Archive for the ‘Website promotion’ Category

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

12-15th September, 2007

12/9 I add a link to my profile in Facebook and my email signatures in Gmail and on the Open University forums (where I’m a student). (I had to install a Firefox extension called Better Gmail to get HTML in my Gmail signature). First review of my site is posted on Hedir (a peer reviewed website directory) - thankfully a good one.
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View all blog posts about this local web directory.

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

2 - 11 September, 2007:

2/9 Phoned my mother and brother and asked them to add listings. Of course, my mother’s registration email doesn’t arrive. I check and can’t see anything wrong, so to my shame, I assume the problem is something to do with her relatively new email setup, which seems to have problems with spam filtering. I create her membership and she adds a basic listing for a local charity, the Adventure Trust for Girls - thanks mum!

3/9 Emailed 2 friends, 2 former potential customers, a classmate from my business startup programme and also a local woman whose children’s activities I’d been taking the kids to. I offer them every feature free if they’ll help by adding a listing to test it out. They mostly say ‘That email was so long, I’ll read it later’. Nobody adds anything
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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.