Site Promotion

[Todd]

How do you promote your shrines?

I think Amassment is great in that we can get a large group of people to view our sites with almost no effort promoting them by just being a member here. How do you promote your sites outside of the community though?

I'll answer in a separate comment, so I don't clutter up the question and main point of this post.

[Todd]

I'm actually struggling with this currently with my Knuckles site. The Sonic community is not very connected at all, and I haven't seen any joinables. I e-mailed several Sonic sites and asked for affiliation and link exchanges, but haven't received replies yet. I might join public directories like List Me and Geek Listings, but I'd like to push my way into the Sonic community as well, and get some more Sonic fans visiting my site (Not that you guys aren't great :P).

I struggled with this when I debuted Breathe Drew, too, and I think I gave up trying to promote it. lol

Success stories, go.

[Aku]

To be honest, I have never really worked to "promote outside the shrining community" - I think I've done most of what we all do, join various listings (including Amassment), plug plug plug to my network, and link exchange with others if I can. I guess for me, the niche of the shrining community seeing it has always been enough. :) I think part of me is also kinda scared to see the reception from people not in the shrining community LOL

As far as "creatively" plugging, about the only thing I can think of is what I did for Gintoki. About 5 days before I opened the site, I had a countdown with a different header & tweet for each day (which I tweeted out on shinkirounet & retweeted on my personal twitter lol). I think all it did was make people mad, but w/e since that's really all that site does anyway!!! I've become more and more interested in landing pages though--a lot of times we don't put sites online until they are "complete" (or "complete enough") and I was toying with the idea of creative landing pages for a site that's coming soon... haven't started on anything yet, obviously. :P

Tumblr is rumored to be a pretty good resource for plugging fanlistings to even those outside of the community though, so I don't see why slapping a #sonic the hedgehog tag on it and throwing it to the masses wouldn't be some form of promotion for a shrine as well! (I feel like a lot of fandom on tumblr is also very into psychoanalyzing cartoon characters... so it's kind of a good "audience".)

[Masao]

I don't do enough site promotion, but mostly because I'm lazy. Which sadly seems to be the source of all my problems

I have thought about tumblr, but the problem is, people there don't like clicking offsite. They'll read an excerpt if you quote it in your post, but otherwise it's no go. People there write a lot of what we'd probably call shrine essays, but they call them metas.

I probably wouldn't promote my sites on facebook or anything attached to me personally just because most of my other friends don't understand. They either think I'm a huge dork or I'm wasting time. I don't mind being labeled as a huge dork, because I am lol, but I know most people don't think of it as a positive label, so there's no need to get called out for it all the time by people who don't understand. And I've also got friends who think I run too many sites (and they don't even know half of it), so I keep my mouth shut to save my ears.

Otherwise though, if other people read what I write, I don't mind. I think if we write anything and put it out there, we need to own it. As in, not making excuses for it if someone criticizes it. It's one of the few good points I learned from my writing professor. I kind of want to make whatever shrine work I write to make sense for everyone, not just people who support my views. I think one of my proudest moments was when someone on tumblr told me they liked my Theon meta. They still hated Theon, but they appreciated my viewpoint and the things I had to say. I just need to channel my meta writing on tumblr back to my shrines xD;;

[anon]

When it comes to getting my site "out there", I usually start by posting a link on my LiveJournal first. Amassment is also a good place to plug fan sites, though since I've been on the decline I've actually made a plug-related post once. If I've joined other communities/forums related to my shrines, I plug at there too; usually they have a thread exclusively for plugging websites, and I also have it in my forum signature too.

If there are active top sites (that are also reputable, mind you, but that's not always a big deal) I will join them. And there are a lot of plugboards on the Internet that lets you post your button for free to advertise your site.

Non-fan-related sites are easier for me to plug because I don't have to join a specific fan community to plug my site, and these sites for me are generally aimed towards larger audiences instead of a specific niche.

[dubiousdisc]

I've never really tried at all. I'm pretty content with just plugging it here. I have been considering using Tumblr as an updating channel. In that case, I guess I'd post a screenshot of the website and a link, tag it and see what happens. I guess the crucial thing in that case would be the screenshot, so it can catch the eye and not disappear in the scrolling. But I haven't tried yet.

[Saya]

Same as dubious, I am quite satisfied with you lot visiting my shrines, while I do link them on my tumblr archive and my twitter, normally people only people who actually come and check, are you from amassment, and I'm ok with it =)))))

[Emma]

Same as dubious, I am quite satisfied with you lot visiting my shrines, while I do link them on my tumblr archive and my twitter, normally people only people who actually come and check, are you from amassment, and I'm ok with it =)))))

Yup, I'm exactly the same. I'm not really active anywhere else that I could plug a site, but I'm happy enough with who visits. So it's all good. :)

I also agree with what Masao said. I've seen a lot of essays on tumblr that would probably have been on shrines a few years ago.

[ritabuuk]

I'd say what I have used is a, "if you build it, they will come" attitude.

I have done some site promotion, but most of my hits seem to be longtime visitors that return every so often to see if I have updated. I also have people wandering in from Google. The people who are most interested in reading a shrine probably will be googling for its subject, so I guess you should make sure your site gets included in a Google crawl. Other than that, there is word of mouth and getting the link to your site out there. Link exchanges are good. There have been a few more popular fansites that gave my site a boost in visitors with a link exchange. But even better than that is someone who takes it upon themselves to say, "hey, check out this cool site" (an unsolicited link, a tumblr post, people talking in a forum, etc). That not only promotes my site in a more personal way, but makes me feel all fuzzy inside if I ever come across the plug. So, I think if you make the best site you can, and with even just mild promotion, eventually the fans will come. =)

[Ava]

I don't really promote my sites much, perhaps that's because they're not complete yet and marketing seems like such a big task. At the moment, I simply put up a link to my collective whenever I join a new social network and I link exchange with whoever contacts me.

Directories were my main method of finding websites in the past, so I still join them every once in a while.

The tumblr idea Aku mentioned is great. I'm not big on social media, but it's definitely something to consider, especially if it's been effectively utilized by the fanlisting community already.

Another option is to comment on blogs, with substantial comments, and list a related website of yours as your url. It reaches an interested audience and it's not shameless pandering if you really do have a response to the blog entry. I can't imagine that it would create a significant influx of traffic, but it's a small, simple action you can do if you're reading that blog anyway.