February 28, 2010, 08:31:07 AM
Seems that one of the side effects of technology advancing so quickly is that something that worked great for marketing last week is terrible this week. For a lot of people it seems that by the time you realize you want a blog and get it up and running the blog train has passed and everybody else has moved on to Twitter and Facebook.
Being the web geek that I am, I've tried a lot of different online ideas to draw people to my sites. Some are marginally successful. Some weren't worth my time.
Splash PagesDon't know if this is the fully correct definition, but I see a splash page as a landing page that I have to click through to get to your main site.
I'm going to start with this one because it is a bit of a soap box subject for me. It seems that most of the people claiming that a splash page brought in more search engine traffic are the same ones using a Flash template that wasn't getting any search engine traffic before. Of course a well written HTML page would get more inbounds than Flash. At least until the search engines start indexing Flash which they have started working on.
My biggest problem with splash pages is that it's one more click I have to get through to get to the site I wanted to get to in the first place. Rarely do splash pages actually have the information I'm looking for. They're there for search engine crawlers, not people.
BloggingThis one sprang up a couple years ago as the cure all to no search engine traffic. You started writing and magically people would come flocking to your site.
The catch is that you need to keep at it. I don't remember the exact number, but a vast majority of blogs have fewer than 10 posts on them. Their creators plopped up a blog without realizing that there was still work to be done after uploading Wordpress and picking a theme.
On the other side, blogs can be extremely successful for those willing to stick with 'em. Search engines love sites that update often which blogs do very well. Blogging software makes it easy to add content to your site, usually just by posting your thoughts.
Last year I converted my ProofBuddy site over from a standard content management system to Wordpress, mostly because Wordpress is much easier to theme than the CMS I was using. As part of that I left comment forms active on pretty much every page. What I found is that there are a lot of visitors that will leave a comment on a post who wouldn't consider filling out a contact form, picking up the phone, or signing up for a support forum. Sure, that leaves a lot of different places for me to check for visitor contacts, but it also brings in a lot more contacts.
Online AdsHaven't really given this one enough of a go to have an opinion on way or the other. A few years ago I tried AdWords for a couple of months and didn't get much action from it. Turns out photography is a fairly competitive field for online advertising and the clicks were over a dollar a piece. Spending $25 or $50 in ads to book a $1,000 wedding would probably be worth the gamble, but after 2 months and $100 I didn't have any bookings that I could trace back to the ads so I stopped.
Social NetworksThese are supposed to be the next big thing in web marketing. Or the current big thing I guess. Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook can bring in really good traffic if you play it right.
Natural traffic from social sites has the advantage that it's typically friends, online friends or IRL friends, that you find the link from. This gives the link some recommendation value. If someone I trust links to a site it typically has more trust value than one I find by searching.
You can also use them for advertising, although most of the users on these sites are pretty good about rejecting you if you come across as spammy. So there's a fine line there. As an example, last week I followed someone on Twitter that posted a link to great photography found around the web. Really great shots, although of questionable copyright legality. The guy even sent me a DM to thank me for following him. Problem is he signed the DM with "To thank me" followed by an affiliate link to Amazon. One bad link and I'm not following him anymore. Not that he's hurting for followers, but I also can't be the only one that dropped him because of the DM spam.
I started a couple of accounts on Twitter last week to see how they go. Posting a link on there definitely brings in the web crawlers. I've posted a couple of links back to PAF and within seconds there would be 20 or 30 web crawlers hitting the site, including GoogleBot which is the one I'm most interested in. The line I'm trying to keep on the right side of is posting links to other sites as well so the feed doesn't come across as spamming people to come visit here. So I've been posting links to other sites that may be interesting to photo geeks as well.
Wow!Ok, that turned in to much longer of a post than I was expecting. Guess I'll stop typing now, but I am interested in hearing what's worked for y'all online. For that matter, I'd be even more interested in hearing what didn't work.
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