How to market a web site

[rknr55]

I'm a web developer that just developed a 'A book search and price comparison site'. The site address is http://www.onbudget.ca. I think it is a neat site that will definitely help canadians find the best deal on books.

I'm a technical guy without too much marketing experience. Can anyone give me tips how I can market this site. BTW, I don't have too much money to spend on marketing.


-Ron

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OnBudget.ca
http://www.onbudget.ca
Book price comparison for Canadians. Millions of titles to choose from.

[Canucklehead]

Man this is a cool site! I like how "minimal" it is - just go and use the site and enjoy :D

To help get the word out at no or low cost:

- Press Release announcing this free service
- write up in local newspaper (local BC boy creates free service...)
- feature on local newscast (we're speaking with R.N. - creator of the onbudget.ca comparison shopping service for books - he has VOLUMES of information on this")
- literacy associations/clubs might be willing to distribute flyers or post your flyer

Make sure you don't breach any copyright on the book pictures or the Amazon quotes. Ya never know...

[wheel]

Unless you've got something very viral (and you don't right now :) ), you've got to put some work into it, it will *not* just happen.

Very generally, there are three ways to market your site online.
1) Pay per click advertising. These are the sponosored links on Google/Yahoo etc. Good way to bring in steady traffic.
2) optimize your site for the search engines...so when someone's looking for a book they find your site. Spend a month at forums.digitalpoint.com to find out how to do this.
3) Find some other site that you can advertise on - but *only* if the visitors there are clearly definable as looking specifically for your site. For example, I saw a car insurance company advertising on a snow tire site. Bad idea - are the folks visiting the site because they want car insurance? Nope - so results I guarantee would suck. You should only advertise on sites where people are actively shoppers/price comparisons - like here; or heavy book buyers.

The 4th possibility is to find something viral about your site and become the next big thing that everyone emails 20 of their friends about. Works great, but tough to find the right thing.

[wheel]

I had a quick look, you need to do some work if you're going to search engine optimize your site. And that's where I'd be starting. You're going to be looking to optimize for the 'long tail'; all those thousands of low volume search terms, like:
'buy {some book name} cheap in Canada"
or
'{some author name} books canada"

and so on. You should be able to rank for those non-competitive terms, but make sure your site is easily indexed by the search engines (and make sure the text on the page talks heavily about the title, author, isbn, anything else about the book ,and the fact that you're Canadian.