Hi Guys Looking for a bit of help/advice... I launched my website 3 weeks ago - www.scotlandhotelreviews.co.uk. Eventually I would like to add advertising to the site, but at the moment I'm happy to let it run for 6 months - a year and build up a good community and a good selection of reviews with a steady stream of traffic. I've submitted the site to Google, Yahoo & MSN, and it has started to get indexed on each of these. I've got a twitter account with nearly 1500 followers (I started this last year before the site went live) and I've also go a facebook page (86 fans started a week or so ago). The site is getting a small amount of traffic each day, mainly from twitter and facebook, but I would like to give it a bit of a boost to get some more UGC. Any ideas? Thanks Leigh P.S. I'm s**t at writing articles!
Buy leads... I get 150k monthly at a really low price then I blast out 25k a day thru an online e-mail program
You have a great domain name. Hopefully, this is your main keyword phrase you are targeting. The site is very good. The only thing I would change on the homepage is the "Sign up then add a review". Get rid of the Sign up part. That has the potential of scaring people away. While you may be s**t at article writing, I highly recommend getting GOOD QUALITY articles out there and go more for the "authority type links" than just the normal backlinks. These type articles should be no less than 500 words. Your resource box should NOT have any sales type stuff in it or visit me etc. The idea is for your article to get picked up by a high PR site. If your resource box sucks from trying to talk someone into going to your site, instead of just giving the facts and useful information, the higher sites won't pick it up. Hire someone to do that for you. It will be well worth it. With your site this should be extremely easy to do and you should have a ton of info for articles. Good luck!! and don't even think about buying leads. You won't need them)
I will be the first to admit that I do not know as much as many of the others on here but I think your site is GREAT! The site is very clean and very profeesional. I'll agree with zeekstern about removing sign up because it may scare some people away. You will probably have more than enough traffic in no time at all if you follow his suggestion of getting some articles out there. Keep up the great work!
First of all, congrats for the great domain and a professional looking theme. From now on, start serious backlink building with GOOD ANCHORS. If you have good backlibks from QUALITY sites and GOOD ANCHORs then Google will deliver you tons of traffic every single day. Once you start getting traffic and good PR then advertisers will be begging you for ads!
I really like your site design too. It's nice a clean and easy to navigate. I also wonder about the purpose of the sign up process. Are you trying to control what get posted? It's not very clear what I would be signing up for. Is it just the ability to post reviews? Personally, I would keep the sign up, but make some sort of opt-in for a free monthly newsletter or such to build a database of potential buyers. You could also provide some sort of free travel guide or something similar as an incentive to leave a review. As for targeted traffic, I would stick with the free methods as long as your time frame is 6 months to a year. One of my favorite sources is to sign up for some popular travel forums and provide some value with a link to your site in your signature. If it is an open and popular forum every post you make provides a good backlink to your site plus always has the possibility of getting you another position in the search engines pointing to your site. Overall, I think you are off to a great start with this site, particularly with your integration of Facebook and Twitter. I would also add a lens at Squidoo and a Hubpage with the highlights of your site and more backlinks. And don't forget to bookmark all of your entries at some social bookmarking sites (digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, etc) Good job! Keep up the good work. Ken
You can do some adwords, SEO, Video Marketing Banner Advetising. There are many different ways you can market your business. You can also try GOOGLE Content Network this will allow you to put your text link or banner on other targeted websites.
Hi Everyone Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply to me and thanks also for all the positive comments about the site - it's great to hear good feedback! I'm definitley going to remove the 'Sign Up' text and change it to just 'Add A Review'. The reason I'm asking people to sign up is becuase I want to try to ensure that the reviews that are being left are real and not just hotels adding them to talk up their accommodation. Zeekstern - you mentioned about "authority type links" - what's the difference between these and normal back links, also, once I have written an article what is the best way for me to promote it and are there sites where I can get ideas about the kind of things people are writing about related to my niche? You also mentioned about a resource box, can you explain what this is (sorry not up on articles at all!) Nokimchen - What's the best way for me to find sites that will add a link to my own, also should these be reciprocal or not? Ken - Thanks for the travel forum suggestion - I'm going to get signed up for some tonight. In terms of bookmarking is this something that I should do myself for each new review for example.
Hello, first off, I too want to congratulate you. A very nice looking site indeed. I have few things to add to what everyone has said. One of the things I did notice in your site is that, other than your site name I could not figure out if you have other keywords or keyphrases for which you are hoping to get SERPs. Maybe I did not read deep enough into the site to figure it out, but I think you need to add bit more content in the individual pages. This helps build the on-page SEO. I like your sign up idea, and I understand your argument, YET I think even if you have people sign up, there is NO guarantee it is NOT someone from a hotel doing it in order to benefit their hotel. So it is kind of a double edged sword, you really have no way of determining it is a legitimate customer. Ok, now to answer some questions you asked to other members, maybe they have a different approach but here is mine - Authority type links are links that you place at sites that have authority in the niche or more often than not, a high PR. Normal links are simply links you leave at forums, blogs, links from social bookmarks, etc. Once you write an article you should distribute it to article directories. Submission is FREE so do not get fooled into paying any membership. You can do a search for article directories one of the most popular and more often mentioned is ezine, but there are hundreds. As for what you should write about... well write about hotel stays, about hotel service, about vacationing, but ALWAYS remember to include your keywords, whichever they are. The articles should be well written and with a balance between keywords, and high quality content. I can recommend an article writer, just send me a PM, she is great, native English speaker and has decent prices (Not $1 per 100 words, but her work is worth the price.) As for getting sites to link to your own, when they are related to your niche, IT may be MUCH harder to get site owners to agree to a link. Especially since you will be a competition. You may however, try to get hotel sites, discount sites and the likes to maybe agree to let you place a link. NOW that will cost you unless of course you do a reciprocal link. Remember noone does anything for free or just because. And yes, do sign up for travel forums and even travel blogs. Participate with quality information. Do not leave spammy comments, that will only get you banned and can do a lot of damage, especially now that you are starting out. Finally, in order to get some traffic to your site, in addition to the social networks, consider buying email campaigns, just to get your feet wet. You can also try using free methods like traffic exchanges. These help build site branding and establishing, something that is extremely difficult to do. Create a splash or squeeze page with an opt-in list and autoresponder. This way you start building a list of prospective clients to whom you can send emails too.
Hello advertise - thanks for the great feedback! You mentioned about other keywords/phrases on the site, what I was trying to achieve is for example when you click on a destination then the main keyword for that page would be 'Destination' Hotel Reviews, i.e.: Glasgow = Glasgow Hotel Reviews. Again, my SEO knowledge is limited to say the least so I've just applied what I thought might work - hover any suggestions to improve this would be great! With regards to links - would it be best for me to have a dedicated links page on the site - or for each destination/town display relevant links on that page. My concern with the second option would be directing traffic away from the site. Also, the hotels that are currently listed have a link to their website which I have made nofollow - should i change this?
I agree. For your kind of site you really want to build things up properly. It'll take longer than the "spammy" tactics, but it'll work much better in the long-run. One tip about Facebook... often people are more likely to sign up to a more "generic" fan page. They might not have any reason to be a fan of your SITE, but if you set up a page called "Holidays In Scotland" you'll find a lot more people will sign up, and then their friends will sign up when it appears in their feeds, etc. For example, we have JUST set this one up: http://www.facebook.com/HolidaysInTheUK A bit of a plug, but I'm holding a webinar this week that would probably be of interest to you: http://www.websitemarketingguru.com/webinar