What strategy will win?

How to effectively promote new site

[JohnKing1]

I have just completed a site for The Vegetarian/Vegan Society of Queensland, an Australian based non profit organisation. The site has been running for under 2 months, and has been submitted to all the major search engines. It is currently listed in Dmoz, with related listings in Looksmart, MSN, etc. There are 25 known inbound links from related sites.

The client has expressed interest in advertising the site on the internet. Currently I am considering:
Paying to have 5 pages submitted to Inktomi.
Banner advertising. (I have no idea where I should advertise though)

Can anyone suggest the most effective way of advertising the site?

[Brett_Tabke]

Welcome to the forums. Thought about Overture?

Before that, I would persue an agressive search engine listing campaign (freebies) and see what it produces. Once you start spending money on traffic, you tend to lose site of the freebies.

[cfel2000]

You have asked the largest question possible (especially if you've read the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy and therefore already know the meaning of life [49]). I would suggest targetting the free areas of some search engines like Yahoo. And I would diffinatly submit your site to DMOZ and therefore Google. Beyond that it depends on who your target audience is and how much your willing to pay.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Welcome John,

I also run a non-profit site...you can get a good listing in the Yahoo directory free of charge and also try getting listed in zeal, who provide results for looksmart amongst others

I havent spent a penny promoting my site yet get quite a few visitors

Content will always provide more visitors than any other method!

[cfel2000]

msn have a free registration to non-profit organisations as well

[Hobbyist]

That's Zeal. (the non-commercial way to enter MSN)

[skirril]

Have you tried the sneaky way?

Recommend this page to a friend?

I have a php script that ode that, mail me (email) if interested..

Skirril

[JohnKing1]

Thanks for the advice. I have been listed in Zeal and it is starting to produce some traffic with MSN and local Australian engines.

I will advise the client to do a trial 'Full Serve' Overture campaign. Some of the keywords related to the site have no bidders at all so should be able to get to the top with little expense.

I will keep trying with the free spider/directory submissions. I am new to the keyword analysis game, it looks like a black art to me at the moment, so I will rely on adding lots of good content for the moment and tweak the keywords later.