Hi,
I'm really stuck for ideas about how to promote my Christmas website.
http://www.fillmystocking.co.uk/
It's all about making lists of things you want for Christmas then sending them to your friends / santa.
I have lots of gift ideas for under £10, so it's ideal for secret santa presents etc... They are the USP's but how can I get people to visit my site!?
Ideas so far...
1. Offer top spots throughout my site for those sites who refer the most people to me (I have put a place holder on the left as you'll see)
2. Run a competition where I ask people to guess the most popular present on the site (most views / additions to list) and the person who picks the right list gets all the presents on their list (to the value of £x)
3. Email billions of people for link exchanges.
4. Write on forums?
It's at this stage in the project when I realise how blinking difficult promoting websites is and how I really wish I had a better idea for a site in the first place lol
Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated, I've put loads of time into making this site, so it would be a shame not to atleast try and make the most of it.
Thanks,
Tom
robfenn posted this at 09:05 — 13th September 2007.
He has: 468 posts
Joined: Jun 2005
I'm not normally pro email marketing, but i think it could work in your case.
Pretty much everyone in the UK celebrates Christmas, so the likelyhood of your website being useful is very high. With presents being under £10, it's easy to justify making a purchase too. Otherwise i'd get thinking about press releases, interesting news that you can tie in with your website. Maybe do a survey on the average price of a Christmas present? Are men more likely to spend more than women? How many presents to people return? etc. etc.
I know this isn't a critique section, but why is your site so narrow? If people don't have a resolution of say, 1024x768, then the likelyhood of them even fathoming how to use the internet warrants them a useless prospect. Looking at my analytics, only 3.8% of people use 800x600 screens.
Also, from a user point of view, i like it when sites have categories for ideal presents for the missus, your mum, dad etc. Saves me having to think about being original...
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Megan posted this at 13:26 — 13th September 2007.
She has: 10,288 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Rob had some good ideas. Add a blog or some articles about christmas shopping and you could get a lot of good incoming links. Make it funny/intersting/exceptional and you could make the social bookmarking sites.
You could also try a banner exchange with other UK Christmas sites. Not link exchanges - something humans will notice and click. This is something that could spread by word of mouth as well.
Make some buttons for people who made a list to put on their sites. They want people to see their lists so they'd probably use it.
Megan
My web design blog
MrCat posted this at 00:23 — 17th September 2007.
They have: 168 posts
Joined: Aug 2007
You could also provide trivia contents on your site that visitors would find entertaining and useful enough so as to may them stay even longer. Make it a bit more interactive. Having those contests and prioritizing schemes on top referrers is a great start! And promoting this early would really help a lot. IMO content building is a very essential part of promoting your site
For new sites, I always advice to go with PPC and targetted link backs (which are both good ways to get targetted traffic) as a start aside from a good mix of free promotion campaigns. Blogging about your site is also a good option
Here is a checklist of ways you could market your site.
Free methods:
Submission to SE's and directories
Article marketing
Email campaign
Forums, blogs and board postings
Social Bookmarking
Etc. etc.
Premium ways: (Should require a budget)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Targetted Link backs
Professional SEO services
Ad spaces
Offline campaigns
Etc. etc.
Hope it helps and best of luck!
oh yeah.... advance merry Xmas!
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