Hello and thanks in advance for taking your time to help me out here. My newest project www.rap-it-up.net is a digg clone focusing on hip hop and rap culture, news and the online blogosphere. I'm new to webmastering, and marketing, but I'm pouring alot of time and effort into this site, and other than a few emails saying its a great idea, and a couple dedicated posters, still have yet to see a return on time investment, or an embracing by the online hiphop community. I'm wondering what I can do to spread the word, or make the site more user friendly, with what little knowledge I have. I don't really have any more money to put into it, but I've got 25hrs a day to spend working on it if I could get some ideas on how best to spend my time. I've already targeted some of the bigger and smaller bloggers, as well as portal sites I've been able to find, asking for a link/shoutout/ or even a review. Only one bite so far, but it has generated more traffic than most of my own attempts at promotion. My intentions for this site, since it is a topic I'm really passionate about, is to help unite the online hiphop and rap community, as well as spread awareness. I originally came up with the idea after constantly seeing any rap related story posted to digg get almost instantly buried, and posted a blog entry about it and on a couple forums. I got a ton of positive feedback, which encouraged me to look into how to build a digg clone, and I found a great open source project @ drigg-code.org. Its built on drupal with a custom set of modules. I looked at pligg, but almost every site I found that was pligg driven seemed overwhelmed with spam, which is one of the things I'm planning/getting ready for now. I've already got a couple moderators/editors in place, as well as a couple modules on standby to help control the spam if it does come up. What I would like from you guys, to make an even longer story short lol, is suggestions, opinions, and tips on how to A)Make the site more user friendly B)How to better spend my time marketing/promoting it C)Any drupal modules or php hacks that you think I should look into D)How would I go about approaching and finding bloggers who could ultimately benefit from my site, and get them to submit their own content? E)Any other comments, suggestions, or feedback related to www.rap-it-up.net Thanks in advance everyone on Digital Point, this has been a great forum and community for me to learn from, and I hope to one day be able to give back what I receive. For your time, I'll digg or stumble any links you pm me.
You should start an ad campaign on adbrite, that will help bring in traffic. I know you may think that it's not paying off, but things like this take time lol.
It'd be nice, but the one thing i dont have to invest in this project is money :S Plenty of time though. Thanks for the input though and good luck with starting your design/devel career. I wish when I was 17 I had an inkling on what I wanted to do lol.