I will rise in the SERP's.
CyberBrian, I would do two things first: 1. Pay someone that knows regex / modrewrite well and have them change your .htaccess to eliminate the parameters in your URLs. You may also want to consider making the category names as part of the url i.e., .com/blenders and .com/blenders-ad12345.htm instead of http://www.restauranttrader.net/index.php?a=5&b=184&c= 2. Take whatever is left and pay someone to refresh your logo. It looks a little choppy on my display and you know what people say about first impressions. Spend whatever is left after that on: Until you have more listings, make everything free except for Featured Ad (in the meantime give away some featured ads so that there is content on the front page - no one wants to join a club that has no members. Search out suppliers and join their affiliate programs. Try to get datafeeds to load as listings (cut's down on the data entry time). Change the adsense colors. Place a 728x90 adsense banner on the ad detail pages below the category cookie trail and above the ad information. Join the coop or linkvault. I'm in both (not the same site). If you decide to join either from this post let me know and I'll send you my referral id so I can get credit ). The <title> on all your pages are the same. Make the meta tags unique for every page (category, ad detail, browse, search) your script should allow for it if not use the left over money to pay someone to do it for you. Update your "links" directory via modrewrite so that it does not contain parameters. Good luck and welcome to DP! -jay
Cyberbrian, If you're offering something for free then that is newsworthy. The trick is to send your press release to publications that your target market reads. Most trade magazines have an announcements column....so start putting together a list of restaurant related publications and associations. If they don't have info on their website about submitting a release don't be afraid to contact them and ask. Usually these same groups will also put out annual resource directories with very affordable ads.
A shrewed way of generating a pr would be to find one or two unique items that a restaurant would need to serve "true healthy food" and write an article about it...... Don't ask me I just eat but a fatless chip fryer would be a great idea..... .... the secret of serving crunchy salad with no vitamins washed out.... another.. Expat
A fellow geoclassifieds user has written a module for turning the whole site into more search engine friendly html, but for $300 its a bit steep right now, especially considering Y! has already indexed some of the dynamic pages. I know, I've been bugging a friend to do it for me, I might have to break down and pay someone. This is tricky with the dynamic pages and the particular script I'm using. Apparently the html rewrite takes care of it, but in the mean time this is what I did: <title>RestaurantTrader.net-- <MODULE_TITLE></title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="New and Used <MODULE_TITLE> for sale."> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="used, commercial, <MODULE_TITLE>"> Code (markup): The title module replaces <Module_TITLE> with the name of the category. Thats the best I could come up with with my nonexistent programing skills. Thanks everyone for the other tips, I'm going to start implementing some and we'll see what happens...
You should be able to make some of the changes in .htaccess without modifying the code. Read through this forum: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=18 there are some really good regex / modrewrite tutorials from DP members. If you don't see something that addresses your problem formulate your question and post it there. I would remove my domain name from the tags or at least put it at the very end of the string. Is there a variable for the ad title? If so stick that in there for your ad detail pages. Good luck!
Press releases dont attract that much audience unless you have something really interesting to offer them... everyone under the sun are using prweb.com so it's difficult to get through./
It's actually fairly easy to get mentioned in lots of publications IF you send a release directly, which is why I mentioned that before. Even regular retails can get coverage if you catch the right editorial schedule because many pubs do 'product showcases, or holiday gift ideas, etc. You do have to spend a little bit of time looking at different ways to promote your merchandise or services (ie. BRANDING). PRweb is helpful simply because every release in archived and if you can afford to invest a few $ then you'll get added benefits and a little SEO boost with backlinks and such.