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Any ideas on how to promote my website?

Thread title: Any ideas on how to promote my website?
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01-15-2005, 04:43 AM
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x3knet is offline x3knet
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  Old  Any ideas on how to promote my website?

As all or most of you may know, I have opened up <link in sig> and would just like some suggestions on how to promote it.

Put yourself in my shoes... if you owned my website, how would you promote it? Where would you advertise? How much would you spend promoting it?

01-15-2005, 09:01 AM
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Good question and one i will be happy to answer! Nothing is more exciting than a new business venture (at least imo)

Ok, first establish who your target audience/market is? It's obviously people without hosting who can't for whatever reason afford a decent forum.

Now we know who we're looking for, we just need to find them!

The first thing that springs to mind for me is, a large popular free hosted message board called ezboard (i'm sure everyone has heard of this).

Various ways to attract attention...usually people who post on ezboards end up having their own one anyway! I suggest searching for the largest ezboard you can find....or the largest general chat one.

> E-mail the owners of the community and offer them your services, a FREE hosted forum with choice of skins instead of their slow and outdated ezboard!

> Find forums where you can advertise and post your offer or join large communities and use the sig trick to drum up interest.

Aside from that.....join vbulletin.com, phpbb.com and invisionpower.com and post in their forums with your advert in your sig. You need to spend about 2 hours a day..maybe more posting and advertising, it will pay off.

Join large forums like webhostingtalk, sitepoint, yaxay and use your weekly or monthly advert to good effect.

Google adwords, open an account and put about $100-500 into it, get terms like "free forums", "free forum hosting" etc.

I wouldn't waste money on advertising and i wouldn't really bother with targeted traffic and all that nonsense...your product isn't suited to it and the roi would probably be poor.

I reckon you can get about 100 forums hosted on a budget of $500 (just google, the rest is free!) And i reckon if you start your google campaign tommorow and get posting tonight.....you could start seeing the results in a few days.

01-15-2005, 03:26 PM
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  Old

The only problem with google is... I don't have the money for it. And I can guarantee that my parents won't let me use their credit card for the google adwords.

I neevr really thought about going to ezboard and finding a popular one, awesome idea. I'm going to do this today. Would I just email the admins and ask them if they wanted one? Or ask the members if they want one?

And the people that go to yaxay, sitepoint, phpbb.com, and invision.com... Wouldn't they already have some type of hosting? Or they would be going there for support for their own forums...

The only thing I don't offer on my website is the user to edit the global wrapper. But if they have hosting already, they will probably not want what I am offering.

I appreciate this so much Rob. Thanks!

The more help the merrier :-D

01-15-2005, 03:33 PM
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Well....i would e-mail the owners of the individual ezboard forums with the offer. There are sometimes people on vb, phpbb etc who haven't bought the software and are asking pre-sales questions etc.

It's also good to get the word out in general....people will mention it to their friends etc.

01-15-2005, 05:05 PM
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you really need to find the shall we say it 'newer' internet users - someone with a small amount of interet knowaldge would know how to get a free host and upload a forum, if you find people that know almost nothing about how this kind of stuff works they will obvioulsy want to use your service, now you knew this already but where do you find these people?. . . . first of all are you a member of any large forum where people might be looking to start their own forums, gaming forums maybe? 'new' gaming clans often use this type of service for their clans forums so if you can advertise on any gaming/clan forums that could be a place to start for you, another place could be a sport community people might want to start a forum for them and friends to talk about whatever sport/team they follow

try to think of as many places like this as you can and you should be able to bump up your user base quite a bit from that

01-15-2005, 07:57 PM
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Well then the type of website I am offering is open to ALL categories. That is the problem with me. All of my websites are very general. Take AnythingTalk.com... talk about ANYTHING. RateMySites.com... used to own it, and offered a topsites list to ANY website with ANY type of content.

I really need to develop a niche.

01-16-2005, 04:42 AM
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On ezboard... would it be better to provate message the person so they know it's not spam... or email them and take a risk of it being deleted?

01-16-2005, 11:41 AM
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I would e-mail them as it looks better.

01-16-2005, 01:53 PM
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Try going to big clan sites. There's always the "noob" that wants to start his own clan board.

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