anyone have any pointers to offer?

[Scrolls]

considering guests and so forth? my site has done....sponsored search, we are paying a site $50 a month to get our site submitted to every search engine and directory and to keep it high ranking (of course thats up to us with optimization). we have a link exchange with about 6 major hiphop websites. but still, we seem to be getting hardly any guests. what else can we do?? i appreciate greatly to anyone who responds.....

[filburt1]

You're throwing away your money by getting it listed for a fee. It would be a ripoff at $10 for a one-time payment, but a $50 recurring payment is ludicrous. My hosting fee is less than that.

[Scrolls]

once listed, this company wouldnt be able to take listings away could they?

Im thinking of retracting payment, and stopping the program cause every response is near the same.

[Sean S]

wow $50? save that 50 and buy yourself something more useful buddy . As for your question, once listed, they can not do anything about it or remove your link, it is not up to them. This company is not really helping you that much, if not they are probably ripping you off. Cause for most major search engines out there, including google, you can simply submit your site yourself, same case for many other major search engines.

My advice to you is that get more affiliates that are almost in the same category as your site and update your site commonly with useful content that would make the visitors come back. Also for some site categories, joining popular topsite directories will also help.

good luck to you,
Sean

[Lea Verou]

Improve your site, make it interesting, make it professional, don't overstuff it with irrelevant mods, make it visually appealing and visitors WILL come, even with close to zero advertising.

Btw it would help if you provided a link to your site...

[SaintDog]

In all honesty, save the $50.00/month your spending for link submissions and search engine updates and put that toward an advertising budget instead. Constant submission to a SE or link directory isn't going to help you at all.

With Google, Yahoo and other SE's, your either indexed or "sandboxed" (in the case of Google). Paying a company to submit your link monthly isn't going to increase your chances of getting indexed or bringing in additional traffic.

Why pay a company to do for you what is already free and simple enough to do yourself, especially when submitting a single link takes maybe 1 minute.

Also, a great deal of companies use automated submission tools. Search around, I've read varied versions, however they can possibly end up preventing you from being indexed.

Manual/Hand submission works best. While it may take time, there are few websites that will be an overnight success.

Originally Posted by filburt1

You're throwing away your money by getting it listed for a fee. It would be a ripoff at $10 for a one-time payment, but a $50 recurring payment is ludicrous. My hosting fee is less than that.

Agreed. I'm #1 on google and about a dozen other search engines and I've never used anything other than free submission services.

[Scrolls]

^^really? hmm...im seriously thinking of doing that...and heres the link. http://www.hiphopscrypt.com/forums/index.php?

[Sean S]

Well seeing your site now, I could make a few suggestions. First of all, I would recommend making your ads a bit more organized. Having two ads like that overlapping at the very top of the forum not only is unattractive to the viewers, but it will show the guests and members that you care more about making money than actually what you have to offer to them.

My advice to you is to use a ad management system that would display random ads at the top with different sizes rather than having them pile up on each other and take space.

Second of all, forum alone would make it 3 times harder for you to attract members who would visit. Think the way your members might think, why would they, out of the thousands of other website/forums in your category wanna join in your forums and stay there. A few things that would highly increase your traffic would be to open a main site that would publish a few articles or news and give some for the members to read, some useful downloads might help too. Forum alone will make the work harder on your part, cause then you have to compete to win over members from sites that have a good site with content up and also have a forum.

And last, I hope you did not pay too much for that "custom" skin, as that skin (Fibe) was originally designed by me and sold to pixelmunkies at http://www.pixelmunkies.com/product....2&cat=1&page=1

best of luck,
Sean