Tips On Marketing My Site?

I started this site in late June. It's popularity has not grown at all. Although there are new member registrations about every other day, the UV / day number has always been around 30.

The topic / niche is quite rare. However there is another site on this niche which has a PR of 4 ( The Male Soprano Page ), is listed in dmoz and yahoo dir. However, that site has been around for over 11 years and I am certainly hoping that I wont have to wait that long to earn that page rank.

I have been trying to make some link exchange with other music sites since about 3 weeks ago and it's going alright. However, some sites refuse to exchange links with me due to the unpopularity of my site.

My site has forums, videos, pictures ( gallery ), articles ( which are collected from other sites and written from scratch by members ) discography and biography for the singers ( keywords ) I am targeting a high rank for in Google. However, the discography and biography sections are still very empty and it'll take a while to fill them.

What would be best to fill first? Should I try to collect every related video in the video section before working on the other, more incomplete sections or should I try to add content to everything simultaneously and slowly?

Is there anything else I can do than add content and exchange links?

I hope I was clear enough here, if there are any questions you need answered before being able to give me tips, please ask .

You have a very carefully defined demographic, particularly since the male soprano voice is more rare among vocalists, so I can imagine it might be somewhat daunting to turn regular old traffic into sticky traffic. However, the counter balance of this observation is that when you do get niche targeted traffic to your site, you are likely to build a very loyal user base.

One suggestion I might have for you is to be more proactive. Instead of simply building content & implementing SEO, you might want to supercharge your efforts by going out and finding isolated pockets of demographic groups that will definitely contain your target audience.

The first thing I did was login to my Facebook account and searched for "soprano", finding several classical music groups especially for sopranos. Within these groups you will find musical talents including your male sopranos.

You may have done so already, but I would immediately join all of these networks and start jumping into the conversation. Create a new account with your site name as your username, and then just contribute in conversation. They will naturally make their way to your site to check it out when they trust that you are truly a valuable member of their community.

Your site work lies in content. If you are going to bring this highly targeted, difficult to harness group to your site, make sure you have something interesting for them there.

Find something that tweaks their interest, challenges their intellect, arouses their curiosity, etc. Write an article/thread on it, and give it an amazingly catchy title to get them in there. End your article with a point of debate or question almost guaranteed to force a response from them. Then reply and keep the discussion going. Others will naturally want to jump in to be a part of the ongoing discussions.

From there what you are going to find is that all these new visitors who are engaged by your site are going to gradually start talking about you in other communities spreading links around for you, or in verbal discussions with their colleagues getting direct traffic for you, or email referrals, etc, etc, etc.

So it might at first sound like this is a lot of work, and you really wanted SEO to just take care of all that. The irony is that all this up front work will make your SEO factors explode your site with traffic down the road as your site starts generating all kinds of links back to your content. From there, you'll find that new users are going to be finding you via search and you may not need to spend any time at all in other communities. Of course you may still want to do so, since if it works in the beginning, it's even more likely to work as your site grows in reputation.

Thanks Joe. I've never used FaceBook but I suppose it's worth trying for the sake of the site. How do you suggest I get around their name system?

site look great! very impressed by the aesthetics...took a while to load though over your competitors site, might want to look at that...

if you had a person interested in your topic and saw you and your competitions site, you would win no brainer.

just have to get them there first. Good advice Joe.

Originally Posted by Arkidas

Thanks Joe. I've never used FaceBook but I suppose it's worth trying for the sake of the site. How do you suggest I get around their name system?

Create an account for yourself, and advertise your site on your profile info, create a group for your site, and join other groups related to the topic that you can post to & possibly link within, & setup an RSS feed using your Facebook notes that pull some of your most important content from the site.

Okay , but I was mainly asking what name you would suggest me to use. They've got some restrictions for 'First name' and 'Surname'. I can't just type 'Malesopranos' in first name and '.com' in surname.

Thanks for the compliment Caddyman. It's a mystery to me why my site takes so long to load. It might be the RAM, there's usually just around 250MBs free of my 2GB for some reason ( I use my server as home computer as well, on CentOS ). The connection shouldn't be a problem ( 40 / 40 ).

Yes - I understand. My recommendation is to use your real name.

But you said I should have my site's name as user name? Is user name something I need to set separately in my FaceBook account?

Sorry for the confusion. I did say that. Let me correct myself in saying, consider doing this on any site that provides the capability.

You may have done so already, but I would immediately join all of these networks and start jumping into the conversation. Create a new account with your site name as your username, and then just contribute in conversation. They will naturally make their way to your site to check it out when they trust that you are truly a valuable member of their community.