What is the best way to promote a new website?

Hi All, I am new to this online marketing. I have this website that provides foreclosure listings for free of cost.

http://www.watchforeclosure.com

After doing some research I paid $900 to some to post articles in social bookmarking and directory sites. The traffic I am getting from these bookmark sites are almost none. I would have got more traffic if I used pay per click advertising. Is pay per click is a good choice to promote a site that is looking to make revenue through ad sense?

Can you please share your thoughts?

 

This is a good example for many to learn from. THIS is why you do not waste your time and money on methods that only noobs do. This also includes signatures, and, paying hundreds of dollars to some "expert," "guru" to have seo done.

Sorry you lost this much, activeserve, but lesson learned, I guess.

If you are selling something, you want to make money off of your site, you need a lot of people coming in on a daily basis, and that requires advertising.

Word of mouth comes in second.

Did you know that Craig Newmark started out doing a little bit of advertising, and then word of mouth took over? That is all he did. It took him awhile to get it going, but, look at him today.

Of course it is much more difficult today, but advertising isn't as hard and as expensive (not nearly as much as you spent) as you may think. Others are doing it, so can you.

 

I agree with copper12 ... to many so called "gurus" out there just rip you off for stuff you could easily do yourself.

1. Advertising may definitely be the way to go .. for example you could easily have used that $900 to place and ad on a Blog related to Real Estate ( better targeting )

2. Try offline advertising - for example in Real Estate publications ... you could put an ad in one of those neighborhood community real estate publications that have "Properties For Sale" listed ..

3. Start your own blog about foreclosures .. you could also put up tips for homeowners facing foreclosures

4. Hand out brochures to Realtors and ask them to give them out to potential home buyers and investors in their area...

These are just a few ideas and my 2 cents so to speak ... but hopefully it helps you in some way

 

i did a thread on this, well on a way to drive traffic to your website. You can see this thread here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1162724 you will find it useful

 

thank you for your feedback.

@JNRCORPS thank you for sharing the list of free ad sites. Will try some of them today.

 

Since your site is just new, you should be focusing on your SEO since traffics from otehr sources aren't converting.

 

someone advised me to do the seo like article submission, social bookmarking. i paid someone do the same but there was no traffic from those sites.

Can you give me some more detail information about promoting my site through seo.

 

PPC provide targeted traffic but i will suggest to invest on SEO since SEO are providing long term natural traffic.
Besides, you can look for banner advertising on high traffic site which have same niche

 

As i said in my last post i paid someone to do the article submission, social bookmarking etc and got no traffic. some experienced people here in this forum are saying it is waste of time and money. some say go for seo.

Can you please little more specific on the seo, as i do not want to loose more money on this.

sorry for asking too many questions? I am completely new to this online marketing world. Please bear with me.

 

Something to bear in mind, is that most methods of quality, long term traffic promotion will take weeks or months to bear fruit. If you just got the work done recently, and expected to have a huge amount of traffic appear a few days later, you will be disapointed.

The promotional work you paid for may, or may not, turn out to be a good investment; but either way, you won't see the results immediately.

 

How do you spend $900 on directory submission? There are manual directory submission service to 2000+ sites for $50 or less. And for social bookmarking, you can probably get 100 stumbles for $40 or just have your friends stumble your site. The article submission part is the most time consuming and needs to be carried out continuously, but still. It shouldn't take much time to see at least your results appearing in google and organic traffic began to trickle in. Then it will get easier as the traffic is organic, and continuously.

 

Here ya go, activeserve. I copied and pasted it from my e-book on marketing. Many of my readers wanted just that part, so I said fuck it, and just give it away.

It's everything you need to know about seo.

Three-quarters of the way down is where it begins for optimizing exactly the way the seo services do it, with a few tips that they either don't know about or they do not do.

It is complete, and nothing is left out. What you will be reading is what the "pros" do. And as you will see, it is easier than making a left hand turn downtown.

http://thelist.fm/search-engine-optimization.shtml

It's sort of like a mini book, so you may want to print it out, and park your butt on your couch.

Merry Christmas.

 

I would either do one of two things...

1. Use Adwords
Upside: Can create a ton of traffic to your site
Downside: If you don't know what you are doing, you can blow a hole in your pocket!

2. Get professionsal SER service
Upside: Get tons of organic traffic for a longer period of time compared to using Adwords
Downside: Usually costs $1000-1500 for each site

IF you don't like either, just try and promote like you said by paying for social bookmarking and other things like that .

 

Social bookmarking and directory sites aren't really well known for sending profitable traffic to sites anyway. Yes, they can send traffic quickly, but not neccsarily traffic that clicks on ads and buys stuff.

As for SEO, having your site rank well in search engines is basically a combination of on-page factors (your site's page titles and meta-tags) and off-page factors (the quantity and quality of sites that link to yours). You may want to check out some of the free articles on a site like www.seobook.com and get a sense of whether SEO is something you want to pursue.

 

@Jihoy

I paid this amount over the period of two and half months. This includes 1200 social bookmarking + 1000 directory submission + 8 article submissions with 1000 confirmed back links. Not sure I paid too much for this?

Where can I get the manual directory submission service to 2000+ sites for $50 or less can you please share the information here?

 

Oh lookie, he wants to spend even more money.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

 

You can do classifieds, press release, forum posting is helps to you.

 

Hey nice site. I actually enjoyed going through it and checking out the search tool. Works pretty nice. Loads fast. Did you code this yourself?

scott
bargainscent.com daily online bargains

 

Ouch, please don't tell me you really spent $900 to do something that you could have accomplished yourself??

That was your first mistake.. money will not bring money in every instance.. If I was to spend $900 on some bookmarking and links, you better believe that I'll have made 5 times that amount ROI... minimum!

 

Hi all, As I said in my first post I am completely new to online marketing. May be I lost some money, but it does not matter now. Lessons learnt and will follow some of the advice given here.

Thank you for all you inputs.