Promoting London

I haven’t had much time to post to this blog over the last few months and frankly, in terms of new trends and ideas for promoting and marketing websites, the market seemed to be undergoing a period of consolidation and rationalisation more than anything. Then, out of the blue last week I was contacted via one of my other websites by this young man inviting me to look at and possibly partake in a banner scheme he was setting up. in his own words;

“As a company you can submit a banner which costs $10 (roughly £5) this enters you into a daily draw the winner of which has their banner plastered all over my site for a day, giving them maximum publicity. At the end of the competition one advertiser is selected at random to win up to $250,000 to advertise their company. The grand plan is to get 100,000 submissions, with the prize money being 25% of the turnover.”

The scheme itself seemed interesting along with the fact he has personal story backing it which adds greatly to its PR possibilities - long story short, I quickly found myself buying banner space for two of my own sites.

All I can say is, if you are looking for a source of marketing at an incredibly small price which has real possibilities then I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out for yourself. For my part, I am putting together a package based on it to offer my clients, not something I commonly do as I am loathe to recommend schemes unless I really believe in their value.

For the record, the young man is called Richard Stratton [could he be the next Alex Tew?] and you can get started by visiting his website at www.theonebigad.com - good luck Richard and hope you’re not hobbling around for too much longer!!

Last year it was Pixel Ads, this year it seems it will be Word Clouds, the latest, greatest, can’t fail marketing technique designed to advance the websites we manage or promote. Except, so it seems, these perfectly valid and useful techniques become so quickly devalued that the users whose business should benefit most are left with crumbs in return at best. When Alex Tew came up with milliondollarhomepage.com last year and vaulted off his small corner of the internet and into the spotlight of the traditional media, could any one begrudge his success and earnings? After all, he had come up with a truly original [well, close enough] idea that broke new ground in terms of internet promotion. So what happened? We saw all manner of copycat sites springing up, ten-dollar-this, 5-cent-that, all bright & shiny under new domains and promising massive visitor numbers. Yet less than a year later who would possibly consider buying some pixels from one of these sites? In the overwhelming majority of cases, nothing has been done to develop the sites further to either encourage visitors or increase the standing of the site with search engines [which would increase the value of the incoming link to the advertisers website]. Instead, the people responsible have long since moved on to marketing the next fad, more glistening domains. Realistically, the only people to have benefited are the top level marketeers who quickly developed versions of the software necessary to create pixel ad sites and sold on the packages to the second & third level marketeers.

Now we are at the beginning of the word cloud / tag phenomenon, the big guns were out early convincing their peers, associates and affiliates [do I not like that word] to purchase links in their clouds, followed shortly by the opportunity to purchase the software itself at oh so beneficial prices for the early birds. Soon, the sky will be filled, yet not much nourishing rain will be falling on the plains of client sites below because those clouds need seeding and let’s face it, not too many cloudbuilders are interested in hanging around long enough to carry out the work required.

Is PromotingLondon.com going to be different? In 3 words, I hope so. It has been set up to not only host the word cloud site on the front page but as the nexus to provide a developing resource for promotional ideas and products primarily for the benefit my existing clients’ websites and businesses. The aim is medium to long term benefit, adding content and visibility, building popularity and pagerank as we go.

Regards for now, Delb