Tuesday, December 4, 2007

How I failed to promote my website

Continued from 12/3/2007

So before I created my website MaPaGuides, I used overture and Google trends to search which keywords related to my website are popular and how often people use these keywords. Then I decided to target some keywords like creative kid (1320 in overture), creative imagination (1099), parenting skill (1649), creativity (14167) and so on. Some keywords are popular and competitive. Some are not. I hope those keywords not searched frequently may make my website ranked high quickly and bring some traffic for me. Based on above knowledge, I did some search engine optimization when I built my website although it is not professional. To avoid search engine ban, in fact I didn’t do much SEO, as I know the most important thing is to get enough inbound links and more traffic.

After I created my website MaPaGuides, I then tried some ways to promote my website as described below.

1) I submitted my website to several search engine and open category.
2) I tried to find top ranked forums, websites or blogs relevant to my website using some keywords like parenting forum, parents, kids education, post a comment and so on. Then I tried to post some comments in these websites. As I don’t want spam them, I got to read their contents and think how to make meaningful comments. Most of them also ask for registration. It is really time-consuming. After I come back to check, I found most links to my website are inactivated. So this is not a quick way to build inbound links. It needs persistent effort.
3) I tried to answer some questions in Yahoo Answers. It permits links. But several days later, I found I couldn’t add links any more. But I did get some inbound links.
4) Then I submitted my website to several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, del.icos.us and Furl. But nobody added my website to their favorites although I got some links.
5) I learnt to write a simple RSS for my website and submitted it to a list of websites. Many websites were already heavily spammed or not exist any more.
6) I tried to submit some videos to youtube and wrote relevant description to link my website.

So how is my promotion effect?
1) Since I published my website on Oct। 5,2007, there were only several first-time visitors coming to my website everyday. You can see my traffic as shown below. Check the ranking of my website in Google and Yahoo using those keywords I targeted. You can’t even find it. How failure it is!

2) But if you can see from other data, there was some progress.
· More and more pages of my website were crawled by Google (on 10/30, 11/7, 11/17, 11/18 and 11/19, 11/25/2007) and Yahoo.
· 35 inbound links were established.
· SEO score of my home page increased from 26 to 46.

What‘s the problem? Why are there so few people coming to my website? The low ranking of my website is sure the major reason. But why all my links in top forums, websites and social bookmarking sites can’t bring me more traffic? Is the contents of my website not good? But people didn’t even take a look, how could they know it is good or not? So there must be some reasons for me to find out like follows.
The title and description is not attractive.
Young parents are too busy to surf Internet.
Parents don’t go to these websites.
Parents love to buy iPod and games for kids other than caring how to improve kids’ creativity.
I might submit my website at wrong time.
My links were not in good position.
There are too many competitive websites or links.

My future plans:
1) I should spend more time to analyze my competitors and learn from them.
2) Most web surfers may not pay much attention to kids’ education. I may add some contents for young people and adults about creativity improvement.
3) I should add more funny, attractive and relevant contents in my website. I do have some good ideas.
4) I should submit my website to all search engines, social bookmarking sites I can find.
5) I should spend more time to establish links in forums and blogs.
6) I should create some blogs to promote my website, that is one reason why I built this blog.
7) I should write some articles and submit them to other popular websites.
8) I should try to make more high quality videos and submit them to youtube.
9) I should try to promote my website through sending emails to my friends.
10) I should translate my website into Spanish, Chinese and Japanese and submit to corresponding search engines.
You see, I have lots of things to do. But who knows which one may work? As I know in research, most things we learnt don’t work very well. Doing business may be the same. We need watch carefully, think in details, work hard and do it creatively. So let’s find out if my creative ideas will work in the future.

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