My site is nearly 2 years old now and I have grown into the second most active site in my niche. There are 2 separate magazines which serve my niche (I no longer subscribe to either) which both have done little write ups on other umpiring websites. Not to be rude or self-aggrandizing, but the sites they have written about are not all that, all have been static sites. I feel I have a lot more to offer visitors than these sites. My question is how do I go about getting noticed and maybe my own write up from one of these magazines? I'm thinking in it would be something great to get attention as I am doing a complete overhaul of the site which will go live when I switch to VB4 after it has gone Gold and has some of my favorite mods available. I guess I should start by renewing my subscriptions.
You should write them a letter as if you were a member of your own site and let them know about it. Its very possible they don't know about it. "Hey I'm a big fan of your magizine and been a long time reader. I saw you make mention of a few different websites out there that were nice, but I'm a member at XXXX and in my opionon their site really really stands out from the other umpire sites out there. Not to take anything away from the site you've wrote about as well, as they were nice and I've been to them as well, but site XXXX gives us all these great features BLAH BLAH"
Sponsor some Not For Profit events in your area. While you are there, make sure you hand out some business cards. If any reporters show up to cover the event, make sure to hand them a business card and talk with them. Donate some door prizes with your website address on it. If someone from the press shows up, give them an "extra" item you had left over from the door prize donations. I helped sponsor a local event, which involved pulling my bar-b-q pit to the event and cooking for everyone. That way they did not have to have someone cater the food, which would have cost a lot of money. Next year I'am hoping to do the same thing and maybe even donate some door prizes. This shows that you care about the community and puts you in direct face to face contact with other people.
You should try and network with the media buyers, we've done that for a few of our local sites and been featured in our newspaper as well as mentioned on the news a dozen or so times in the last year.
Most print companies are moving online. You can usually find them on twitter now. Just follow them on twitter, interact with them. If they aren't on twitter, ask them why.
On our forum, we had a forum-wide effort to help get more attention given to Lineolated Parakeets. They are fairly rare (but are growing in popularity), so the largest parrot enthusiast magazine, Bird Talk only has maybe one or two articles mentioning linnies per year! So in an effort to promote lineolated parakeets and perhaps my forum as well, we tried to get as many of our members to write in to the magazine at the same time so that they don't miss it. See the thread here: Lineolated Parakeet Forum Many of us wrote in and sent photos, but there was no great outcome. They still hardly publish any Lineolated Parakeet articles. I don't care if they don't mention my site (although it would be nice!); I just want to help spread Linnies' popularity, because when people search for them, my site is one of the first results, so I'll get the traffic anyways.
