Promoting a news service

Latelly (as most of you know), I added another site to my network, Web 2.0 announcer, which is a site that displays all the top stories from several sites (digg, delicious, spurl, etc.)

As a site I think it is very usefull, especcially to bloggers that search for content to add to their blogs, and looking at the statistics of the site, I think that most of the people who visit it once, continue using it on a regular basis.

My problem is that I don't know how to promote it. My first thought was to send a press release (which I will propably do), but I would like to have some help from you too...

Can you please help me with that?

Thanks in advance :)

BTW I think to pay a small ammount (let's say 1-2$) to every blogger that will make a post about this site.

Do you think that this would be a wise move, or not?

have a good contest for a logo somewhere else to get complete mileage, or if you have the time, ask bloggers to link to this site, i think its kewl  idea... but paying for posts might be a good idea, Just exchange some kind of links for posts so you wont have to pay em...

I think you should post on important blog sites and add some info on the website that blogs have to add you link...
and write a wordpress plugin! (f.e. a search function)

Thanks. Those are very very nice ideas.

I think I will implement some of them :)

BTW how hard is to write a wordpress plugin?

just go to wp developers and get one thats done, and mod it... thats what others do...

Hehe, right :)

I happened to wander into this site yesterday. It's some sort of advertising program where your ads appear on blogs. Has anyone tried it? Sounds like just the trick to advertise to bloggers, but it seemed a bit thin on explaining what bloggers are targeted.

http://web.blogads.com/

Sounds like a good service. Maybe I will try it when I have some extra bucks.

BTW Michelle did you got my yesterday mail?

looks like adbrite or something...

Ok I made a wordpress plugin :)

But as it is only my 3rd day with wordpress, I would like to have some beta testers just in case that there is any bug....

So if you want just pm me to send you the file. The plugin is displaying the top tags in a tag cloud (as seen here)

Thanks in advance :)

how does this cloud work if I have categories like:

Advertising
Uncategorized
Reviews
- Websites
- books
- aplications
SEO

It doesn't matter what categories you have. The plugin displays the top tags of web2announcer in the sidebar of your blog.

how are these tags selected?

They are the top tags from the web2announcer service.

With the admin module you can set how many of them you want to display.

Should I add a modification to use custom tags?

so this cloud is a remote copy of the cloud from your web2announcer  website?

Yeah, but it keeps a cached copy in your site, plus you can control how many tags you will display.

I know this is an old thread but I still need some help for this site :)

Until now the site is going very well. We have very good search engine traffic, got on social bookmark sites homepages some times, and there are many return visitors which means that our service is useful to the people who find us :)

The real difference until now was the social bookmarks, as this gave us a chance to get links from many popular forums and blogs and this has as result more stable traffic. Of course this is a great source of traffic, but I can't rely on that (even that I know we will be picked again) I have to note here that there was no tricks regarding social bookmarks, and in fact I didn't even submitted the site to any of them, which means that the site in general is optimized for social bookmarks.

So I need to find some more ways to promote this service (both the news and the videos sections) but my problem is that I can't clarify the target group of this site. I mean that the site is very general to have a specific target group.

If I want to create a cpc campaign I really don't know what keywords should I look for, or what to post in the campaign. If I want to promote this using other sites, I can't think of a site that could probably be good to promote such a site.

So - obviously - I am stuck :) Do you webdigiters have anything in mind regarding this site? I am interesting in both free and paid ways to promote it.

Couple of things you could try...

Feeds, since you already have feeds look at promoting them services such as feedburner and the like would be an ideal way (and free) of attracting and maintaining visitors.
Content wise, you have a problem that most of your content is not original, you should try and promote the blog more, partly to make your site stand out but more importantly because its you principle content source at the moment.
notice you have done the press release thing, but don't forget you can re do it as many times as you want,

PPC will I think not net you in many long term visitors, and so would be a waste of money, you can always tried paid reviews though I would recommend you do this through one of the new pay per post companies, that at the very least will insure that you are one step away from the bloggers.
Competition, why not run one, who can find the maddest story. Also think of ways to get visitors interacting with the site.

just some thought I'm sure I will be back with more.

First of all thanks for your comment, it is really useful :)

The content is not unique, but the site is very useful because it offers some unique things :

• People can see all the top stories from all the top social bookmark web sites in one place
• Members can browse only stories they are interested in (by using the favorite tags feature)
• Members can save their favorite stories for later view

Now regarding feedburner I don't get it, how you can promote a site with them? Feedburner is still something I don't know much about....

Pay per post sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should spend some money for some blog posts from busy tech related blogs.

That competition idea is good. I will work it out and see what I can do for that :)

feedburner is just an example of a way to syndicate your feeds, think of your feeds as simply an extension to the site, there are dedicated feed directories and other sites, feed optimisation can net you a fair view extra visitors,  via your feeds so if you go down the is route its important to sort out the advertising side of your feed, when I get a minute I will digg through Google Reader for a few good links on feed optimisation and marketing.

The content side its worth using the blog as a content generator for the site, it really is making a difference already and should be given a more prominent place to help the engines, while you I and people visiting the site know that the site is useful you have to see it from a search engine view, more unique content more chances of hits.

at the moment there is a 50% discount at reviewme.com for new advertisers! enter "trial" during you order.

From that perspective I know how a feed can help :) Right now I have an addthis button which can be used to subscribe to the feed from any service of that type. We also have a button for social bookmarks, and a google module which allows people to check the top stories from their google homepage.

Tim you are right about the content thing. I should start posting more stuff from the site in the blog. In the beginning I've just puted it there to log the changes in the application and get more feedback from the users.


I am on my way.... Thanks :)

For the record, the discount is valid, but they don't accept paypal :(

thats strange the payout is via paypal...TLS ads need to be paid with paypal too...

That is really strange. Maybe they've changed their payment processor lately or they have a different processor for each country? :P

sorry I wrote the wrong thing, TLA payments need to be done with the credit card but the publishers payout is via paypal

I just thought I would post a quick link to everyones fav blogger (urgh not me )
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/02/14/11-ways-to-find-new-rss-subscribers-for-your-blog/
Its aimed at blogs but it might give you some inspiration for your feeds.

Interesting post. There are some valuable advices there.

Thanks :)

So far I have optimized my feeds and gave them more visibility in order to get more subscribers. Also I've added some more content sources and I am trying to be more active in the blog. Also I've made some myspace promotions with some success but I guess I need more friends to my account in order to make this promotion work better :) Last I worked the SEO a little more and now the site gets a little more than 1000 daily visitors from search engines so I guess so far we are ok from this promotion.

Today's job is to promote our new revenue sharing system as I think it have potential (at least if some serious people trust me with this)

The next step is to promote the site using a social bookmark submission service. As the site actually established from social bookmark traffic I guess this promotion worths. BTW can somebody help me find some cool title/description for my first listing? I want to post something for the video section of the site, so I guess I will use a title like "Cool videos from all around the web" or something like that but I have no clue what to use for description. Can you help me on that? Would it be better to post a listing from the videos or the video section itself?

Thanks in advance for any feedback :)