Our Journey into Internet Marketing

Not like I promised a post about our future plans, but something more about the current state of our internet marketing and yours as well.  If you are not much into marketing like us, a good start is to at least know how bad things are for your site.   There are several indicators for how well you are doing at this moment.  Things like Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Number of indexed pages in Google, etc.

To check all these statistics for your site someone has developed a nice tool of which we are hosting an improved version at  www.xinureturns.com.  An other nice tool to use are the Google Webmaster Tools. It shows you much info about links to your site, keywords, errors during crawling your site, etc.   You can even set some preferences and ask for removal or reinclusion of certain content from the index.

To get more statistics about actual visitors and referrals  we use Google Analytics, which seems to be widely regarded as the best free package available at this moment.

Our currently most successful site is www.picturepush.com. It’s an online photo sharing site. At this moment it is around for one and a half year. It currently does about 75,000 visitors each month and hosts about 400,000 pictures. So what did we do to get up to this point? And what will we try next?

Search Engine Optimization
One way of getting visitors is from search engines, Google in particular. There is a lot of information available about the basics, e.g. on www.seomoz.org . So what we have done is:

• remove duplicate content, every page has one URL
• put album and image names in titles and in the URL
• put important keywords in the titles on homepage, signup page, etc.

We also tried to pay a SEO company to find good keywords for us and optimize the site further for indexing, but this did not work out. At least we could not tell the difference from our statistics. Currently we do about 300 to 400 visitors from Google. More than half of the searches is on actual content related keywords, so things like ‘Paris’, ‘Trucks’, etc. But a lot of pages are still not indexed, so we hope to see further improvement in this area.

Buying Undirected Traffic
We once tried to buy undirected traffic, which gave us a lot of visitors, however the number of actual users that stick with the site is so low, that it does not justify any cost at all.

Directory Submission Services
We once tried a service that submitted our sites to A LOT of directory sites. However, we have never been able to confirm that it resulted in any visitors at all. We also tried to submit manually to some relevant directories, which takes a lot of time and does result in a few visitors, but in this area we have not been very lucky yet.

Email Newsletter
A spike in the number of sign ups resulted from a contest, which we emailed to close to a hundred thousand members of an other website. Which makes me wonder now, why we didn’t try marketing by email more often.

Social Bookmarking
Submitting your site, or one page to one of the social bookmarking sites can get you a lot of traffic. We have been very unsuccessful at this, although we can tell that it works best to submit actual content (deeplinking) on the site (a beautiful picture in our case) than the site itself.

Recently we had some success with a funny cartoon posted on reddit. Resulting in over 7000 visitors in one day. However, these visitors only visit the site very briefly and none of them became actual users.

Product Improvement
Some improvements we did to the site had an influence on gaining extra users. E.g. moving the sign up form from the homepage to a separate page and linking it with a huge button. However, most improvements just make our existing users happier, but they don’t seem to spread the word very fast. Still, we can see that most growth comes from referrals from existing users.

In my next post I will tell about what we plan to do next for our photo sharing service.

We love to think about new web applications and even implement them. However, until now we are not very successful in convincing users to come to our sites and use them. In this weblog we will try to keep you up to date about our efforts to make our existing and new products more successful.   At this moment we don’t know whether our products just suck (we don’t think so), or is it our (lack of an) approach  to the market.  Either way, we need to find out soon.

What we will do is post here at least once a week about our efforts in the area of online marketing in it’s broadest sense.   In my next post I will tell something about our products and the marketing efforts we did in the past year.