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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Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Web 2.0 Devon business directory.

I threw myself in at the deep end with this: it was my first completed Joomla / Web 2.0 site and had a budget of practically zero (I practised things on it for work!). It was also my first experience of doing my own sales and marketing, and worst of all, being local, it was all aimed at people around me… a kind of motivational experience which could best be descirbed as ‘bracing’. Those people on the Apprentice may look like idiots at times, but I have some sympathy!

I kept a diary at the time, and this is a kind of blog with hindsight, after all, there were so many ‘learning experiences’ involved…

This post covers the period when its Google PageRank went from ‘unranked’ to (drumroll…) zero. Yikes.

Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory
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Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Web 2.0 Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings. Things had been through a stressful and stormy patch, but I think these few days in the diary mark a turning point, during which my attitude changed and became tougher.

View all blog posts about launching a local web directory.
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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

(Launching a new web directory, continued from previous posts)

This was the worst period so far, encompassing more trouble with rival sites, face to face sales, dynamic content causing unexpected layout breakages, and unexpected reserves of grim determination…

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During this early period I was focusing almost obsessively on how the first few individual users were interacting with the site: so many issues were raised in this early stage, some which could be fixed whenever I got the time, and others which still require more radical reorganisation 6 months later.

I continued advertising, watching the stats, working on the site, and most of all trying to be in contact with people so that I could find out how the site was working and prevent potential members going astray…

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

View all blog posts about launching the directory.

21 – 23 September 2007

21/9 Continuing testing / correspondence with Joomlapolis forum people about the Community Builder login problems. I find out there is a particular browser setting to accept cookies that is required for login to work. I’m not pleased that people might have to adjust their browser settings to log in, but at least know I know there’s a fix I can tell them about it. I add a help file and a link to it from the login box.

Started looking through the Devon Arts section of Dmoz for likely looking websites to approach for a link swap.
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Background: I’ve been working on a Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
16 – 20 September 2007

16/9 Ordered more free business cards from , some free fridge magnets (same as the business cards), and Post-Its. The redesign of the postcards can wait till I’ve used up the first batch.

Added a link from my family homepage.

Posted a few posts around the Hedir forums and reviewed some websites for them.
Updated my Google Sitemap.

Pleased to see that someone has been looking at my e-cards from Iran!
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