PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

Its been a little over eight months since I launched the Caricature King website. This has been an interesting time because despite using all of the skills and knowledge built up over the past nine years I have had websites, this one still causes me some frustration in terms of getting traffic.

Even now it still has a page range of zero (but at least you can find me in Google) and MSN is the search engine that brings me most traffic (I hear this from a lot of others with sites less than a year old). Getting a SERP that I am happy with still evades me - but maybe I just need to give it a little more time.

Readers may have read my post a while back about how caricatures can be a great fundraising idea. This has slowly started to gather momentum. Already schools are discovering that by using email and special link provided that tracks the sales to pass the information about the fundraiser around to friends and get their friends to pass it on again, orders from far and wide can be generated. This is great for the schools as it brings in funds from sources other than the parents and those they normally chase when holding pie or chocolate drives.

But I digress…

The latest method of traffic generation I am using is running a competition. The prize is a free head and shoulders caricature drawn by one of the artists. The promotion of the competition has been via some competition promotion sites in the UK, USA and Australia.

In addition to the increased traffic from the competition websites, with some I believe there may even be a bit of a linking advantage - not that I have checked to see if the have a robots.txt file to instruct the search engines not to follow the links.

Other than introducing new people to the website, I have as part of the conditions of entry that they acknowledge that they will be added to my newsletter email list. OK, so there will be a flurry of unsubscribes, but in the main my experience is that most will stay on - so I can remind them and bring them news from the site in the future - and so generate some more sales.

Feel free to enter - you might win

technorati tags: website marketing | how to market a website