egafd.com

Some of you experienced people may be able to help....but i need some info on the most cost effective ways of site promotion...banner advertising/swapping??? just don't want to waste acres of time and money...thanks in advance...

hard work, many, many, many hours and trial and error. what works for one site may not work for another. there is no straight answer to that question i'm afriad.

Paul said it..

Hard work...

Ensuring your site is search engine friendly... Getting it listed with the right terms and words for searches.

Having enough content for an affiliate programme and hosting the galleries yourself... Then finding all the webmaster forums where you can spam the affiliate programme.

So far all that costs is time... And you need a lot of it. I can find myself building new galleries at 3 am and geting them on to the right listing sites asap... and finally going to bed at 4-5 am

These are not meant as criticism as such but a couple of pieces of advice which arent really linked to your promotion question but, as a punter, some feedback on things which may be losing you business:

Make sure that there are no dead links on your site - I have just had a quick look through some of the tour pages and have found at least 3 or 4 obvious ones, nothing puts me off more on any site than dead links especially in the free area as thats your showcase and should be immaculate and it reflects in my mind on what Im gonna see once I part with my dosh.

On your updates page list them with the most recent first and not last as at first glance it looks like the site hasnt been updated since 24/3/05.

The font you use throughout is not one the accepted big 5 internet fonts which may cause issues for people on machines other than IE on Windows - always an idea to stick to the "standard" fonts. If you dont then you risk the site not looking like it does on your machine for all users as substitution will occur.

The site scrolls a lot vertically and I am running at 1280x1024 so I dread to think what its like at lower resolutions - vertical scrolling is inevitable (horizontal scrolling is unforgiveable lol) but try and so something to make it scroll less.

Too much blue!!! Personal opinion but the colour is just too drab and dreary - introduce some brightness and colour but with the emphasis on some colour!

Watermark your images - genuine amateur stuff is popular and people will nick it and post in newsgroups etc so you may as well get some free promotion by having your web address on all the pics.

I personally dont like the layout of your preview - I have to go back and forth way too much for my liking, might be an idea to have a think about how to make it more surfer friendly.

Linked to the above about the tour area - you need to have a lot more join links on the site and to make it more prominent. Maybe have 3 or 4 "free" thumbnails per set and have only a few of them as actual images and the others linking to join. Have a look at to see how Simon at SA does it - considering the low price you are charging you need to really push the price and value for money again on every page in the free area and then get people onto your join page and hopefully they will join.

Once on the join page having people needing to scroll down to get to the join button is a bad idea - by all means have it where it is but have another one at the top of the page. As said before that join button is what makes you money so make sure its prominent at all times.

On a final actual site promotion note, search engine traffic is free traffic but you have no keywords or descriptions on your pages which, while not as critical now as they were as some sites dont use them, still are important and you also have very little text on the gallery / preview pages - search engines like relevant text on pages so it might be an idea to flesh that out a bit too.

Jay

Thanks Jay for taking the trouble for replying, all your observations I take as constructive , it is much appreciated and all your ideas have been taken on board...and will be implemented asap