(Professionally) Advertising Your Website

I run a debate site, and along with a redesign that i want to start on soon, i wanted to get some exposure. The problem is, i don't know how to do this. Naturally, i'm willing to pay money, but i need some suggestions concerning how i should go about doing it.

Are those big sites that give you banner space for about $100/week any good? Of course i'd only do it for a couple of weeks, but still. What about those sites that promise 50,000 unique visitors for about $150 (i found one that promises the hits only come from North America if your site is english, which means they won't be paying a bunch of outsourced employees to run visitor counts up)?

I dunno, i want this site to be a success. I am getting flyers made soon, and plan on visiting some college campuses and posting them here and there, as well as putting them up on my campus (CSU). I've made it into the (school) newspaper (heh), and generally promote the site as much as i can, but we still only get about 200 uniques per month (with about 340,000 hits).

Ideas?

Nos.

If you want to save money and test the waters a bit before spending a lot on advertising, maybe go with the posters, get them spread out as much as possible, targeting the crowd (mabye college campuses?) that would come to your site. If you do get enough visits initially the sites on the web can spread pretty fast. If it looks like in a month you don't see any progress you can always go and spend a few hundred and get some web ads and maybe find a few papers (like papers for around town or events, etc... or some journals) and buy some ad space for a bit.
Just some ideas. I have never had to do this. This might be good for a resource section at some point. Hints on advertising your site...

Don't waste your money on those "we'll send you 50 billion hits" things. They just spam people most of the time, and you'll be sending invites to old ladies who only go online to play hearts on yahoo, executives that don't have time to debate on the 'net, etc. Very few people that would see the message would be likely to join. And those people would be even less likely to join because they got spammed...

Really the best way to market your site is to make it worth people's time. If the site is well designed, easy to use, and actually offers some sort of value or entertainment, word will spread. If the site offers no value to people, then no amount of advertising will make the site grow.

I think the design of the site could be much better. I mean the graphics are ok, but when I go to the site I have no idea what it is. At first glance it looks like just another designer's site with a few little one-sentence news postings. Nothing on the page stands out, it all just blends together because all of the text is the same size/color, and all on the same background, etc.

I know you have a welcome paragraph at the top explaining what the site is, but it blends in with the news postings and all of the other text and doesn't catch your eye at all. The thing that draws my eye the most on the page is the big red blob in the upper right hand corner. This is a content-focused site, so the focus of the design needs to be on the content, not the graphics.

I know you didn't ask for a design critique, but I think it could be a major part of why the site isn't growing. Redesign it so that it's much easier to tell immediately at a glance what the site is about, why we should care, and how we can get started.

www.blogger.com is a great way to show how I would envision your site looking. Not exactly of course, but similarly simple, and easy to get started. Focus on the content/service/product rather than fancy graphics. It's not a graphics-related site, and it's not your portfolio, so focus on what is important rather than the graphics.

Another increasingly good way to market is by having a blog. Google loves blogs, and if you turned your "featured topic" into a blog instead of just a blurb on the site, that would help your discussions get on Google faster. Whenever I write about something on my blog, it's generally at the top of Google pretty quickly, as long as it isn't about Cars or something equally general. This is due to the frequently updated nature of blogs, a linked archive, and most blog software "pings" a dozen or so sites that will automatically link to you just because you have a "blog". Then there are sites like www.feedster.com that search blogs.

So, say you have a debate going about Michael Moore, so you make a post in your feature discussion blog about it. When you save it, it pings a dozen sites, which all immediately link it and display the title of the post for all to see. Google spiders these linking sites like crazy, so the googlebot comes along and spiders your site within a day. Then when someone searches for Michael Moore or (insert topic here) they will be much more likely to find your site. They may also search on feedster to see what the blogging community has to say about a certain topic.

You can also leave comments on other people's blogs. Find the politically oriented blogs out there and post in their comments with a link to your site. Don't spam them, just make a well thought-out comment relevant to the discussion. People will read your comment and click your link to find out more about you. And more importantly, google will follow the link and see that you are linked from that high-traffic blog, and will rate your site more highly in the search engines rankings. Just make sure you make relevant comments on relevant blogs, so that you don't just get your comment deleted.

Email owners of those blogs and see if they'd like to do some sort of link exchange. Email other sites and get them to link you.

There is a lot you can do without wasting money on advertising that probably won't be that successful anyway, to be honest.

Gotta get back to work now, or I would write more ideas.

Deker, thanks a ton for the reply. That was very, very useful. I will definately start working on a new layout as soon as i can (going to mexico for a week, though, so it will have to be after :D.

Concerning the blogs - i am very unfamiliar with them. Is there a way to display the blog postings on the debate site, or must it be at a seperate website? Do i have to pay for one if i already have hosting space?

Nos.

The blog could be integrated into your existing site very easily. It could appear however you'd like it to, but would also have links to archives, etc, like most blogs do.

Some good blogging software is:

www.movabletype.org - free for up to 3 blogs, and one author. the only bad thing is that you have to "rebuild" pages. After you make a post, it generates a static html page. When you have hundreds of entries, this process can take a long time.

www.wordpress.org - totally free and opensource. I haven't used it myself, but it's a good alternative to movable type.

www.textpattern.com - another free one (for now). i used it in early beta, but it's supposed to be pretty good now.

www.pmachine.com - they have a free version, as well as a pro version. ExpressEngine is incredible, but $200 and more than you'd need.

there are lots of other options out there as well like b2blog and drupal, but i don't have much experience with those.

Ok. I installed MT, but i have no idea what to do now.

http://dreamsforsale.net/blog

?

Nos.

You need to make a post, and the default templates should show up. Then you can start customizing it. The documentation has a list of all the tags you can use, and is pretty helpful. It should get you started. Just look at the code for the default templates and start to work it into your own design.

Yeah, i was just about to edit my post. I didn't notice the last bit on the installation instructions. I deleted mt-load, and thought i had to make a template by hand using that huge CSS file :p

Sorry - thanks for your help!

Nos.

http://dreamsforsale.net/uhoh.gif

All i did was change the output file of the style-sheet to style.css. Then this happened.

I changed it right back to style-site.css, and it is staying like this. The weird thing is, the actual blog doesn't have ANY template or style sheet on it, it's just raw html, but the admin panel looks like.. well.. the screenshot.

Nos.

I dunno man, I haven't upgrade to 3.0 yet. My admin panel is different. But going into the templates section of the adming panel and changing the stylesheet shouldn't do anything to the admin panel. Unless they made the admin panel editable in 3.0 or something.