Chromand - Desiging, Developing, and Marketing for the Interwebs

(Originally Posted September 26, 2007)

Athensbarhopper.com so far makes up all of my adsense revenue, because I’ve put more work into it that my other sites so far. It still is not quite getting the traffic it could though, and that’s what I wanted to talk about today.
Since this is a locally based website about Athens, GA, it is harder to promote. A lot of tools of internet marketing is designed to get word about your site out globally. Social bookmarking the site is fruitless. There really isn’t a way to use forum marketing. SEO is still important, and I may be trying adwords in the near future, but I still feel somewhat cut off from some ways to market it.

I recently tried a contest on the site. The site has a participation points system built in, and whoever could earn the most points in 2 weeks got a $25 bartab and T-Shirt(I got this for free by the way, but more on that later). No one tried to win in, and I ended up delaying the contest. I had read that this was a good way to drive traffic and participation to a forum, so it begs the question, why didn’t this work?

I believe it didn’t work for several reasons. The first being that simply putting up a contest is not promoting in and of itself. If no one knows about the contest, it doesn’t do you any good. Secondly, I think maybe the requirements for winning may have put some people off. You could earn lots of points for writing reviews and articles, but apparently that isn’t something people really wanted to do.

I’ve devised a new plan to do over the next couple of weeks: work on search engine optimization and back linking, and do some off line marketing for the site. I’ll go hand out flyers on campus and downtown. I’ll also be looking for ways to get out the word on things like Facebook and Myspace, post more in the forums to help get them active, and then relaunch the contest with different win conditions. Hopefully this will help drive more traffic to the site.