Promoting an interesting Baseball Site - see inside -

Good morning all. I run http://mlbfreeagents.com - which is the only site that gives up to the minute free agent signings, team profiles, contract comparisons and more. I coded and designed it from the ground up, with PHP, Photoshop and MySQL (oh yeah, and a lot of elbow grease!).

Analysis
Competition

My main competition is a bunch of sites, however they all just provide users a static list of "Free Agents Available" broken down by position --> I provide a lot more. I give the users the ability to filter, sort, and analyze with statistics the free agents market - I also give the ability to see much more detail about signing information.

Test Marketing
Every time a big baseball fan that I solicit (or don't) to check it out goes to it, they fall in love and become repeat visitors - the problem is I can't get a lot of people to check it out at once. I have promoted it at various forums, however unless it is a forum that I visit frequently my promotions are viewed as spam and don't get many replies - the 5-6 forums I frequent all love it.

Promotion
For promotion, I have contacted major blogs, all of which have not gotten back to me. I tried participating in communities too and it seems not to be working as I hoped.

I have an RSS feed that gives the information I present cleanly, and I have a twitter feed that I feed the rss to, I have a small following via twitter. I also have a link to the twitter feed on the site.

Current State
I currently target "Baseball Free Agents" and "MLB Free Agents"

For MLB Free Agents, in Google I rank 5th, Yahoo! I rank 4th (or 5th).
For Baseball Free Agents, in Google I rank 7th, Yahoo! I rank 17th.

Conclusion
I average about 70-100 hits a day via Google/Yahoo searches and I really think that a site like this could get a lot, lot more. As I said before my targeted phrases are "Baseball Free Agents" and "MLB Free Agents" - which average about 2,500 searches a month via google. I know this sounds like a little, but I think it's good enough to get my popularity going.

Questions
- Should I focus on other search phrases?
- Should I focus on other search engines?
- Should I expect to get 83 hits a day using the metrics (2500/30=83.33)?
- Is there some other exponential effect I should reap eventually?
- Any other help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Mat Stars

 

great site. i love baseball and will definitely drop by your site time to time.

 

Thanks! (See what I mean )

 

Should I focus on other search phrases? Yes
Should I focus on other search engines? maybe...
Should I expect to get 83 hits a day using the metrics (2500/30=83.33)? no

 

Thanks grabarz, any extra insight would be appreciated.

 

on a side note, that is an extremely risky URL to be using, since MLB is a trademark.

 

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

 

I agree with markn26, you might have some trouble down the road with that url. It would be a tough pill to swallow if you built the site up only to lose the domain.

But hey, I love the site. Nice job.

Have you considered sponsoring some player pages at baseball-reference.com?

 

You should probably do more backlinking aswell. At this time I checked and I see no backlinks but if you just started building they may not be showing up yet. Also you might want to do some social book marking
with digg, backflip etc.

 

how did you check his backlinks?

 

search for backlink checker in google and it will bring some up and you just put the website url in and it gives you info..