Marketing & Promotional Techniques

[JamesDavid]

I wanted to start a Thread devoted to Marketing and Promoting your PHPCityPortal Site. The way I look at it, since PHPCityPortal's commitment is to never sell a city portal twice, we are all on the same team, and not competing against each other. Are competitors are YellowBook, YellowPages, Dex, local phoen books, etc. So lets put our energy and experiences together where we can learn from each other..

So far here are a few of my thoughts for promoting..

Real Estate: I am going to order the cheap custom door hangers from eBay, you can get like 500 for like $20, I will get them printed with a special "promo code" so people will see the site name with a chance to list their house for free on the site. Then every house I see for sale by owner I am going to stop and put one on the door...

I also plan on stopping by some of the realtors offices with a flyer about listing on the site for free for 6 months with another promo code.

Autos: Same basic concept I will stop by the local "small" car dealerships and pass out a flyer witha promo code to list free cars for 6 months...


I think one issue people who start these sites run into is that they expect people to pay money right out of the gate to list items for sale. I think by promoting the site for free for 6 months you build traffic and name recognition in the community...

Those are two of my thoughts on Real Estate and Autos which I think will be the first strong hold to drive the site. Also I have some ideas for the garage sales and classifieds section which I will share in a later post.

Thanks

[shuswapbc]

I was going to do the same thing as you said for real estate, but for garage sales. Make up a little package to help our customers, Advertise their garage sales with large sign for their yard and a few smaller ones to post around the community.

We are also not going to charge for anything for a while, We have a real estate agent on board, a car dealership as well. Both have yet to submit any posts as we are still ironing out bugs and such other problems.

Its very smart idea to all work together and fight for all city portals!!! :cool:

[JamesDavid]

I am waiting for the new update to come out and update my site, once I know the site is still functioning correctly I am going to start marketing, hard....

[JeromyS]

We are loving the work you did with your graphics on the front end. I have been trying to figure out what to do with these spaces. I put affiliate ads in, some places it works, but others its just too "salesy". I like what you have going on. Did you build these graphics yourself? I noticed that one that references out back to the home page was not loading properly when I was clicking it.

We have put hours and hours into the existing install and I agree that I am hesitant to do any further works until we can run the next version and ensure its bug free, then market like crazy.

Cheers!

JeromyS
http://shuswapbc.ca

[JamesDavid]

The first thing I did was decide that under no circumstance am I going to put any national ads on the site. I agree with you, it looks way to salesy, and I think the way to sell a site like this is to come off as a "local" site.

Another idea I had was getting "Window Clings" Printed for every Business that signs up for the site. When i business sgins up you can stop by there location, introduce yourself, give them a window cling with the site name on it and it also says "Premier Business Member of BradleyBourbonnias.com". Once again this is advertisement for the business, and jsut as importantly your website.

Let us know as soon as the update is complete on yoru site.

JamesDavid

[rexpco]

For the last 10 years I have used an online printer which does full color both sides, doorhangers, postcards, flyers etc.

The address is http://www.netprint24.com and the work is affordable and turnaround of printing is just days.

Design your piece, Upload, Pay and get it in 2 days.

I typically mail hundreds per month of postcards, simple and fast.

Load postcards into printer
Import mailing list into stamps.com
press print
both the stamps and address are printed on postcard
throw into mailbox


I receive a response rate about 3% for my pest control business which is outstanding. Couldn't be simpler....

To use with PHP CITY PORTAL you could prefill directory with local businesses and import this list into Stamps.com to send them postcards inviting them to subscribe or upgrade to banner advertising.

In my experience postcards and pieces left at local businesses have been most effective for me..

Rex Wilkins

[sceniccitytoday.com]

All of these are great ideas. We also had several banners made and have attended a few local markets and community events. I have been spending a great deal of time trying to get my site ranking where I think it should be. SEO is going to be a big part of getting advertising revenue for the city you have chosen. Advertisers want to go on Google and search "Chattanooga" and see you near the top. They want demographics and site traffic data that is where advertising revenue $$ starts making this profitable.

[JamesDavid]

So far this script has been doing decent with SEO.. I signed up at Google Webmasters which is A MUST for anyone serious abotu this. Just search Google under webmasters it is the first thing a google ran system that help show you where you site ranks...

[JamesDavid]

I am going to post a lot here concerning a few things that have helped me out alot and that I feel are very helpful.... I will be updating it weekly with about three new ideas/ reviews as I update my site...

Facebook Group... Check out mypage (signature) and you will find a link to become a fan of my page. I think this is a great way to get a useful following.... allowing people to become part of something without another login and singup will encourage people to be part of which will increase exposure... Also once you get a large following it will give alot of credibility to your site..

Google Websmasters... google.com/webmasters by signing up and verifying my site it gives me all sorts of of SEO information such as keyword ranking, for example it will tell me where in the order my site ranks for certain search terms which is important and then also tells me which search terms are then turned into clicks...

