Rethink Time - Reduce the priority of Search engine effort

[RicInACloak]

I have spent a lot of time trying to promote my site since I got it up and running, a little less than 2 months ago. I have tried search engines, word of mouth, posing in various types of rooms, etc, etc. But two methods stand out for their success, and despite the amount of attention it receives, submitting to search engines is not one of them. I am probably 'locateable' on 20 different search engines, most of which I have never used as a web browser.

I have had two days on which my hits stood out as really good. The first was on day 1 when I sent an email to my contacts list, I got lots of visits, and got quite excited about the whole process. Then things went really quiet. Every time I took some action, there would be a minor spike, but 2 days later the activity was gone, and new action was clearly required. On bad days, almost the only activity was the search engine robots, crawling my site (and I wish they would follow the hyperlinks instead of trying to get smart and reading the pages out of context).

The second success was when I posted to a local user group. What makes this second success particulary gratifying, is that the user group is effectively my target market, and its in the right/closest/simplest geographical area, used by just the kind of people who may be out to find services like mine.

I realise that I still need to be 'searchable', but hoping to get into the top 10 globally, when I offer the same services as 1000's of other web sites, although possible, will take signficant effort on an ongoing basis. And make no mistake, even if I refine my keywords differently for every engine (which simply takes too much time), every day someone else will refine one step better, and get ahead again. I am not saying its an unwinnable race, mearly that the effort required to stay ahead, is simply not justifiable (for a small company like mine).

I also think that the search engines are being 'manipulated' buy the pay for submission services. Not as a deliberate mis-direction mind you, but simply because the number of submissions that automated submitters can generate will always far out weight the little guy(thats me).

Given my lack of success with search engines, I am not about to throw money at them. From a more
philosophical perspective, I do not believe in sales driven entirely by hard marketing. I prefer sales driven by quailty products and services that are boosted a by a little gentle marketing.

In conclusion I am moving my 'marketing' (and I do not much like that term) efforts away from search engines. Perhaps I should have moved a little sooner, but I guess I had to learn first.

I expect I still have lots to learn, but thats part of the fun.

Now I am sure lots of you disagree with me, so lets hear it (if you read this far).

[softwaresubmit]

Originally Posted by RicInACloak

The second success was when I posted to a local user group. What makes this second success particulary gratifying, is that the user group is effectively my target market, and its in the right/closest/simplest geographical area, used by just the kind of people who may be out to find services like mine.

Posting to newsgroups is a very delicate thing. You should avoid posting advertisements or announcements on most usenet newsgroups, they are treated as SPAM and your domain name registrant may suspend the registration when reported the abuse. Renewing after suspending is very expensive (100$ and more). But you may always put a link to your site in your signature, and post relevant posts on newsgroups of "target market" newsgroups.

[RicInACloak]

I could not agree more, We all dislike spam, but when the question to the room is 'Anyone know a php developer?' Answering 'yes we do php development', and including a url in the signature, well its not spam. Also simply discussing anything at all when your url/signature is on the bottom of each post, gets your name viewed by more eyes than a 1001 ranking on google.