What methods do people use when advertising for a new site? where do you advertise? who do you tell?
what resources do you have for meta tag? Search engine submissions?

Just a couple of questions to learn by!

well i suppose theres a set routine of what you should do

marketing your website is not a case of if you book them you will come and most webmasters will tell you that you should probably spend most of your time advertising your site - which im sure most people do

but a lot of the time people start marketing their site when it has little or no content and a little extra time adding to the actual content of your site instead of marketing it could actually have webmasters linking to you because your site is very resourceful

my firs website was a shopping directory - i was working full time for a pension company at the time so i used some of my cash and paid for inclusion in yahoo and the looksmart network

what i spent most of my time doing though was sending emails to companies for recipricol links and it worked tremendously

i used to do about 20 link exchanges per week and it got to the point when i was getting 500 uniques a day which is very good for a site of this nature

i went to uni though last year and didnt update for months and the hits slowly sropped - i eventually sold it for £500.00 - way below its potential value but the domain was going to expire soon and i had no intention of renewing it

my second site was my united site - other than adding a link to dmoz, i honestly dont think that i added it to any other directories or search engines and nearly all my visitors at first were through word of mouth

and more recently with my new affiliate sites i find myself back to square one in the starting a new site saga and im in the same boat as you mate

ive emailed a few companies and ive submitted to most of the major search engines - ive been spidered by a few so im waiting to see what kind of traffic they bring in - especially from google

once my forum picks up im going to arrange partnerships with related webmaster forums and other related sites

ive got a lot of other ideas for my sites too though im waiting til the traffic is boosted by the se so that i am in a position to barter etc - for example, 2 affiliate companies have queried giving my visitors reduced rates & higher commissions though i siggested it would be best to wait til the traffic was in

my suggestion would be that when you are waiting to get into search engines - continually improve your site to the best of your abilities and increase the amount of content on your site

good luck (and wish me good luck too cos im on the same boat )

advertising sites...let me see...

i work for www.safariquip.co.uk as the primary webmaster of the site, therefore i'm EMPLOYED to do this sort of thing. they pay me to make their site more visible, to get more uniques, and keep people coming back.

the site is still in the development stage, the the primary goal is search engine optimisation. without this anything else is meaningless. you'll never ever get the same amount of visitors / hits from word of mouth as you will do from a 1st place rank on google for whatever your target keyword is.

choose your keywords carefully, optimise your site, get it primed with good content, and THEN begin the advertising.

get reciprocal link exchanges with reputable sites, sites that compliment yours (ie we have links from rock climbing sites because the same sort of people that go rock climbing go on adventurous holidays). this will get you automatically included in search engines as you will be spidered through these links.

furthermore, submit yourself to search engines. this will help you again to get spidered.

ensure your site has good navigation and plenty of content so that you are SE friendly.

advertise by word of mouth, perhaps start an affiliate scheme when the money begins rolling in to boost traffic further.

write an ezine about your sites subject and get it published in a popular internet newsletter. doing this can get you thousands of uniques if it is a highly popular letter and the article is good. keep the copyrite of the article so that you can get it included in more than one ezine.

get a press release out to anywhere you can to tell people that your site is in existence, a brief description, and where it can be found.

update your content all the time.

post regularly on forums etc. with good, helpful advice so that you build up a trust relationship with the other members. if the forum is about your subject, so much the better. add a link to your site into your signiture, and people will follow that.


the basics...
Most Vital - #1 Content Building
2 SE Optimisation
Money Making - 3 SE Inclusion
4 Link Exchanges
5 All the rest

Any type of marketing is good marketing, whether it costs a lot or a little. Personally, when starting a new site, I mainly concentrate on:

Building up content, because people will link to good content and it will be picked up on search engines better.

I submit to DMOZ, because it will greatly boost your rank on Google, and a good Google rank means loads of traffic.

And of course, as everyone else said, I write to people to trade links.

Posting on message boards with the site in your sig will also get you some traffic to start off with.

Hey, I'm fairly new here. So how exactly do I do link exchanges? I can't seem to find the right resources. =/

iceman - basically all you have to do is email sites similar to yours and ask if youd like to exchange links for mutual benefits

unfortunately portfolio sites generally cannot link to anyone else because they would be in essence linking to rivals so it will be hard for you to find recipricol links in my opinion

Originally posted by fonzerelli_79
iceman - basically all you have to do is email sites similar to yours and ask if youd like to exchange links for mutual benefits

unfortunately portfolio sites generally cannot link to anyone else because they would be in essence linking to rivals so it will be hard for you to find recipricol links in my opinion

Darn. So no exchange links for me? How else would I generate traffic? I don't really have $$ to afford advertisement on a super-big site.

one of the best way to advertise a site of your genre is to frequent webmaster forums like this one and try and chip in and help as much as you can - your sig will be blasted around quite a bit

also, there are a lot of web design sites on the net and it is very hard to compete

ive built a few websites for a few local companies and i think that this is the way to go down

Theres a huge market for building websites for local companies - you'll find that many of the owners of companies in your local area do not have a clue about where to start - they might not even know they need a website

sort yourself out with some business cards, get some letters blasted out to local companies, place an ad in the local paper and see the feedback you get