marketing an Irish community website

[garrybennett]

Hi All,

I have been reading through some of the treads on this forum with great interest, and I thought I would start a new thread in the hope of getting some specific advice from users.

I lauched a new website a few months ago: Irish Towns Online - Irish Weather & News, Maps of towns in Ireland - mytown.ie. It is a local community/portal site for every town in Ireland. Google Analytics tell me that I am getting 6k unique visitor and 28k pageViews in the last 30 days. This is pretty encouraging but of course I want more. 80% of my traffic is coming from SearchEngines as the site is built with SEO in mind.

I want to gain awareness of the site to get more users. I will list what I have done, and am working on:
1. Submitted the site to directories and Search Engines
2. Sent some link requests with very limited success (if you own a website feel free to add a link to it )
3. Sent Press Releases about the website launch to some local newspapers

The site is designed to make revenue through advertising and premium business listings. As yet I do not have revenue to spend on marketing so I need to try to get users to the site for free. I am sure that some of you will have some good ideas of how to get more traffic to the site that I will not have thought of.

Thanks in advance for your help

[Powerboat.ie]

Hi,

I've had some success in building up a small network of fellow owners of small Irish sites.

We've been able to conduct some 3 way or circular linking with some success.

All of them are over 10k Uniques Visitors and 200,000 page views per month and relevancy of linked sites seems to be working out quite well.

What we are doing is using the combined powers of our existing modicum of success to build up the status of each group member. We can also use circular linking to introduce a members new site to the public.

Best of all, it's free !

I've pm'd you my phone number if you'd like to find out more about us and join our little band.

Kind regards,

Stuart McNamara
www.powerboat.ie