Promoting London

To celebrate the coming of Spring the cost of a basic tag has been reduced to £20 from £30. This is a limited time offer until the end of March 2008 so if you have been putting off claiming one now is the perfect opportunity to get your personal promotional tag at a considerable reduction.
Happy Easter!

I haven’t had much time to post to this blog over the last few months and frankly, in terms of new trends and ideas for promoting and marketing websites, the market seemed to be undergoing a period of consolidation and rationalisation more than anything. Then, out of the blue last week I was contacted via one of my other websites by this young man inviting me to look at and possibly partake in a banner scheme he was setting up. in his own words;

“As a company you can submit a banner which costs $10 (roughly £5) this enters you into a daily draw the winner of which has their banner plastered all over my site for a day, giving them maximum publicity. At the end of the competition one advertiser is selected at random to win up to $250,000 to advertise their company. The grand plan is to get 100,000 submissions, with the prize money being 25% of the turnover.”

The scheme itself seemed interesting along with the fact he has personal story backing it which adds greatly to its PR possibilities - long story short, I quickly found myself buying banner space for two of my own sites.

All I can say is, if you are looking for a source of marketing at an incredibly small price which has real possibilities then I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out for yourself. For my part, I am putting together a package based on it to offer my clients, not something I commonly do as I am loathe to recommend schemes unless I really believe in their value.

For the record, the young man is called Richard Stratton [could he be the next Alex Tew?] and you can get started by visiting his website at www.theonebigad.com - good luck Richard and hope you’re not hobbling around for too much longer!!

It seems the Google datacentres have all finally updated their records to reflect the latest published pagerank scores. As mentioned previously, this means the price of a standard advertising tag in the Promoting London wordcloud has been raised to the intermediate level of £42 for a guaranteed minimum three years of exposure. Still remarkable value.

DelB

From the look of things it would appear that Google are in the midst of a pagerank update, a time when all knowledgeable webmasters cross their fingers and hope that their sites get a boost from the changes [and definitely do not suffer a relegation to a lower value]. There are webtools out there which allow you to view the pagerank of any website at the various Google Datacentres - normally the values would be the same across them all but at present there is a definite difference showing which datacentres have updated and which have not. How does this affect Promoting London? Well, as the word cloud page makes clear, once it reaches a certain pagerank then the cost of hyperlinks from it will increase. This will happen when all the datacentres have been updated which could be tomorrow or could still be a couple of weeks away [there never seems to be a set time span over which these updates take place]. All that I am saying is that there may be a price increase and it may be very, very soon.

As traffic was beginning to settle down here at PromotingLondon I decided it was time to go out marketing and seek some new hyperlinks by submitting the site to some of the plethora of small online directories that exist out in cyberspace. Spent much of yesterday with the submission process for nearly 200 directories of various sizes and format and am already starting to see the backlinks being posted where accepted. It will be interesting to see exactly how much this increases visitor traffic along with the effect it will have on the pagerank of the word cloud.

Regards,

DelB

I’m a little surprised by this piece from the Click team at the BBC. OK, so there are some good general points about PPC and the rest but they seem to buy into the PR myth surrounding the Arctic Monkeys rise to fame with a great naivety. Surely the idea that they [and a few other acts I won’t mention] came to the fore solely thanks to a genuine upswell of interest from users of sites like myspace has been long rumbled. Maybe I’m just too cynical these days.

DelB

It would seem the summer lull in business oriented search on Google has ended. The adwords campaign I am running for the PromotingLondon.com word cloud has shown a noticeable increase in click throughs and the necessary bid amount to get a decent placing on Google search results with many of the selected key phrases has risen considerably. Take up of the word tags continues to be steady with the expectation of a rapid increase as I bring into play more strands of the marketing campaign.

I am considering raising the price of the keyword tags as the PageRank of the cloud page increases. This would offer best value to early adopters of the scheme, a thank you to those who have helped make it a sucessful launch.

Regards,
DelB

Chitika recently announced an expanded range of advert sizes along with an increase in the product categories. At least now it should prove easier to fit their ads into whatever web page layout you might be using. See the example below for an idea of how well it can be integrated. Perhaps worth looking at again?

Launched the adwords campaign for PromotingLondon.com today, as in the past I prefer a Saturday start as it tends to allow a couple of quiet days to engage in fine tuning. Perhaps due to the hot weather and being the middle of the summer holidays there has been remarkedly little search traffic, even on the highly competitive keywords. I will decide on when to issue the press releases depending on how the adword campaign develops over the next couple of days.

DelB

In re-reading Trickle Down I realised that I had forgotten to say a big thank you to Arun & Abhishek at WordSiteBuilder.com for supplying and installing the script which powers the word cloud here. It was they who took the original word cloud ideas that were being promoted & pushed elsewhere and developed what, to my mind, is a far better product for those of us intent on giving our clients a promotional opportunity that really could fulfill its promise. They providing much needed contextualisation in the relationship between the link words and the search engine priorities. If you are interested, their very own cloud resides at 97tags.com alongside a very informative blog on the process.

Thanks Gentlemen,
DelB