Getting viewers

[GFLPraxis]

In addition to any help someone can offer me for the site I'm designing for someone else (see this thread), I also wanted a little help for my own site.


A group of us created NintendoPlayers.com (I'm sure you'll notice the link in my sig). This is our first 'serious' site- we hope for it to get fairly big and have put a lot of work into it. Now we have the dilemma of advertising and getting people to view the site. What's the best way to go about it? We've been doing our best to increase our google pagerank (linking to others, meta tags, good HTML, trying to get other pages to link to us, etc). My general strategy so far has been:

(A) Put the link in my sig everywhere, have other writers do the same
(B) On Slashdot, look for brand new Nintendo-related articles and post as soon as I can, and try to make a good post that is rated +5 funny or +5 insightful near the top- highly rated posts get bumped above the rest, and thus are viewed by the millions of Slashdot viewers. The few days I've gotten a post near the top had minor spikes in the amount of viewers.
(C) Just try to have good content. So far we've had Nintendojo cite us as a source twice in their articles.

I don't want to do annoying things like posting "VIEW OUR SITE" on multiple forums like some idiots do. What is the best way to get our site more viewers?

 

[radiantm3]

You need to have a good reason for people to want to visit your website more than just once. The most obvious thing is good content. If people don't find your content interesting, then they won't be bookmarking the site or passing it along to friends. There's no reason for someone to stick with your site if there's another competing site that has better content. You need to think of things your website can offer that other nintendo-related sites do not.

Just look at 3-4 other websites that "compete" with yours and study what kind of content/features they are serving. Try to think what features draw a user's attention. In what area's are they lacking? Instead of trying to compete with things they are good at, try adding/improving elements on your site that they aren't doing very well. That way users have other reasons to visit your site.

For example a user could say he goes to Site A for their great news coverage, Site B for their community, and Site C because they have hilarious nintendo related comics for example. If you are Site C and drive traffic to your site by having some entertainment, you will automatically get people to join your community because of it.

Hope that helps in anyway.

 

[munkle]

Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about increasing traffic. Keep on doing what you're doing. Focus on what interests you, participate meaningfully in discussions on relevant sites and forums, concentrate on writing something worthwhile and people will begin to notice and your traffic will increase.

To help Google index your site, you might want to check out Google Sitemaps.