About a week ago I started using adwords to promote my service and have gotten a few clicks to my site, nothing as much as I expected. What I will be doing shortly is advertising in a national magazine. I'm wondering if any of you could give me good tips on getting higher traffic to my website? Its a fairly new site (few months old) that allows users to apply for a free unix account (either student or teachers or any computer users who like unix). I run this server to promote the Linux Operating System. Membership is free. Any ideas for which type of marketing would be best suited would be aprpeciated, thanks. Claudio Izzi System Administrator
Basically, it's advertising. That and word of mouth is what makes a webamster successful. It's not signatures, it's not seo, it's not reviews.... If anyone tells you that seo is the way to go, he is full of shit, and or he is trying to sell you something . It's usually on message boards, and they are trying to be somebody, be part of the group. "Hey, look at me" sort of thing. Ask them what pages they are on in the engines. That shuts them up. First, get your site critiqued. If it's crap, no amount of marketing will help you. Put in a "send to a friend" form on your site. Put it right in front of them. Get them at the heat of the moment: "Hey, I think Frank would like this site." Next, get your ads critiqued first before placing them. Ask others if they would click on it. The main reason why so many don't get good results is that their ads suck. Get an advertising campaign going. Advertise in as many sites and search engines as your advertising budget will allow. List of engines: Google MSN Yahoo Ask (AskJeeves) AltaVista MetaSpider Vivisimo PlanetSearch SurfWax qbSearch ProFusion Proteus Go2Net MegaGo.com WebFile MyGO MegaCrawler Jayde Burf Search-O-Rama Cipinet InfoTiger G7K TowerSearch RealTech Miva Chitika VCM LookSmart NnSeek iWon.com Exactseek Jayde ScrubTheWeb Search.com MetaCrawler Dogpile Mamma C4 Canada.com Ixquick Infogrid Query Server WebInfoSearch 800go Debriefing Highway 61 SearchAve Aesop GoTo Mixcat Abacho Igwanna SearchEngine Find Once Search-The-World Beamed SearchPixie GoClick Abcsearch Pageseeker Lycos Insite SearchFeed 411Web GenieKnows Searchfeed Search123 A9com FreeEmail123 Amfibi 37.com OneSeek WebSquash List of pay-per-click servcies that gets your ads out there: TextLinkAds, TrafficSwarm, CasaleMedia.com, FastClick, BurstMedia, FC, TribalFusion, CJ, Azoogle, CPA Empire, GlobalInteractive, AdBrite, Adengage, RealMedia, Kontera, Avnads, ValueClick, Vibrant, RealTechNetwork, and Dotomi. Even if you only make a few bucks from each source, site, if you add it all up, it, well, add up! 100 sources that makes you only $50 a month is $5,000! One reader told me that he spent $1,000 at one site, and he profited "only" $145 in a month's time. Yeah, and? That's typical. Advertising is expensive. But, add that to all the other sources, sites, and a webmaster can easily quit his job within months of starting his advertising campaign. It's about volume. The heavy advertisers, the big guys knows this. The amateurs go on and on about seo, signatures, and other such crap. Write short but powerful tutorials / articles about your subject, and submit them all over the place. Content sites, bookmarking sites, offline newspapers and magazines... Get others to crtitque them before sending them off. If you know a lot about what you have in your site, act like a teacher, showing others what they can do to better themselves and their sites. Then simply give them your url. It can be in person, and then giving them your business card. It could be at YahooAnswers, and other such sites. It could be through articles.... If you can, get a podcast going, or a couple of videos on yourself, and put it in your site, along with free articles and quick tips. If you don't know all that much, bring in writers who do. There are many who have sites of their own, and they will more than be happy to be able to submit articles to your site, providing that they can put in their url and a quick sales pitch. Expand your site into other areas. The more subjects you have, the more people you can bring in. The more you can advertise. The more you can write articles about. The more.... There are a few more ideas, but these are the top ones. It's mainly just advertising and word of mouth. So a webmaster should be basically asking: "How can I make my ads better?" "How can I spend less on ads and still get good traffic?" "Where can I advertise?"
Some of my favorite traffic driving & website promotion techniques to drive traffic to my sites. They are great for pulling in traffic, subscribers and sales. 1. Article Marketing such as EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticleCity 2. Social Bookmarking such as Digg, Propeller, Del.icio.us 3. RSS Submission 4. Directory/Blog Directory submissions 5. Blogging 6. Viral Marketing with ebooks 7. Comment Posting 8. Forum Posting in related forums. Simply Google "yourtopic + forum" 9. JV with related competitors I agree with Perry's comment about word of mouth especially if your site gets popular in Web 2.0 communities.
If you're going to continue using adwords you need to realize it's all about the money. Put your bid price high enough and you'll get the clicks. You may not get the profit though. Check some of the other ways of doing it on line before spending a bunch of money on a national magazine. You have access to some of the greatest internet traffic generators in existence right here on DP. Go back through the post and you'll get a heck of an education. donrock