I just thought I'd share my experiences of marketing my site with you all as I've been keenly reading this forum for a while now. My site (http://www.apnretail.co.uk) is an eBay misspelled listings search tool, custom written by me. When it went live about a year ago, I started reading this forum to get all the tips on advertising and so on in order to get it 'out there' So I submitted it to google and various other search engines and then waited. And waited. Eventually, it got indexed and some traffic started to come. Then I started posting in forums, primarily this one (with the site in my sig) and a few others (mainly computer related though). That certainly helped raise its profile, enough in fact to get a write up in a UK magazine (webuser.co.uk). The write up caused a big spike in traffic so all was well. I then tried google adwords which worked really well but each click cost money, sometimes more than you would make from users of the site. On the whole though, adwords worked well but in the summer google introduced a matching algorithm to match the word you are bidding on to its relevance to your site. Well that stopped my adwords campaign dead in its tracks because, by its nature as a search tool, my sites relevance is derived from users who actually type in a query. Its like looking at the google homepage and seeing how that page ranks in relevance to the term 'playstation'. The answer is that it doesn't until you type in playstation then all of a sudden, its relevance changes. Anyway, the next step I embarked on was to get the google pagerank up a bit (almost for the kudos more than anything else!) I began manually submitting to directories (Ive found the list at http://www.directorycritic.com/free-directory-list.html invaluable). This helped the backlinks as far as google was concerned but not much traffic was generated. OK, its summertime now, not much gets done indoors so I take a step back from the site, actually this turns out to be useful as it gives me chance to collect my thoughts. My next step was to create a toolbar to allow users to search the site even if they weren't currently looking at it - this was a brilliant traffic generator as people who might think to search for something are far more likely to use your site if there is a permanent link on their browser. My next step was to allow users to embed my search functionality in their page, that paid off as all the final traffic is handled by my site so any affiliate benefits come back to me. The final step I've tried, which currently seems to be working very well, is to create a google gadget that people can embed either on their google homepage or on their google toolbar. I suppose what I am trying to share with you all is that to get traffic, simple site submission to directories is only a fraction of the overall strategy, as is a decent ranking in the search engines. I've found (and I accept that there are many other strategies too) that by providing alternative means to access the services your site can provide, you stand a really good chance of building traffic. To pinch an overused phrase, you need to think 'outside the box!' Cheers Phil
Thanks for sharing that. I'm sure that it will help many. Good luck with your endeavors and keep us up to date on how things go. Regards, -jay
Yes, thanks for sharing! I've just got into marketing myself, and am hoping to become a sucess. It's good to hear others are able to make it...
Hi philnet, I definitely like the idea of the toolbar search, something I'll be thinking about for one of my own sites. Was it very difficult to create? What is the traffic like on your site now?
Hi Luckynumber, The toolbar was built using software from http://www.besttoolbars.net/toolbar_studio_dynamic_ie_toolbar_builder.php, it took a bit of figuring out but in the end it seems to have been worth it! Phil