HowToAdvertise.net

I recently got an email from the owner of pc101.com, a computer hardware and troubleshooting forum. She wanted to improve her traffic and take her site “to the next level.” The site she’s running has a good domain name, a small forum with 400+ members, and a few backlinks. Basically, it’s a really good starting point and she’s trying to figure out what to do with it now.

Her goals are to build traffic, make the site more accessible, and start generating revenue. Here are the tips I shared with her:

Site Mechanics

Consider a content management system for the front page so you can control the front page content. For CMS’s I like Drupal, but not as much as I like WordPress. I’m not 100% on moving the forum to the background, but it would be nice to be able to control the front page content. Since you’re using vbulletin, you might also consider vbadvanced as your CMS. My wife ran www.scraplove.com for years with this setup and really liked it.

Marketing Strategy

• Post everyday and reply to every post that gets made. A lot of people forget or never do this one and wonder why their communities won’t grow. It’s a personal time commitment, and you get out what you put in. Try to think of it as an investment. If you’re having trouble monitoring new posts, remember that vbulletin can generate it’s own RSS feed. You can use a program like Feedreader to give you a list of everything new. It can take as little as five minutes to scan 100+ posts a day with an RSS reader.
• Define a budget – even if it’s $0. You need to know how much you have available to spend for prizes and things like that. If you already have a bit of traffic, consider monetizing with Google AdSense, YPN, or an affiliate program. If this generates any cashflow, you can roll it back into a development budget.
• A big advantage an already established site is your existing memberlist. I suggest you start with a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter to your current subscribers. If you know of any other small to medium sized forums with a similar (but not competing) audiences, see if they’ll mention you in their newsletter in exchange for a mention in yours. A newsletter is a good way to announce new contests, changes, and goings on and will motivate people to get involved.
• What I like about forums is their ability to produce search engine friendly content on a daily basis without you having to do it all yourself (there’s only so many posts you can write in a day). How about a contest? You can give a prize to the highest poster, the best tutorial writer, etc. Prizes can be as cheap as a little recognition but I find something like a T-shirt or a little gadget works well. High activity on a forum draws in new search traffic and keeps users involved. This is an excellent example of activity breeds activity.
• The other nice thing about forums is that if you build the community well, you end up having a little army of people willing to work for free! If you have members that would do it, get them to include links to your forum in their signatures on other message boards and other websites. Give them ownership of parts of your site in some way to make them feel like a part of the site. Moderator privileges, special jobs, or dedicated forum areas are a good way to do this. Again, there’s only so much you can do in a day and the more people you have helping you, the better.
• For link exchanges, I’ve been successful with this idea. Basically, you give people prime ad space on your site with a rotating banner. In exchange they post a static link on the front page of their site. This can be highly effective if you can attract the audience
• For the paid stuff, like pay-per-click ads, I would hold off until you’ve exhausted the other options. Websites can be really profitable because they have such low overhead. Don’t introduce a paid service or dedicate a lot of money unless there’s no other alternative.

More and more, I see people trying to re-invent the wheel and come up with new traffic generation schemes for their websites. To be clear, there are five primary methods to attract visitors and traffic to your web site. They are (in no particular order):

• Paid advertising (e.g. sponsored search, contextual or graphical advertising)
• Actively getting links to your site on other sites
• Outbound emailsViral efforts (e.g. Tell A Friend, bookmarking)
• Organic search engine optimization (SEO)
• Offline activities (e.g. mailers, PR, local ads, etc.)

Selling a website often involves the exchange of raw logs to verify traffic.

Website buyers will sometimes request to see a website’s raw logs before the will close a deal. So, what are these logs and how are they used?

Site logs (also called raw logs or access logs) contain information on every transaction that your website processes, as well as the date, time, amount of data transferred, where the request came from and more.

Every time an html page is downloaded, every picture that is requested, every request that your website receives and everything it sends out to the world is listed in the access logs.

Not everyone is going to ask for these, but they’re important to me when I buy a website because 1) they’re very tedious to try and fake and 2) I can look through them to see if you’re telling the truth about your traffic sources. These logs are often used by programs like Webalizer and AWstats (provided by many hosting companies) to create fancy charts and graphs so you can see how your site is doing traffic-wise.

Here are two lines from one of my access logs. One day worth of logs on a small site might contain a thousand lines like this:

14 – IP Address Removed – - [27/Jan/2007:23:37:54 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 7461 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=GWh&q=free++rpg&btnG=Search” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9″

---

15 – IP Address Removed – - [27/Jan/2007:23:37:42 -0600] “GET /submissions/submit_a_biography.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 4210 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

The red portion in the first line shows you I got a hit from Google. Paste it into your browser and look for my site, 1km1kt.net in the results. The blue portion in the second line tells me that this page was requested by a search engine bot and not a human. Both are nice pieces of data telling me that Google is indexing my site and where it is appearing in the search results.

