I just built a site to hold contests. Since the contests run for at most 40 days, it doesn't seem long enough for the contest pages to be found by the search engine, listed and direct traffic to my site. What alternative methods can I employ to get people to come to my site? The site is at http://www.contestx.com
You can always advertise. PPC, articles, directories, press releases, google sitemap (not advertising I know), banners, text links, forum posts, etc.
Press Releases seems to be the best option to choose for this. Articles and Directories again will take a lot of time to get approved and published.
I can only spend about $50 a month for advertising, which is a small, small drop in the bucket. How do I go about doing a press release? Also, if I am just on shared hosting, what happens if I get dugg or slashdotted? Can a hosting company move me to a dedicated server within a couple of hours without service interruption?
I would do a press release on either http://www.prweb.com ($40 min) or http://www.prleap.com (free). Also, submit the press release to local newspapers, AP, etc.