STAY LOCAL WITH YOUR WEBSITE ADS... I have said this before and will say it again.. I personally think that having ads for teeth whitening and diet pills make your local site look like an "ad factory".. i think it would the site would be better off having free local community ads then giving off an "ad factory" appearance I mean if you goal is to make a decent local site showing people the ads they see everyday on other sites will not build credibility that you want to be a local resource. also local businesses will not be excited about paying to list their plumbing service when you have google adsense running in the corner with ads regarding plumbing how to books and other plumbers sites..

Feeder URLs.... I have about 10 URLs that feed into my site. this gives me more traffic.... one feeder is a dotCOM domain in which the county uses the .net as their main site. I bought the dotCOM for $150 and it gives me about a good amount of quality traffic so the purchase was a no brainer. Also maybe other close local towns/counties would be a good idea.. Also if you plan on investing alot into your site make sure you secure any hyphenated domains that are close to your webaddress. exmple if your site is "closecounty.com" spening $8 for "Close-County.com" would be a good idea....

until next week...

[JamesDavid]

I am going to give a quick update on a few things I have already talked about.

My facebook fan following is up to about 470 people. I got this high by uttilizing FREE facebook coupons I have found on the web. One of which was a $100 credit through the Visa Business NEtwork on Facebook (google it). Anyways by targetting only people who have their location in the surrounding towns i was able to achieve this pretty easily and without spending a dime of my own money... Whenever I post things through facebook I see an increase in traffic to the site for that day. I run this website for a county of about 100,000 people, .5% of which I can reach within seconds on facebook. If I can get my facebook fans up to 2000 ( very possible) I will be able to reach 2% of the population daily... priceless...

Also by adding the Fan Box to the front of my site (check it out) it allows the site content to stay updated as I update the facebook status. This will keep people coming back because it is dynamic content.

Local Ads/Different Ads: If you check out my site you will see a newer ad on the left that looks like a corkboard, something different that people WILL read... Also I will beat it in again becuase I feel it is SOOO important... stay local with ads.. people see Google Ads EVERYDAY on EVERY site they visit so seperate yourself as a true local contributor and don't do it. I look at it this way, if your goal is to make pennies in the long run with a portal site then plaster internet ads all over it, but if you truly want to grow and develop a local business with true value behind it for both yourself and the local citizens stick to local ads that truly serve your audience...

AUTO: In my first post I mentioned how I was going to stop by local auto places and let them know about my site. I went 2 for 2. I stopped by two dealerships which didnt currently posses the ability to have an online inventory and they LOVED the idea and loved the site and loved the fact they could post there inventory for free..

Google Analytics: A brother of google Webmasters. Google Analytics is FREE and there is even a spot for it in PHPCityPortal. It will give you in depth view of traffic, bounce rates, visitors, pageviews etc and is another must...

Background: this is a very cool way to to change your site around. Google does it with their logo for holidays/events so there is good marketing sense behind it. I have a different tiled background for every season/holiday... I had leaves for fall, pumpkins for halloween, leaves again after halloween, will have a thanksgiving background before thanksgiving, a shopping bag one right after, then a christmas one through christmas, news years one for a few days and then a snow one for january, etc...

Thanks again for your time...

[nordal]

Great post and interesting facts you give there. I'm personally surprised of the "Facebook effect" having such a potential big impact, but it's obviously a point that should not be ignored. Good job James - and keep us posted on any more tricks/ideas and progress you get.

[Martin Brock]

Excellent post James!

[JamesDavid]

Two Links more links for your site..

http://www.addthis.com/

I put this on the top right of my site. It is a nice widget which allows people to bookmark your site on hundreds of other sites...

http://sxc.hu
Image Stock Xchange.
Just ran across this the other day. By registereing for free you get thousands and thousands of quality images... Hi-Res and actually usable.... check it out.

While I am posting I am going to give you another thought of mine.

Give people a reason to come back tomorrow: : If someone comes to your site today, what reason do they have to come back tomorrow? I know that the sites I visit every day are the sites that offer me something new/different everyday.. If you can't manage to have something new everyday then shoot for something new every Monday..

Given the ability to edit the layouts and look of each site adding a widget is the easy route. I actually just added a box called "Daily Dose of Dilbert" a simple Dilbert Cartoon widget, with a new cartoon everyday. I know people like Dilbert so if I can get them to stop by even for 15 seconds a day to see a different Dilbert cartoon then I have accomplished something big... I got them back to my site which is a very hard thing to do and separates the successful geo sites from the fallen.

[Netman262]

Where did you add the code for the bookmark widget? What file? Where in the code did you add it?

Thanks, :)

[JamesDavid]

If using the default template I editted the file "header.tpl" I got the code from addthis.com

[Netman262]

Got it.

Thanks.

[JamesDavid]

anyone have anything to share