Hi All I have just finished re-developing my website, I spent extra time making it w3c compliant and also contain headers for keywords and basically everything that helps with SEO. Now I turn to the advertising/marking side of the website. I have never got to this stage before as I normally just develop websites for others or for personal use. This time im looking big and want my website out there for other people to use. Does anyone have any advice for a complete newbie like me. My site is quite specific, targeting clubbing holidays for 18-30's. Some destinations already have many websites which i know will be hard to compete with for now (although one of these destinations on my personal site did reach top on Google 2 years ago without any advertising). Any advice at all would be great ! Thanks
Well first of all if your site it SEO Optimised then you should start to have the spiders crawling in about a week or two. If they like the content you will start to climb the serch engine ranks. I would also suggest submitting a couple of Articles. Just Google "Submitting Articles" and there will be a bunch of places you can submit to. This is a great way to get attention. Secondly, you may want to consider submitting an Ezine, again Google "Submitting Ezines". Next, get yourself a Myspace page and build it like you did your web page, you will get people joining your circle of friends that you can promote to. Also suggest a Face Book account, and you can do the same. That's enought to keep you busy for a little while, and if you do it well, you will find yourself getting lots of hits. Regards, D
Thanks alot for your help, i have already created a facebook group (250 members) and have about 4 myspace accounts (1 for each destination). One question about this, does links on facebook count as a backlink. I know myspace change the url of links but does facebook? I am thinking about posting my link in many other groups and peoples wall etc (not spam). Will that help in term of backlinks etc or just for publicity? Will try articles and ezines now, Thanks again !
The facebook links won't class as backlinks as they employ the rel="nofollow" attribute within the <a> tag, this basically means that the search engine crawlers won't follow the link through to it's destination. However, I've found with some of my sites that the links in facebook are good at generating traffic. While your site is still young and building it's online reputation it might be worth considering using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Facebook all provide their own versions, Google being the most popular. This is a great way of reaching your target market (18-30s) by selecting the keywords you want your text ads to appear. You can be on page 1 within 15 minutes provided you set a maximum cost per click that will place you above the competition. It's a bit more complex than that but you can always ask for more info! Good Luck!
Regarding the PPC recommendation, if you are new to all this read a LOT first about PPC. Otherwise it could end up costing a lot of money for no results. It's definitely a topic 'study' in itself
In a nutshell, it is basically creating appealing "hook" ads and placing them in other webmasters' sites, and offline as well. Sorry, brother, but the only way to make even somewhat decent money on a consistent basis is to spend it. You also have avenues like these: TextLinkAds, TrafficSwarm, CasaleMedia.com, FastClick, BurstMedia, TribalFusion, Azoogle, GlobalInteractive, AdBrite, Adengage, RealMedia, Kontera, Avnads, ValueClick, RealTechNetwork, Reduxmedia, and, Dotomi. For free tips to get you going, go to http://thelist.fm/advertising/index.html I'm not trying to sell you shit, so just read the free tid bits. Good luck, Gomer.
Great Post. Yes while the free stuff can draw visits, it also takes some cash. I have heard so many people say how they are going to build your list for you, and all that stuff. My suggestion is to run the other way. It takes money to make money, trust me, I have been down that road. D