Wanted: Your opinions on Web Promotion/Marketing Issues

The challenging aspects to me have always been finding the time and the money sometimes to market and promote. I still haven't spent a penny on promotion. Sometimes it can be difficult to make a deal with another site because they are inflexible or they are hard to contact.

I agree with Marc.

Marketing takes time. You can't just submit to a few engines and call it quits. I'd say that a good 75% of the day of an online business owner/operator is markting/promotion in one form or another.

And more and more good marketing sources cost you to be listed there. Prices vary but I don't think you can get away much without paying something these days.

The hardest part is definitely putting up the cash for a banner, knowing you may not see that money come back. Lots of trial and error has to be expected, which means you WILL lose money here and there while trying to find out what works.

Remember that banner ads work better when consistently displayed over time, as people see them again and again. Don't be quick to give up on it if it doesn't start getting results immediately.

Steven

I'd have to say that the most challenging part for me used to be time. You see, I get paid to place ads for the online division of an Advertisment Agency, so I do a lot of posting to classifieds, ffas, ezines, etc.

I got so tired of trying to organize all the sites to post to, and of how much time that this took, that I finally made a tool that has solved my problem.

I noticed a lot of the other posts above also say that the problem is time and money. Mine was too. So, I spent months parusing the internet, and building my tool. It is called The Ultimate Marketing Machine. I use it to submit to millions of free sites, most of them very high traffic.

I set it up so that I wouldn't "lose my place", and could easily copy and paste when needed.

If any of you would like to check it out, all people who post at this message board may use it for free, whenver they wish. No catches. To get access to The Ultimate Marketing Machine, just go to http://submitter.genuineprofit.com

Making and using this tool really helped me stay organized and save time. I hope you guys find it useful as well.

Thank you for all the help I've gotten from this message board in the past.

The main challenge is the education of the customer and in some cases, the site designers, on the importance of search engine optimization(SEO). Generally the focus in on design and function, which in important, but it's like building a home, and then deciding you want to have a basement / foundation.

The person responsible for SEO should be included right from the start. They should guide the way the site is designed as much as possible and the way the site is built. It's a real joy to see a site optimized "from the ground up", because you know that such a site will perform to it's full ability, unlike those where SEO is an afterthought.

The second challenge is taking in the thousands of differnet viewpoints on hundreds of aspects of the SEO process. What keyword density is safe? Use commas or spaces? Should the title be 60 or 75 characters? Is an HTML comment good or bad? How should I use Alt text? I've never seen anything like it in working with computers where there are so many options and very few facts. Everytime someone says it works one way, someone else says "it worked for me". I feel sorry for the average person that tries to optimize their site.

And the third challenge is the amount of time it takes to use all the marketing tools available.

Thanks,
Christian

When i first started building sites i thought the most difficult part is getting into the search engines and get some real traffic from them.
Now that i have some experience i know that the traffic from the SE, comes as your link popularity grows. After that it becomes a lot easier and you get a lot of traffic from the SE. So, start building link popularity by trading links with other sites and the rest will come. Of course that if you want to spoend money for advertising it all becomes much easier...

Best regards,

If you use a combination of common sense and trial/error, promoting your website isn't to difficult at all. Of course, every website warrants a different promotion technique.

With that said, I would agree with the others that time is the biggest factor. Setting up campaigns, checking results, editing the campaign to work better, and checking the results again takes up a lot of time.

The most advertising is finding a method that actually works.

I think that all webmasters (inluding myself) spend too much time looking at crappy promotion sites when they good be improbing the overall content of their site.

Don't get me wrong. You have to spend time entering your site into the search engines but how many times in the forums have you seen someone say
'Hi there. Would someone like to trade links?'

but when you click on the persons page, all there is is an amazon ad and an under-construction graphic.

I have been most guily of this myself.

I'd spend a couple of hours looking at rubbishy promotional sites which will probably bring me about 6 hits when i could be bettering my website, adding more links and tips etc.

Have you ever heard the saying 'If you book them they will come'.

Well if you have great content (and are registered with a few search engines) then webmasters will want to link to.

I've used webmaster directories before for the simple reason that they link to good sites.

Content, content, content!!!

Peace out homeys

i haven't seen any solid tutorial on getting good search engine rankings. probably never will either because that info is worth mega bucks and the engines continually change their methods for indexing.

Everyone who knows anything is trying for those top-10 positions. The odds are against you.

Besides, it all depends on the search criteria you're using. One word more or less can make a big difference.

2 years ago I had a warez site in the top 10 position for the search term "gamez" . I think it was #3 on webcrawler. Got me 200 hits/day from that source alone. I meta-stacked and it worked, I don't think Meta Stacking works anymore though.