Of Relevance

So I have this little online project on the side, www.click.co.za (it is a collection of user generated reviews and ratings on e-commerce shops in South Africa) and now I need to promote the site to gain maximum exposure.

The trick, of course, is to do so with minimum (or ideally zero) cost. Luckily, the venture is online and not on some street corner downtown, so in theory it shouldn’t be too difficult.Also, the audience is geographically targeted.

I am going to keep a brief log of all my ideas and the results they generate, and will gladly collect all your suggestions too.

Off the top of my head, here are some methods that are free or negligible that can be used to market online ventures.

Twitter: a good place to get initial feedback from a tech-savvy crowd. Also good for generating ideas, and creating the initial push for “viral” posts.

A blog: The foundation of any good online campaign. This can be in the form of an independent post (like this one), or a dedicated blog for the online venture (I have one of those too. You can subscribe here). You can ask others to blog about your venture for you, or guest blog it on other blogs yourself. Blog posts can be propagated using Digg and a (countless) number of other tools.

Facebook: Good for spreading news, links to blog posts, etc. Groups are quite powerful if used correctly, becasue they draw targeted eyeballs to your message. Facebook applications are also an option.

Comments on other blogs. If well written and relevant to the blog post and your online project, they can draw good traffic to your site.

SEO: Search engine optimization. Powerful way to get a completely new yet targeted audience audience. With a bit of careful planning and simple guidelines, you can ensure that your site appears in top search results (for free) when people search for relevant topics.

WOM: Simple word of mouth, propagated by the above tools.

Visual and Audio Media like Youtube, podcasts etc. These can help a message spread virally in a very short period of time.

Each of the above methods can fill a book on the exact how-to’s and when-to’s and best practice. Luckily none of it is new to me, so I can launch right into it. And of course, I am not going to limit myself to online PR only.

It has been suggested that a new online website should double its traffic every two weeks. I am not sure how correct this is, or for how long this applies. But I will be sure to keep a neat record of stats, so I can draw (and share) my own conclusions.

Any other suggestions?