Website promotion - advice needed

Hello.

I've been in web design as a part time thing for a number of years, and whilst I've tried to steadily improve serverside/graphic/good layout skills etc. there's one thing I still have no clue about - promotion of the site.

Recently, I did a reduced rate contract (I'm a student, it's freelance part time for local businesses) for a small film maker in my area. He's part of a few guys who set up a company called Robin Hood Productions because they're all history enthusiasts who happened to have some spare cash to invest.

The manager guy who I directly worked for got ripped off by Sage (£100 for a domain name!!) and a lot of other conmen when researching how to get a website going and I felt sorry for em all and did it at a much lower price than if anyone else had asked.

Now, they've done their first video and they'd like to sell it - I've done this the cheapest way possible, through a third party processor which is easy to use (they're not very computer literate). It's all online and ready to sell and has been for a few weeks - but the orders still aren't coming in!

I've checked to make sure the website is working fine, but still nothing.

I've submitted to search engines where possible (for an entire day of my own time - even to ones I've never heard of, UK specific ones, worldwide ones, the big players, directories, everything, manually and no automated as to ban the site) and created relevent, non-repetative meta tags.

We're even running a competition on the website! (http://www.robinhoodproductions.com/competition.htm - easy question designed to get visitors to see what the videos are about). I've posted this on Loquax.co.uk and all other big competition sites to get visitors to notice us, still nothing.

I can't think of what else to do? I really hope these guys succeed in what they're doing but I'm at my wits end as to what I should do next - I've even made sure all friends/relatives/etc. know about the website and the kiddy video being available!


Are there any promotion gurus out there who can help me sort this out??

Thank you in advance!!

Sarah.

Oh, yes, and I've also tried getting links added to Robin Hood enthusiast websites in return for one! :(

lmao, you need better prizes... :D

Also, your website does not seem to work.

No, seriously, you need better advertising techniques.

Comps do not generally work, and whatsmore, it can cost you more than what you would make, if the response is not so good, as what you are saying at the moment.

I do not know how I get the kind of hits that I do, although my website is still under construction, I am getting around 500 hits every hour... but that was due to style of advertising, non-direct.

From these forums, a lot of people go over to my site voluntarily, as from other forums.

If you want effective advertising, I would generally go with sponsoring someone else who is pretty big, who will therefore put a link to your website.

For example, this is what www.pixeljunction.com does, it has a webring, which is pretty big, and well the codingforums are an example of this too.

I guess that is the best way, seeing as a lot of people generally ignore ads anyhow.

A few weeks is nothing. You have to wait a few months before things start to happen. You must also realize that nobody may be interested in their 'great' video. For ways to promote your site, search the web for "free website promotion" or "website promotion". :D

I am afraid that your competion is a bit too obviously a means of harvesting email addresses, and people are not too keen on receiving a barrage of advertising. And your prize is hardly exciting.

Are you counting the number of hits on your site, or orders received? Hits are the equivalent of people passing the front door of a shop and glancing in the window. You will be lucky to get 1 order out of 200 hits.

You do need to consider the point made that your product may not actually be wanted by a lot of people. No amount of advertising will overcome that - in the world of consumer goods only 2 or 3% of new products ever become established in the market in spite of very costly and professional promotion.

In fact, you should have started immediately, by including the sites URL in your signature in the message above. I usually just visit a site to know more about someone else if I'm communicating with them, even if its not their site, it lets me know their interest, and I can bring that up with them later on.

Find other Robin Hood sites, let them promote the site. Its true, like it was mentioned before, weeks isn't much time on the web.

Also, for sites like these, only people with an acute interest, or really need to get information quickly, will visit them. The more information you guys contain, not just about the project, but about Robin Hood himself, and other sources of material (like other movies, books, write comparisons of the two, or b/w movies etc.) the more involved we will be about it. However, seeing a project that doesn't really involve the visitor, or initiate an interest with an familiarity except for the fact that he's a fan of Robin Hood is hard for him to get interested.

Its like me starting a site, trying to sell my home videos of me on my vacation. :cool: As cool as I might feel watching them, I'm sure people who don't know me, or even people who do know me, wouldn't care too much, unless they can be linked to it. -> though i'm quite sure the robinhoodproductions video is of much better quality. :thumbsup:

Another interesting way of getting people into the site, is to get people involved, for example this forum. Discuss anything to do with Robin Hood, and just go from there. Of course, initially, you'll need quite a few diehard fans to keep the forum going, but if it catches on, you got your hits right there. Its something of how Amazon.com runs their business, they don't care about profits for the initial years, they working on getting customer loyalty.

Duniyadnd