Archive for the ‘Website promotion’ Category

This is the latest installment in the gripping serialization of promoting my Devon directory. You know, when I started putting this journal online I was worried it might catch up with me – no chance, it seems to be getting further behind all the time!

In any case, this entry sees more of the earliest listings going in, and the arrival of my free promotional T-shirts from .

I got the T-shirts from , and I actually think they look quite nice – very appropriate for the country-ish / green theme!
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Is Web 2.0 just a load of hype? I have my suspicions that it doesn’t make money, but some aspects do have potential for website owners. Both RSS Feeds and social bookmarking seem promising to me (at least, if it’s Facebook, now that so many people are on Facebook). So I thought I’d give it a go.

I can’t see much potential for it on my Devon businesses directory, as the articles are mostly duplicated RSS stories and press releases. (There’s a bit of off-site anchor text keyword targetting for it though ). My chocolate website has original content, with more potential for social bookmarking, but probably a less nerdy readership (hence the emphasis on Facebook, which seems the most widespread and least nerdy option available).

So I found a selection of plugins from extensions.joomla.org to test out social bookmarking on my Joomla sites. The first plugin didn’t like my PHP version so that went nowhere. The next one seemed great: a ‘Digg’ button appeared at the top and a row of little buttons appeared at the end of my content items, but it didn’t have Facebook. The final one did have Facebook but didn’t appear everywhere I wanted it to. So I’ve still got them both at the moment.

I found a great RSS module from one of the same authors, which offers not only the feeds, but the buttons to add them to aggregators like iGoogle (which I actually use, therefore I think it’s handy and useful!) It did annoy me a bit by causing some code validation errors. So far I have fixed them all, apart from a stray ‘r’ which appears after the embedded CSS, but only when the module is on the right hand side. Huh.

But I am straying from the point again, which is trying out the social bookmarking plugins, not tinkering with the code behind the scenes. So I added a couple of stories to Facebook. I was pleased with one of them, but the other site seemed to provide the home page as well as the story, and more confusingly, it gave the home page meta description instead of the story’s, even after I deleted it. I tried various options with Joomla caching, but didn’t see any difference: strange. Perhaps I’ll try Facebook again later. Meanwhile, I registered with del.icio.us and bookmarked a couple of stories, but can’t really see the point to it yet.

So I’ll be keeping them all for now, and seeing if any of them work out well. I can’t see my sites getting Slashdotted (thank goodness!) but you never know, it might bring in some readers and friends of my visitors And I’ll be trying out each of these social bookmarking services myself, so I know what each one is about.

Next step: WordPress social bookmarking plugins for the blog

Having previously written about the Google Adsense Heatmap, I was keen to try out adsense blocks in more successful locations.

Google Adsense Heatmap: darker colours are ‘hotter’ areas

My first opportunity came with a project of my own to develop a custom Joomla template for a new website about chocolate, ‘I Dream in Chocolate‘.

Website Screenshot showing Adsense positioning

I planned the main Adsense location to take advantage of the areas highlighted in the Google heatmap, and created the Adsense blocks in Joomla using mod_html modules.

I didn’t go for the ‘hottest’ area, which I think is between the main title and content, as I thought this location might be over complicated to manage separately for different content items, and also less nice to look at. The current design adds a kind of white chocolate stripe to the page layout, though it does push the main content down a bit far, especially as I also added a link unit right above the top menu.

By keeping them near the interactive options and menu items, I hoped to take advantage of the visitor’s attention (and mouse) being in that area. At the same time, by using a different style, I have avoided them being actually mistaken for menu items and on site links (which goea against Google’s guidelines).

It does seem to be paying off so far: the following screenshot shows clicks for this new site have already overtaken my more well established site Stairway to Devon, which has the Adsense more out of the way. Bear in mind, many of the page views for the new site will have been caused by me working on it, so it’s actually been more effective than the figures suggest:

Screenshot showing Adsense results for different websites is gone: can’t show the actual numbers – it’s against Google’s rules unfortunately!

Inspired by these more encouraging results, I decided to add some better AdSense locations to this blog while upgrading WordPress at the weekend, following the excellent instructions in this link: ‘Upgrading WordPress‘ and this one: ‘How to add Adsense to your blog‘

Adding AdSense to a WordPress blog involves editing the WordPress PHP template files. I had some odd experiences, with AdSense blocks sometimes not appearing in some locations, or only appearing after several minutes (which I think is a delay on the Google setup end). It also required a lot of fiddling about with the CSS. But eventually I was able to get the following units set up:

1. Link unit at the top of the screen
2. Adsense Referral link between the page header and content
3. Google Search box in the sidebar
4. 2 Adsense content units in the sidebar: first a small one, then a tall one
5. Adsense content unit in the top ‘hot spot’, between the content title and paragraph text on the single post pages (which don’t have the sidebar)

While upgrading, I also tried setting up the options to ping WordPress’s list of practically everything, which should promote the blog a bit more widely, so I will be interested to see how these changes all work out.

Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.

Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory

23/9, continued: Postcard advertising
Having ordered a load of free postcards and business cards from , I was ready to start some more intensive offline advertising.

Decided to start with Totnes, as I feel more nervous in Exmouth with it being my current home town, and also more importantly, it’s nice going there: Totnes is Devon’s most new age and hippyish town, chock full of artists and environmentalists (surely!). Even a newsagent’s in Totnes is probably well-targeted advertising for me.

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Once the site was ready enough to go online, I added Statcounter code and set it up to send me weekly summary reports by email. I’ve also written about each week’s triumphs and mishaps in more detail, to be serialized here in this blog (woohoo, exciting!) – just choose the
‘Launching a local directory’ category of posts to read all of them.

As a brief summary to anyone reading this post first, the website is a Joomla / Sobi2 based local directory for the county of Devon, which accepts family friendly free listings with a focus on arts and environmental groups, and offers paid-for extra features such as maps, galleries, ecards etc (some of which are free for artists and environmental groups).
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(The first couple of months, warts and all)

View all blog posts about launching my local web directory.

Background: I’ve been working on a Devon directory with a focus on promoting arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.

Summary: Once the website got to the point of being presentable enough, I started gradually making it more available, while continuing to work on the site, and beginning to actively promote it. This is how I did that and what happened.
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I’d had the plan of launching a web directory for about a year, and bought the domain name a long time before I got the chance to work on it. The idea was that a directory would provide the following benefits:

• Advertising opportunities, with special features to offer to my customers
• A chance to increase my skills, resulting in a new site to add to my portfolio
• Something to test out various advertising and marketing strategies with
• The possibility that it could make some money
• And of course the possibility of it bringing me more work in web development via links on the site

This blog section will report on progress in developing and marketing this Devon Web Directory. View all posts in this section.

RSS feeds can be a great way of promoting your website, providing a list of recent headlines, with or without ‘teasers’ which are short sections of text from the beginnings of the stories.

As a WordPress blog, this blog automatically produces an RSS feed (click here to see it), and now that it is three months old, with quite a few posts, there is enough of it there to be used for promoting my website.

The first place I’ve used to promote my RSS feed is obviously my own website, where I’ve produced a page on RSS feeds as extra features for web design packages. I’ve also collected a set of web related news feeds to keep up to date with.

Next I found a directory on a site that hosts a very useful feature for displaying RSS feeds using Javascript, so I’m submitting the feed URL there (after some puzzling it over I chose the ‘Internet Marketing’ category). They require a reciprocal link for this, so here it is: RSS 2 JAVA – Directory.

When I find more of these, I’ll also post the URLs here.

A review of 3 months of posting on Hedir

Hedir is a busy website based around a peer reviewed directory, with a community of developers, moderators and reviewers and a much larger group who submit websites for approval in their directory. The idea is that people who submit websites should also review others, but not many of them seem to catch on to this, although it’s a great way of finding out what works and what doesn’t work on other people’s websites. The Hedir website also offers forums, and blogs for its members.

Every page on Hedir shows a couple of units of adverts from Google adsense, and they operate a revenue sharing scheme which I described in my earlier post ‘Adventures with Google Adsense, part 2′. It seems on the surface of it like a good idea and very cleverly done. However, as I discussed, after a month of fairly intensive posting, I had not made any money from it. As I’d been away for 10 days in the middle, I thought for a proper trial I’d give it another month of posting to review pages and forums. By the end of this I had posted about 300 times in total, and I think that gives it a very good chance of working if it’s going to.

The Alexa traffic rank of the site seems good, at around 32,000, but there are currently about 180 pages of sites listed in the review queue. I thought perhaps this meant that each page was hardly ever viewed. If they could bring in some way of requiring everyone who submits a site to do a certain number of reviews, that would bring the size of the queue down and get each page viewed more frequently, but it wouldn’t necessarily get more views for each member’s adverts.

Another reason for the tail off in Hedir adsense views when I was away is of course that once another review has been added to each page (which is presumably the reason for most of the page views), those ads won’t show up for my adsense id any more, meaning that those pages have been removed from the number still available for earning me adsense commissions.

Given the way that people use Hedir review pages, I think there is not likely to be much commission from revenue sharing ads, at least certainly not on the review pages – I can assume this was a typical couple of months. Forums may be viewed more often, being publicly available and linked from the front page, but forum ads are only linked to the last poster 20% of the time. They also offer blogs with adsense revenue sharing, an opportunity which I haven’t tried yet.

However, I did discover another benefit to posting on Hedir: people will sometimes follow the links in your posting’s signature. So I now have about 300 signatures posted on various Hedir pages, which are all currently linking to 3 of my customers’ websites, and I’ve been seeing more traffic coming to the websites from them.

Some members also think it may have an effect on the linked sites’ Google page rank, as the links have been known to show up in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts, but I don’t know how you could check whether there is specifically a page rank effect.