doodlebug

Here's my issue, I have put a lot of effort into making GreatLever.com this is a town in Bolton with approx 13k residents but how should I promote it ?

Ideas :

1. Advertise on local radio at a cost of £120 for 99 ads
2. Buy 50 window decals saying we are listed on GreatLever.com your local directory at a cost of £60 and ask the shops listed on my site to place one in their window.
3. Post leaflets through doors at a cost of £40
4. Be naughty and get 250 stickers for £26 and place them on bus stops etc.

Please help me !

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No links for me thanks !

websaway

whatever you do you will get a limited return so don't spend too much.

Edwin

4. is stupid because a Whois will lead right back to you

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Caz

Agreed. Although lots of people do away with it.

The company that got £100,000 cleaning bill from a London council would scare me of doing anything like this. But if your cool with a man having to go to each bus stop and taking the sticker off then cleaning it at a cost of £100 per sticker go for it lol

julian

I think you are just wasting your time with this because:

- a residential suburb of Bolton is not extact at the top of everyones list for a destination.

- who's going to bother to advertise on it who lives in Greatlever anyway?

- greatlever.co.uk is already serp'd up to the eyeballs (can't even see greatlever.com on first page of g)

- even if you got people to look at it via all your methods the website looks like a 15min dull and uninspiring WP job - your only hope is to inspire a community feeling so people continue to look and perhaps bookmark it? How do you do that? Content. Decent content = £££ or Time + hardwork..

but please don't let let me put you off - prove me wrong!

KingDomainNames

1. Need to consider the quality of the radio advert, and when it will be aired (daytime, evening, midnight ! ?)
2. Sounds good - decals in shop windows, if well designed, are more attractive to me than, say, a regular A4/A5 poster.
3. I’d also consider producing a small run of leaflets to drop into those businesses not yet listed, in addition to the house leaflets.
4. Stickers - I’d be scared too. Have you considered ‘clean’ advertising ? Link - can this form of advertising get someone into trouble ?

Other possiblities:
More prominent link (+ icons) on the site to a twitter account and Facebook page maybe (in addition to a like button or G+ button.
Use Twitter and search for twitter geo apps out there that may help spread the word.
Use Tweetdeck to have columns for different relevant keywords, and re-tweet any relevant/good/helpful ones that pop up in real-time in those columns.
Facebook page - once you have 25 likes, you may be able to then bag the username you want, which may help in search results (I’m no seo expert though)

Just my tuppence-worth

p.s. I can see you used 'Create' on the site - would you recommend it ?
Cheers, Steve

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doodlebug

Was wary of this idea and even though cheap I am going to skip it.

You're right on the quality, I'm not great at web design but then looking at other sites around mine are great compared to a lot out there, as for it being a tourist destination it never will be, as for locals advertising well it's free to list, was hoping that people need something then greatlever.om comes to mind, its not easy for them to forget the domain is the place they live and .com is always easy to remember.
As for Serps I did have this domain parked in the past so probably flagged.

Thanks for the post, the radio ad would only be like 20 secs but they have offered to write it for me, Twitter is something I am yet to use so going to look into how it all works, as for Create, If like me you don't write your own code and do stuff like mysequel files etc then yes I would reccommend it as it does most of the work for you, I have seen some really nice looking sites done using Create and mine are definitely not the top end of you can do on Create.

ps. I looked at that link and gotto say they do some cool ad work

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woopwoop

I actually did the window decals for one of my websites and also made business cards and bought the plastic card holders.

I walked around the whole area and talked to local businesses, I got to know about their businesses and spoke about how we could team up. Here's what the decals (static clings) looked like:



I also did the same for another geo site I have:



Here's a pic of how the business cards/stands looked.




I'm not sure of the impact but I think it was very minimal. And while I don't regret the £250-ish it all cost me, I think that whatever you do, make sure you are ready to measure the impact. Stupidly, I wasn't (time/busy/all that) so I have no real way of knowing whether it was a complete flop (I can't even track the dates I did it/the site registrations/uvs too easily)

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doodlebug

Thanks for your post mate, the business cards idea looks good, I could maybe place one of them in the doctors and dentist etc.

I've decided it's radio ads, decals and business cards.

Total costs around £300 but this is only for the initial launch and not going to be regular, if it makes £10 per week = approx £500 per year it will do, it costs me £60 per year and very little work for which I enjoy doing anyway

Here's to the future

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rob

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