How I Market My Websites
Published by fongrich on Tagged UncategorizedComment: Would you mind telling more about your marketing approach for your sites? What do you do to promote them?
The truth is I actually do very little marketing of my websites right now. The sites I bought had built in traffic from previous marketing champaign, so I can’t expand too much on that. I know the gadget website was heavily promoted on forums and blogs by the previous webmaster. I tried to outsource a guy to post little comment on forums and had my link to the site, but it seemed like spam and wasn’t too effective. I think the strategy does work, but you have to really be an active member at a popular forum and not only promote your own site. I just don’t have to time to commit to that sort of promotion.
Another strategy I use is Adword. It works only in some cases where the keywords get heavy searches and you can have a presence with relatively low bid of 5-6 cents. This has worked very well for my diet site, but not for the health niche site which doesn’t get enough clicks for that price. When you pay for the traffic, you better make sure your CTR is good and your PPC (Pay Per Click) is higher than your click price. That’s what they call arbitrage.
The most effective way so far is link exchange. Of course, doing it properly takes a LOT of time and effort. There are many ways you can do it wrong and it will hurt your site big time. So the natural thing to do is outsource that task. The catch is, there are many ways to screw this up and once it’s messed up, it’s very hard to get in good graces with the search engines. So it’s essential to pick the right outsourcer to do it for you. You must ask about their process in detail. Even then, you have to check on their work carefully, because it’s too easy to cheat on this type of task.
What are some major potiential issues with link exchanges? The idea is to create a resource page with all the relavent sites that’s related to your site’s content. So you’ll have to research and find all the good websites that fit into your site and place an anchor link with some description, then email the webmaster and show them you have place their website on your site and ask them to return the favor. This is a long process and low conversion. The easy and bad way is to go to a link farm or ‘bad neighborhoods’ where the sites you link to are irrelevent and they spam link each other. If your site is associated with massive link farms and unrelated links, it will hurt your ranking. So when choosing an outsourcer, you have to make sure they’re doing it correctly. The right outsourcer does this full time and has software and procedures that make this tedious task efficent and clean. I was lucky to find a good one from the beginning. However, I am wary of this strategy because, if google doesn’t like something within the process and change their algorithom to catch it my revenue could crash.
There are many other ways to promote a site which I have not tried yet. I plan to play with some of these ideas in my next 10 websites and test them out. One very interesting strategy is PR (Press Release). Once you create a news worthy article, publish it and other content websites will pick it up and link to your site automatically. That way you’ll have many incoming links which will help your ranking and increase traffic tremendously. Another idea is ezine articles. You submit free articles on an ezine site for webmasters to publish your content on their site with your signature link at the bottom. That way you get links coming into your site. I plan to try those two in the future.
I have to admit, I am not too strong with my marketing strategy right now. That’s only because I don’t want to mess around with my websites that I spent 18K on… I will definitely be doing a lot more experiments on my next 10 sites.
September 2nd, 2006 at 4:18 am
You’re articles give me a lot of inspiration. Thanks.
Would you mind to write about the kind of websites you are making? Are you more in blogs, other CMS based sites or static websites?