Website Promotion

July 7, 2008 10:27 PM

What is your one best ethical suggestion for promoting a blog/website?

I've been googling the crap out of this for the last week or so, and have found a lot of, well, crap out there.

Not enough of it has been helpful. A lot of it seems shifty or stupid or likely to backfire.

I figure if people limit their answer to one suggestion, this would be helpful.

I'm banging away on social media type site, listing directories, search engines, etc. And traffic is going up, but obviously, I'd like to see even more. Ideas (idea!)?

Thanks.

posted by cjorgensen to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Non-Internet-based word of mouth. If the blog is genuinely good, people will visit.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:32 PM on July 7, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Original, compelling content which can't be found anywhere else and is valuable to a good-sized slice of the reading populace, or a rabid niche is IMHO the only "ethical" way to build readership.
posted by wfrgms at 10:35 PM on July 7, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

Email influential bloggers and ask for a link. Popular bloggers need content too, and if you write something good they'll be happy to link to you. You might want to start with lower-traffic bloggers who won't be getting deluged with link requests, they might actually be happy to do it.

One thing to keep in mind, ask for links to specific content, rather then just your blog in general. Try to write something really good.

Don't write about yourself. Maybe you could have gotten away with that six or seven years ago, but now there are a few bloggers with wide followings who really write crap but just happened to end up in a strong position due to momentum. The liberal blogger Atrios would be one example. He's a really popular blogger, but his blog sucks. It only gets traffic because it's been around forever.

I think if you want to break out in the blogsphere these days, you've really got to have focused, and high quality traffic.

Also, you might want to consider an off the shelf template, all of your websites look pretty web 1.0, no offense. Are you asking about christopher.jorgensen.name? I'm looking through it and I'm not really seeing anything compelling, anything I'd want to link to if I had a blog.
posted by delmoi at 10:49 PM on July 7, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I put together an academic website about seven years ago, for a very niche academic subject. I wanted academics to know about the site, so I did two things:

(a) I contacted a bunch of academics (in fields related to the subject of my website) who had similar links on their own personal websites, and asked them to link to my site. A bunch of them obliged.

(b) I sent out about a hundred paper postcards with information about the opening of my site, to people in the academic field my site concerned.

Something worked, because seven years later, my site is still up, and it is the number one Google hit for its subject matter.
posted by jayder at 10:49 PM on July 7, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

What do you mean by ethical, really? I have to ask, working in the industry. I have lots to suggest I just need to know where you draw the line.
posted by scarabic at 11:07 PM on July 7, 2008

I mean, that is, if you're interested in stuff that WORKS. I can talk to you about stuff that is merely ethical all the livelong day...
posted by scarabic at 11:09 PM on July 7, 2008

Well, a good start toward ethical blog promotion would be to not make blogs that steal their ideas from books.

If you've not read the above-linked, all apologies, but your jackassletters seems a liiiiittle too familiar for my tastes.
posted by phunniemee at 12:04 AM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

You might start by making it easier to read - that background image is great but I couldn't spend much time on there, no matter how fascinating the content.
posted by ceri richard at 12:50 AM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

a liiiiittle too familiar for my tastes

"Picks up where the Lazlo Letters left off..."
posted by kmennie at 5:12 AM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Find popular blogs with similar subject matter, approach, etc. Offer to write guest posts -- many blog writers actively solicit them.

Or submit something interesting and relevant to popular blogs and hope that they post it and offer a link back to your site.

You can also try submitting short (spec) guest posts to commercial blogs of the Gawker and Pajamas Media ilk, or whatever is most relevant to the kinds of visitors you're trying to attract to your site.

Keeping the visitors around after the initial link is another matter altogether.
posted by camcgee at 8:21 AM on July 8, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

delmoi: Also, you might want to consider an off the shelf template, all of your websites look pretty web 1.0, no offense. Are you asking about christopher.jorgensen.name? I'm looking through it and I'm not really seeing anything compelling, anything I'd want to link to if I had a blog.

Nah, that site is pretty much just for me and friends and I don't get it updated that often. I'd hit you with a PM with a link for the site I would actually like to see take off, but looks like the rest of this discussion has gone to that site anyway.

And the one thing I do like there is the layout! But point taken.

scarabic: What do you mean by ethical, really? I have to ask, working in the industry. I have lots to suggest I just need to know where you draw the line.