Where can I get the logs?

Good question. Assuming you’re on a shared hosting plan, I would hope that your provider has a control panel you can use to access them and download them in a text file (that’s all they are – basically big text files). If your host uses CPanel for your backend control, look for something labeled “Raw Log Manager” or similar.

You might not get anyone else asking for these, and I only do because there’s no guarantee that people selling websites are representing them accurately. It’s a buyer beware market, and due diligence is extremely important because once money changes hands on a website, there’s not much a buyer can do.

I’ve been working with a client recently setting up an email newsletter campaign for his existing customers. In his office the other day, he asked a very straightforward question that I hear from virtually every one of my clients:

“What are we trying to accomplish here?”

The goal of any marketing campaign varies based on the needs of the business owner behind it. In this case, the client sells insurance policies in Grapevine, Texas and wants to focus on auto insurance for teen drivers. His product has three features that influence his most effective advertising strategy:

1. Insurance is a universal requirement for most of the visitors who will come to his website.
2. The insurance industry can be highly competitive.
3. His product is not unique and the primary selling points will be cost, quality of service, and name recognition.

With this in mind, we’ve been working on tailoring an advertising campaign designed to generate new sales leads and bring new insurance customers to his door. For his product, I believe that passive email marketing will yield the greatest results.

What’s the difference between active and passive selling?

Active Selling

To actively sell a product means that your goal is to seek out individuals and a) make them aware that your products exists, and b) convince them that they need to buy it.

Active selling is most effective for new products that people may not be aware of – a new service your company offers, a new invention, or a new website that’s just been released. Actively selling a product is considerably more difficult than passive selling because it’s hard to convince people that they need a product they’ve never heard of!

Some examples of active selling include:

• Cold-calls and phone solicitations,
• sales pitch websites,
• bulk spam mail.

Passive Selling

On the other hand, passive selling is considerably easier and often produces better results. Passively selling a product means that your user base is already aware of what you have to offer, and your only goal is to stand out in their mind as a preferred source to acquire it.

It is never easier to sell a product then when people come to you asking to buy it.

In the example above, the vast majority of Americans need insurance at some point in their lives. By sending out helpful emails related to the insurance industry on a regular basis, my client continually reminds his base that he is an excellent source for insurance and that he is available to help them when needed. All he has to do is be ready to answer the phone when it rings!

Some examples of passive selling include:

• Newsletter mailers,
• follow up phone calls and sales visits,
• content rich websites.

How can I use this to improve my sales?

The difference between the two selling techniques can be subtle and is reflected in things like the wording sent out in newsletter campaigns and the type of website you maintain.

If you’re selling a product that’s not a new idea (real estate, insurance, auto sales, financial consulting, etc.) consider increasing the amount of effort you spend to passively sell your product and see if your results improve. Here are a few simple ideas to improve your passive selling efforts:

• Maintain a content rich website that lends credibility to your expertise. When people shop for your product, they will probably have questions that need to be answered. If you have a website that provides those answers up front, they will be more likely to buy from you.
• Keep in touch with your clients on a regular schedule. Use a calendar or some automated program to plan follow up visits and regular emails to touch base. Providing your existing clients with useful bits of information in your field can be an excellent way to stand out when they need your service or when they need to make a recommendation to someone else.

If you’re in the market to buy a content driven marketing blog, check out this auction over at SitePoint.com:

Here are the details:

PR3 – Business networking site – All original content

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is a content driven web site related to small business marketing and networking.

Content

This site contains 19 professionally written; original articles related to small business marketing and networking that have not been republished or distributed elsewhere.

The contributing author is available to do follow-up work on a paid basis, but that is not included as part of this auction.

Traffic

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is fully indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It averages about 20-25 unique visitors per day*.

You can view traffic statistics at:

http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/stats/

username: guest
password: guest

* Our traffic numbers are not inflated with bot visits, paid traffic, or links from our other websites. Our statistics program does not count the majority of visits that would artificially inflate traffic.

Revenue

We started using Yahoo!’s YPN program to monetize MarketingSmallBusiness.net in September. Earnings are as follows:

Sep 2006 – $0.09
Oct 2006 – $6.79
Through Nov 17, 2006 – $2.38

You can view a screenshot of the most recent earnings at:

http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/ypnstats.jpg

Domain

The domain name is registered through GoDaddy. It was registered as a new domain on 7/14/2006 and is included as part of this auction.

Backend

This site is powered by a fairly standard WordPress installation. All content is contained within the WordPress database.

Terms

The buyer will receive a copy of the site contents, database, and domain name. The winning bidder will be responsible for their own hosting and moving the website to a new home. I’ll be happy to set up one year’s worth of hosting and move the site for you for a one-time fee of $200.