Submission + - Creating a sustainable website community for free?
SamClark writes: "During the production of my latest website I was considering how I was going to advertise the website and get it off the ground for free. My first thought on the matter was that a new website had to have enough content in order to keep new visitors interested. But how do we get that original content stream on a community based content driven website?
One of the ideas I have been trialling are free website advertisers like "Tag A Cloud". You submit your link to their website, and then link to it from your own. The more links you pass through to them, the bigger your link gets on their website. This should in theory send more visitors to your website over time. Over a three week period my website has currently received 27 unique visitors, 22% of which left the website immediately upon their visit. Is this method really worth the time and effort I put into it? Maybe time will tell.
The most successful link to the website I have put online so far was in Wikipedia. The website gets around 100 visitors per week from this link, however we lose around 70% of the visitors immediately upon arrival, therefore making this method only 8 visitors more profitable than the free advertiser, but at least we are getting our name out there to a lot of people.
During this experiment I also added the website to the main search engines and these have also proved a good marketing tool. Google alone has sent 442 visitors in the past three weeks.
One of the main problems the website has faced is lack of user submitted content. And as such, users don't return to the website, is there a certain amount of users a site needs before it becomes sustainable and then grows exponentially by word of mouth? How high does the threshold of registered members need to be before the website can hold itself together?"
One of the ideas I have been trialling are free website advertisers like "Tag A Cloud". You submit your link to their website, and then link to it from your own. The more links you pass through to them, the bigger your link gets on their website. This should in theory send more visitors to your website over time. Over a three week period my website has currently received 27 unique visitors, 22% of which left the website immediately upon their visit. Is this method really worth the time and effort I put into it? Maybe time will tell.
The most successful link to the website I have put online so far was in Wikipedia. The website gets around 100 visitors per week from this link, however we lose around 70% of the visitors immediately upon arrival, therefore making this method only 8 visitors more profitable than the free advertiser, but at least we are getting our name out there to a lot of people.
During this experiment I also added the website to the main search engines and these have also proved a good marketing tool. Google alone has sent 442 visitors in the past three weeks.
One of the main problems the website has faced is lack of user submitted content. And as such, users don't return to the website, is there a certain amount of users a site needs before it becomes sustainable and then grows exponentially by word of mouth? How high does the threshold of registered members need to be before the website can hold itself together?"