Well, I don't want to comment spam people, I don't want to pay for links (or even do negotiated link exchanges), I don't want to just try to draw attention just for attention (as in creating a post that might get picked up someplace that I would never have otherwise written).

I'm hoping for sustained growth of readership, not just a traffic "blip."

phunniemee: Well, a good start toward ethical blog promotion would be to not make blogs that steal their ideas from books.

If you've not read the above-linked, all apologies, but your jackassletters seems a liiiiittle too familiar for my tastes.

• The Billy Letters
• Kembrew Mcleod
• Ben Franklin (yes, that Ben Franklin)
• Jonathan Swift
• The Yes Men

I could go on for some time with this. Long enough to pretty much justify the idea as a genre, not as theft. Lazlo Toth wasn't the first, some predate him by a couple hundred years, he even credits them in his books (as I do him on my site), and he's surely not going to be the last. What he did was make it famous, but this is like saying any vampire novel written since "Dracula" is theft (and even there Stoker wasn't first). Fire up amazon, spend some time looking through the books linked off the Toth pages, and the ones linked off those, and you will see there are literally dozens of people out there currently doing this. Not to mention other websites.

I'd even go so far as to say name any website, book, or band, and I can name 3 precursors.

If you're saying I'm not doing it well, that could be a fair criticism, but to pretend like an idea has to be completely original to be run with is silly, since then there would only be friendster (and myspace and facebook wouldn't exist). And let's not mention LOLcats or postsecret knockoffs.

But enough of defending this, since that wasn't the question.

ceri richard: ...start by making it easier to read

I was trying not to go with a specific site for this question, since I run a few, and have ideas and registered URLs for more, so not sure which site you're having visual difficulties with.

camcgee: Or submit something interesting and relevant to popular blogs and hope that they post it and offer a link back to your site.

Cool idea, didn't really think of trying to get content someplace else.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:05 AM on July 8, 2008

I don't really think you can "rip off" an idea like that. I wouldn't worry about that too much. I do think you should spend some more time on your design, though. Just glancing at it earlier, I didn't even notice the responses.
posted by delmoi at 2:52 PM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Huh. Yeah, design is something I need to work on (and am). This said, I am getting sick of the whole "Web 2.0" look. Every website is starting to look like every other. An edgy title banner, same layout (two or three column CSS), and standard navigational elements.

I worried more about making sure it looked decent on mobile devices like my BlackBerry.

I wanted to do some paper effects like this guy did on this page:

Studio Shadowlight but the scanned letters looked dumb onto of them, and I couldn't get it to look as good. Link it to a web design site that is non associated with me at all. I'm only putting it here as an example or the paper layouts.

And as an aside people keep sniping in here that this post is an attempt to do the thing I am asking about (admins are deleting these needlessly, since I have thick skin), which really makes me wish I had posted the question anonymously, but I've read the standards for those questions, and really, I don't think this question fits the criteria. I personally don't think a single mefi question would drive that much traffic to a site. I posted the site over in projects a couple weeks back and it's generated 23 total referrers. Probably 3 of which were mine. Not exactly the traffic levels I am hoping for.

And for the record, I've asked this question in exactly two places. Here, and in the forums of the CMS I use. I got few responses there. I don't really maintain an active presence anywhere but here and there. This is exactly what I meant by ethically. I could sign up for 90 different forum sites and ask there, and I am sure that would generate some traffic, but I am not interested in traffic blips. I did do a search in the forums here before asking, but other that SEO there really wasn't anything that addressed actively promoting a site.

I did think it was ironic that a nearly identical question was asked a few hours later (from an admittedly different perspective).

This thread is a bit discouraging though in that there doesn't seem to be any checklist of things to do. Other than checking to make sure I was listed in search engines, the only thing that was coming to mind was google adwords, which would be great if I was selling widgets. I tried digg (two referrers) and reddit (about 600, so would call that one a success if any turn into regular readers). And a friend put me in his stumbleupon bookmarks and that generated a short lived blip. I made a technoratia profile, but haven't developed it. Started a twitter feed.

The answers here are helpful, and not what I was expecting. I was thinking of more things like in that last paragraph, but I didn't ask the question to get answers I could think of.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:08 PM on July 8, 2008

If there was a checklist of things to do, everyone would do it, and it would become instantly useless.
posted by delmoi at 11:41 PM on August 6, 2008