Marketing Your Web Site

I received a very kind email recently :-

Enquiry: Hello, I've been visiting your blog and Irish Views site for a couple months now and have been really enjoying it. I appreciate the level of honesty in your blog entries, that's quite rare in a webmaster, especially when it comes to earning money online.

I was wondering, do you have any plans to share in your blog how you've marketed Irish Views? The SEO in your pages is obviously quite good, but it would be nice to hear more about promotional steps taken. Anyway, I was only curious, I know most webmasters like to keep silent about their traffic secrets.  :) 

I mostly just wanted to say thanks, your site and blog have been insightful.

Kindest regards,
Andrew

Thanks for the positive feedback Andrew. Not many people take the time to let you know you are appreciated.

To answer your question about how I have marketed IrishViews.com - not a huge amount!

:-)

OK - I'll elaborate a bit...

Firstly, In case I have not made this obvious from previous posts, the vast majority of my income comes from my wallpaper / photo web site IrishViews.com from Adsense adverts, and the majority of traffic comes from people searching for various images on Google Images. I started it approx 3 years ago.

I have spent *no* money marketing it.

Initially I did no kind of SEO at all apart from making sure that the ALT tag was filled in in my HTML code.

I had no intention of making any money from this. I only put the images up on my web site as I enjoyed photography and wanted to share them.

After 3 or 4 few months, on my server logs, I started seeing some traffic coming from Google image search, from people searching for images using keywords that I had in my anchor text and my alt text, and I started to think I might be onto something.

I bought the book "Search Engine Optimization For Dummies", and applied most of what it recommended.

<blatant plug>

Here is a link to the ebook version (Affiliate Link)-



Now, there is nothing about SEO that you can't find for free on the internet. But how much value do you place on your time?

Do yourself a favor, and save hours (and hours) of time by purchasing the book above.

I honestly really, really recommend this book, but not in a "oily sleazebag, I'll make loads of money out you idiots" type of way... It really is great value at $24.99 - and I would definitely recommend it even if I was not an affiliate.

</blatant plug>

But remember, after you read it you have to *apply* what you have read otherwise you are wasting your money..

If you prefer a hard copy version and don't want to print it out, then by all means, go to Amazon and buy it from there..

In case you do not want to buy the book above, I think a couple of the most important points in it are your on page optimization (which is reasonably well covered in this blog) and off page optimization (getting links from other sites back to your own web site).

But to get back to the original question, apart from SEO and starting this blog, I have done nothing on the marketing side of things...

I only started this blog in June 2007. The sole reason at that time was to try to get more traffic to my main photo web sites (mainly IrishViews), and improve the SERPS of all my pages. Since then, I have spent a LOT of hours on the blog, and I only get a modest amount of traffic from my blog at the present time, although I guess there are other less tangible benefits to having a blog. I am not sure there has been a noticeable increase in the SERPS of my web sites because of the blog either. If there has been - it is very small...

So the jury is out on whether it is worth creating and maintaining your own blog as a marketing exercise.

I do plan to improve the look and feel of the web site in the near future with some new header graphics and a logo, along with moving it to it's own domain.

Currently it is a subdomain - www.ni-photos.jmcwd.com, which you get redirected to if you type www.irishviews.com into your web browser address bar. The reason for this historically, is because it was only set up as an afterthought on my web design web site - jmcwd.com, and I did not want to spend and extra $2 per month on hosting it on its own domain!

But I am fairly sure that this will not make a big difference to how much money it makes. It is just making it a bit more attractive for direct advertisers etc (and in my heart of hearts, I feel it is probably not worth the effort...)

If anyone else has any 'marketing' type tips or experiences to share - then please add a comment to this post. Thanks!