How people are promoting new sites that are not newsworthy

Hacker News had a news item recently from the maker of the Geek Atlas titled If you build it, they will ignore it. The post by John Graham was a perfect example of self promotion through selling self promotion tips or a story. Daniel Markham was one of the first to comment on this post, which you can read here and he brought up something many developers can easily forget after long hours coding.



I’ve heard (here) that the develop-to-promote ratio should be about 1:10. In other words, for every hour you spend developing, you should spend about ten promoting. I believe it.

Part of the big reason I agree 100% with his comment is that there is no proven path in marketing a new product or idea of any kind and it is even harder to promote a new site that isn’t groundbreaking or controversial. John Grahams book is actually newsworthy though, a unique idea for a niche market, the easiest material for a reporter or blog author. His post though is what sites that are not newsworthy can do to gain traffic and attention for their product. There are thousands of people that are actively trying to market their idea with no budget and no experience and thousands more that have no product yet and all of them enjoy reading positive or insightful posts about promoting products. Creating a story worth reading can get you a thousand readers in a day and sharp declines in traffic the following days. It isn’t sustainable by any measure unless your already an excellent writer but those thousands of visits might give you the mention or opening you need to move up on the web.

That’s what promoting your site is all about isn’t it? Moving up to gain visibility from your target audience so you can start getting visitors you didn’t have to take by the hand. So how am I promoting my free online dating site DiveIntoThePool? For starters I’m paying for my visitors. Nothing black market mind you but my monthly bill is about the same as a nice car payment, all money is going to pay per click or impression based ads. The biggest thing this does for a dating site at least is give a nice fresh feeling for all visitors. Everyday there is someone new so the site is always changing. I’m definitely in the red a great deal of money and will be for the foreseeable future but I think it’s well worth the investment. Even if I could buy PageRank or SERP for the keywords I want it wouldn’t be worth it because I hate sites that game the system, they are usually empty of unique content like BigResource (I won’t link to them sorry).

Paid ads aren’t for everyone and if the site your starting isn’t newsworthy then you might not have a budget for advertising at all. After you’re done submitting to hundreds of directories and link exchanges I’ve got another suggestion for you. Become a part of the community where your users live. For me this means I needed to learn more and more about dating, you don’t want to go to relevant blogs and then just spam stuff like “great article, thanks!” because that is worthless to both the site your posting to and yourself. With insightful commentary you will get a better idea about your users and their needs as well as becoming someone recognized around the area by regulars. I can’t say whether or not becoming part of your target community is the silver bullet to promotion on a budget but it feels like the right thing to do so far. Keep in mind I haven’t received a single new user from any of my blog or forum posts yet and that isn’t the point. If you have no budget and no prior success the odds are you aren’t known to anyone.

My first press release of sorts was to my friends and collegeus, single people included in there and I didn’t get a single new signup from my own associates! While the announcement write up was a good experience and it felt good to tell everyone I launched it didn’t provide the site itself and benifit. I’ve been researching how to write up a proper press release and Bill Stoller’s Publicity Insider had a write up on being newsworthy which removed any doubt that publishers have no interest in helping me succeed. With a new site that isn’t newsworthy I have the competition of thousands of scripts and throw away sites also publishing press releases and I am working on what makes my site unique. You can’t write your first press release in a single sitting and I suggest that you have a few people read over it. Don’t have them look for spelling or grammar mistakes just yet because you want to know if they found the press release interesting. If it isn’t interesting then you need to go back to the drawing board until it is. The publishers get dozens of press releases a day you must stand out so take your time on this.

There is no single path to marketing a site that didn’t get $12 million in venture capital or wasn’t paid for with bailout money but hard work and persistence. Write about your experiences as you have them, become a part of your target community, write insightful commentary and don’t give up. I expect this to be a very long trip. I’ll be sure to write about it every chance I get and I hope to read about your experiences too.

Got any other ideas to promoting sites that aren’t newsworthy? Leave me a comment and let me know!