I market to a limited audience and have been adding my website to many directories and search engine, especially those that are related to my target audience. But I need help.
I have upped the visits per day from about 20 may last year to 45 may this year but I have been at 45 since december 2001. How can i keep growing my online presence?
Should I invest in pay-per-click banner exchanges? Directories?
Or should I just keep adding to directories and SEs and leave it at that?

Try free banner networks?

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Andrew

Weeeeelllll :-? I cant really put anything on any of my pages exept for stuff about the retreat center. So that sticks me with buying stuff And I'm operating on about a 100 dollar a year budget that includes software, marketing, enhancments fo rhte site and everthing else under the sun exept for my salry and hosting
So that really puts me in a pickle doesn't it!

thanks for breaking-in this particular forum BigZ!

my opinion of PPC search engines/directories:
they're such a waste of time and money. i know, i know, there are webmasters out there who swear by it but there's absolutely NO POINT 'advertising' your site on even one such service if your target audience is probably not going to be using it to look for sites/products such as yours. Believe it or not, I have never used e.g.Overture to search for anything in my life!!! I suspect the only ppl who use them are the other webmasters who are actively bidding on it...

what i can suggest:

MAKE (webmaster) FRIENDS, I seriously want to emphasize this. These friends have probably done more to make this site of mine a moderate success more than any one service on the net. When I first started this site with it's 20 odd hits a day, just one link off James Shaw's coveryourasp.com did wonders to my ranking with google for example! If nothing else, it also motivated me to try harder

MAKE a FRIENDS OF SPRUCELAKE.ORG page. Just add a single page on your web and do all the link exchanges in there. You may want to exchange with sites that compliment your service & location of course.

MAKE SOME NOISE. The trend nowadays is to offer some form of interactivity on your site. Have a Guestbook for starters, especially since your target audience are usually already sold (and only looking for more info) before they even look at your site, reading positive reviews from other guests will definitely make them more confident.

Oh, and don't underestimate the power of advertising offline! Flyers, t-shirts, caps, stationery, merchandise, give-aways, etc.

Thansks Jay!
Those are some good thoughts. I had kind of figured that the PPC SEs dont do as good a job as other forms of media.

How do you suggest that I make friends? Are forums like SOF and here good places? Or is it better to visit thier site and personally emaial or phone them? What has been your experience?

Good Idea on the FRIENDS OF SPRUCELAKE.ORG page. Ill see if I can get my supervisory committe to let me do that.

Im working on making the site a place that people woud want to visit to find up to date information and also add a little bit of interactivity. (Im learingni PHP so that should help!)

We currently advertise in neatrly all of our hard copy advertuisments.

Thanks a ton!

Actually, not until recently did i start making friends through forums (not many webmasters tho). The problem with forums is that usually the webmasters who run the forums themselves are sorta aloof and distant (with 1 exception - Knut of websiteforums.com). I owe a lot to this guy and he's genuinely helpful.

Mostly, either i email them (after visiting their site) and start up a casual "how do u do?" kinda email and take it from there. Sometimes u get lucky and they go out of their way to help u out and most other times u'll be lucky if u get a reply...

anyway, now u have one more webmaster friend - ME!

so do you just brows thought the internet? Or do you do searches in the SEs or what to finde the sites that might link to you?

yeah i used to just browse (and still do) but lately it's happening the other way around too (i.e. they find this site and write to me...)

OK! Thanks! I'll work on getting a link page set up. Sorry I cant put yours on

- Make a list of those you want to target. (Actually, you already have it done in the first few lines here... http://sprucelake.org/Confernc/Confernc.html )

- Go to Google/Yahoo/DMOZ etc and search for each of those keywords/phrases (Christian Leadership Teams, Seniors Ministries, etc)

- Take the top 10-20 hits, email them offering a link exchange. Don't advertise your service, they might consider it spam...but they'll check out the site and might even become customers. You should have atleast 1 in 5 add links to your site.

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