Re: Marketing a new web site

From: Adam Audette <pubs_at_audettemedia.com>
Date: Fri 16 Feb 2007 21:25:58 -0600

Jim,

Before you contract a marketing firm be sure to do some research.
Familiarize yourself w/ typical marketing strategies and techniques
by using the following resources. I recommend these as a starting
point, but there are many more to explore.

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Forums
======

- Highrankings - http://www.highrankings.com/forum/ - one of the
best places to get started marketing your site, with a heavy dose
of SEO/M. Friendly and ethical place to get answers, run by Jill
Whalen who's old school and well regarded.

- LED Digest - http://www.led-digest.com/ - a very active
discussion list published by myself, so this is self-promotional.
But it's very pertinent to your situation because the LED is
newbie-friendly and contains a wide diversity of subscribers, from
experts in the industry to agencies, clients, edu's and mom & pops.

- Webmaster World - this is a large forum, very professional and
helpful. Tends to be for more advanced webmasters but these
specific areas are great places to start:

New to Web development:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/new_web_development/
General SEO & Marketing:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_promotion/

- DigitalPoint - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ - a huge forum
where you can get lost quickly, but useful to browse for common
questions and solutions. This forum can also be used as a sort of
weather vane when indexing changes are rolled out from the major
search engines.

=====
Blogs
=====

- SEOBook - http://www.seobook.com - run by Aaron Wall, a highly
regarded SEO and marketer. Great information for search marketing
and his ebook contains a wealth of knowledge. I recommend
purchasing it and going over it thoroughly, even before hiring a
marketer.

- SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org - great blog and community site
for search and marketing related news and ideas.

- SEO Roundtable - http://www.seoroundtable.com - you can see a
theme developing here... yup, marketing online is very much about
search. This blog does a great job of culling key knowledge and
news from popular forums.

I could go on and on listing resources, but this will get you going.

As far as what specific techniques to begin with, I suggest
submitting your site to Google http://www.google.com/addurl/ ,
creating a sitemap for their Webmaster Tools suite
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html , and
focusing on getting some good links. A great place to start for the
latter are directories, but use care which ones you choose. Good
ones are the Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, Best Of The Web,
Gimpsy, Joeant, and ODP.

You might start participating in forums and commenting on related
blogs w/ your URL; most of the links on these pages will be
nofollowed (there are exceptions) but this will put you in or near
the discussions and people you're targeting. Also, there's some
debate as to whether nofollowed links are spidered or not, and some
marketers swear by this technique to quickly get sites indexed.

Finally, a great option to send some traffic your way quick is PPC.
AdWords is where you want to begin: https://adwords.google.com/

Hope this is helpful!

Best of luck,
Adam


-----------
Adam Audette, Publisher / Moderator

LED Digest | marketing discussion list
http://www.led-digest.com
since 1997


Received on Fri Feb 16 2007 - 21:25:58 CST