Every month I’m writing a post about site promotion.  I started the website in July 2009 and for six months it attracted no visitors (except for friends and relatives). On march 2010 I decided to take the site more seriously.

In this journal I’m sharing my experience of promoting this website. While it’s possible to learn about site promotion from many pundits, the idea here is to offer the perspective of a complete newbie, learning by doing. I’m also going to share the results of each attempt.

A month has passed since Journal entry #1 and we’ve experienced web exposure magic. From 1-2 visits per day we’re seeing at least 10 visits per day. During this month we had 590 visits. According to Alexa the site is rated at 17000000 Place – I don’t really know what that means but it’s not that good. Still it is amazing growth. In fact, if we’ll have the same growth as this month for the next 20 months we’ll probably outperform Google. Scary thought….

I’ll try to summarize all the tools and methods that made a difference so far:

1. Update the blog every week – this is the commitment we took for this website/blog. So far so good, even if it’s hard work.
2. Fixed a redirect problem – I’ll write about it sometime.
3. Placed tags on all posts
4. Placed alt text field on all images – improved very much the Google images search results. Actually it seems that most of the traffic the site receives from search engines are from image search.
5. Commented on forums. I joined some forums and made some simple comments there, these are:
   • Escape from illustration island
   • Zero2Illo
   • MouseCaffe
6. Enlisted to some online portfolio services
   • HAI – Hire an illustrator
   • Saatchi gallery
   • Israel society of illustrators

So as I mentioned, the results were good – even if we still have a very unpopular site. It’s a big change from where we started. What’s next? It seems that we’ve done so much it will be difficult to improve now. Some ideas and plans:

• Get the know social networks and join twitter and Facebook
• Allow people to follow using twitter on the posts released
• Continue to post every week
• Print business cards and postcards with my website in them, and distribute them
• Show work in local exhibitions
• Continue to email agents
• Continue to learn about SEO and gather more ideas

Tags: Site promotion, Web Traffic

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Site promotion, The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.