Forum Moderators: phranque
I have been working on a web site for the past 3+ months and its coming along well. The site is an entertainment site for ham radio. We have a good forum, photo upload gallery, ham radio news, search engine, live DX clusters every 3 min., other cool scripts, about 1,000 pages of content and we have plans to ad 10 times what we have now. We also have 2 editors. I have scripts that allow them to post in designated areas of the site via their browser.
Like I said, the site is only 3 months old. The volume of traffic is about 1,000 to 1,500 visitors per week. That's great for now, but what does it take to get 5,000 visitor's a day? HOW DOES A SITE GO BIG?
I feel like I'm behind a GTO with a BIG engine, and you keep trying to turn the engine but it dies. You get it going, but its cold and dies. Like, the site will start to have allot of action and new visitors see current visitor's participating and its contagest, but so is inactiveness.<--is that a word?
What will help get it jump-started? Search engines, Takes time right? We are very lucky to have paid lots of attention to treads on this site, discussions on SEO. And have read articles on it from everywhere. We are only in 3 search engine, one is my favorite, Google. We were lucky to get in the top ten positions on many good search terms, one is "ham radio entertainment" with the #1 and # 2 position. But that still does not do it.
It must be time. Maybe 2 or 3 or 5 years. We will just have to wait and see. There our only a few other big sites out there like us. They have been around for many years and I sometimes wonder if surfers are afraid of new sites. Maybe everything looks creepy to them because they have gotten so attached to these other sites. Then there is always the possibility that my site sucks the big one. Kind of like the ugly kids mom who thinks her son should be a model. Boy that would be pitiful.
Well, if anyone has any impute on this, I would sure like to here what you have to say. Chow for now and thank you in advance!
KG2RG
the community was set up to serve the users of an MSN chat room ... the MSN communities just didn't do what we wanted so i created our own community. this chat room is the only source of traffic to the community. search engines have spidered parts of the community, but as far as i know, we only have a handful of plain HTML pages listed in google (PR1).
personally i don't think search engine listings are of any real benefit to the community as it is not for profit. when we finally get a bank account opened for it, we can add a few affiliate links to help it pay for itself.
have you thought about gaining traffic from MSN chat rooms? try using the MSN chat room as the main public chat room for the community.
how about creating small introduction sites about ham radio on MSN / geocities etc? people finding them would then be able to follow the links through to your community.
and are you posting "recommendations" for your community on other websites and forums? sneaky i know, but it works.
Sounds like your doing good with your project. And as for using other sites forums to get the word out, yes I have done some of that as well. Some sites have no problem with it and other ham sites edited my post and told me not to steel their traffic. I have even sent about 600 emails to ham clubs and organizations.
Google has about 230 pages indexed. Prior to registering our address, our title was SlingShot-99. It was not likes as a name. viewers voiced that to me many times and we have even pulled a bit of traffic from seachers looking for slingshots. I'm not sure why I called it SlinShot to begin with. When we where choosing a name to register, we had keywords relevant to ham radio in mind. We came up with HamWave. The URL is hamwave.com but it the title tags, I put a space in it, making it 2 words ham wave. I'm sure this will help with SE results. I would almost even say that the title tag is your biggest allies in SE results.
As for using MSN chat room as the main public chat, I don't think it will work for us because we our ham radio. Maybe it would work, but I would fear an empty chat room with our name all over it. Howmany licensed hams can we find in the MSN chat rooms. We as a ham site our at a slight disadvantage. Kind of limited, but there are millions of hams in the world.
You mentioned having paid links to help pay some of the sites cost, We have also that of this. We have a banner rotation but only advertise ham related banners. We have a few paying advertisers and its going to take a whole lot more to pay for the site and support future plans. There is a ham radio magazine with a circulation of 45,000 subscribers. I will advertise in there classifieds for .20 cents a word. That's pretty cheap. Here's a question. If I advertise just the URL, one word, it will be very cheep and in our budget. Maybe pay a little more to have out one word URL in bold and under/over lined. Can this be effective as much as an ad with 20 words? IE, hamwave.com ham radio entertainment has want ads forums and so on?
I also think real hard, about what can I put on my site that no other site has. Something different, but something that hams need. Something that can only be used via our site?????????????? I'm sure that is something we all think about.
Howmany licensed hams can we find in the MSN chat rooms.
what can I put on my site that no other site has
Some thoughts....
First of all, looking at the topics within your forums, have you thought about more specialized topics such as QRP, homebrewing, and policy/legal issues? From my experience, those three topics alone are "hot" and good at attracting a diverse group of people. Admittedly the policy/legal topic can get a bit strained considering the global reach of a web site.
There is a huge global community of amateur radio enthusiasts on the internet. You have a good site, and I would not be suprised if given some more time you attract a much larger audience. But you also are competing against tons of email listservs that cover different topics, UseNet newsgroups, and more specialized topic web sites. Go out, check out those resources, and see what you can offer that they don't.
Another aspect you might consider is print ads. Between 73, CQ, and QST (among others) you could probably gain a number of readers by a simple ad placed in a hobby-specific magazine. <-- added.... Doh, I see you are already lookin' at magazine adverts....s'pose I should finish reading 'fore I post. :) -->
Thanks for the kind words and the great advise. I would like to soon provide free web sites for hams on the site. I have my eye on a few web hosting scripts. I would also use a redirecting script to Convert subdirectories to subdomains. Can be used with their ReDirect script to give visitors theirname.yourdomain.com This script requires your server to have DNS wild card. My server said they will add it for me
All this will require lots of server space and that will cost $$$. We will try are best to grow. The main thing I hope to achieve from all this, is to contribute to and promote ham radio. Ham radio is a hobby on the edge, with a lot of competition from other hobbies. Its a great hobby and while helping to preserve it, I am having a great time and its a great experience from a wed design aspect.
