Web Promotion and Creating Buzz

I was talking to Dave here at work who fools with websites the way I do. He is the only person that I ever talked to who knows anything about Google Page Rank. His brother has an interesting website called GloFish.com. GloFish are controversial. They are genetically altered fish that glow in the dark. There are people who think that this is against God’s plan. They ignore the fact that modern domestic animals have been genetically altered over tens of thousands of years of selective breeding. They object that the alteration was done using gene splicing rather than selectively breeding and culling over a long period of time.

Dave’s brother’s website is controversial and has a Google page rank of 5.

Dave’s photography site has a Google page rank of 5 because he has a link off his brother’s page. My pages have all recently been dropped down to 3 from 4 because of changes in the Google algorithm. I still get more traffic than his site or his brother’s site – go figger.

Chris B. has restarted her eZine StaticMovement.com. She was able to get the nicer, simpler domain name and I helped her get it up and running with the old website’s data. She needs to get the word out that’s she’s back.

J has decided on a name for his book, which I think is good one. He is putting his latest batch of short stories together and will publish it using the Nomadic Delirium Press imprint. This is similar to something that I am thinking about doing, but I keep getting stumped with the cover art.

There was a recent question at Speculations about Buzz Generators. I checked on these and they are ad agencies that flood the world with press releases and assist with advertising.

My mind has been cooking all of these separate factoids and I am concerned that there are very few good ways to promote a special interested, very focused, website. J. needs to promote his book. I need to promote my software. Chris needs to promote her site. Dave needs to promote his projects.

I have no solution yet, but I have been thinking. The non-internet solution to promoting a new product, book or idea was the press release. There is no such animal on the internet. Buzz is generated through Digg.com, BoingBoing.com, SlashDot.org, Del.icio.us or YouTube.com. There should be a simple and free way to get buzz for the internet.

This is a dangerous idea. Google penalizes anything that it thinks is not an “organic” link. My site HarpLinks.com actually hurts me, I think. I joined a link farm last year and I know that it hurt me. I love webrings and they bring traffic, but are a low end solution and build up slowly.

Every time I come up with an idea, I find a reason why it won’t work. I need a way of generating content that will result in links to target sites, but in an organic way. I need to do this on a smaller scale than Digg and the other big link sites. I have tried Squidoo.com and Ever.com with poor results. Despite their advertising, they do not generate any traffic. Squidoo.com has 300,000 lenses and few of these get any visitors other than their authors.

J. has been exploring MySpace and some writer buzz sites. I don’t know if he has made any sales from the effort. Dave swears that a programmer who makes a FaceBook app can succeed. I made some WidgetBox apps for my sports sites that people can put on their blogs and I had reasonable results (at least while the baseball pennant race was hot).

I am not sure where to go. If anyone has any method of internet promotion that has had better than average results and is free (or very cheap) let me know in the comments.

In the mean time, I’ll make a “read a story” and “Name a Star” widget for FaceBook and see if anyone clicks them.

One Comment

  1. Jim Shannon wrote:

    YouTube. You can find anything on YouTube. I don’t know how to tie a tie. I use clip on ties ;-) I typed in “Windsor knot” into the YouTube search field and it came up with a dozen examples.

    YouTube is great for advertising.

    Hope that helps.

    Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 5:44 pm | Permalink