Life, the Universe and the Internet

A while back I posted an article of my experiences of changing domain names for a site. I basically spoke of the devastating effect the change had made to the traffic the site was receiving and it’s ranking in Google. I won’t go back into great detail here, for the whole story it’s probably best to read the original post.

The original post has received a few comments, so for those that are interested I thought I’d post a follow up of where we are now seven months later. I would say it took about five months for traffic to return to the pre-change levels that they were. Here’s a list of some of the things I had to do to get things back going again.

1. Chase up as many of the old backlinks that I could and ask the site owners to change their links to point to the new URL’s. Most webmasters were very helpful and happy to change their links.
2. Get the links changed in DMOZ: I think this was a critical move, the actual directory change was made much quicker than I’d have expected and the effect on Google rankings seemed to be almost instant.
3. Buy some new paid links and adverts: I did spend some money on a few quality links back to the new site, and I also run an advertising program through stumbleupon which seemed to help a little.
4. Get out a press release: The first thing I did with the new site was pay to have a professional written press release and use some pr websites to get it out there. I won’t go into huge details here as I think this probably warrants an article all of its own, so stay tuned for that one.
5. Creating a site map: I created an automatic XML site map in asp.net that was always up to date. I submitted this to all the major search engines that currently accept site maps.
6. Social Bookmarking and Community Sites: I registered with many of these and made sure my site was listed on the page somewhere, Stumbleupon, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo, any I could find.
7. Promote, Promote and Promote: I just kept plugging away anywhere I could think of, discussing the change in forums and including backlinks, talking about my experience on other blogs. Anywhere that I could justify talking about the site, without looking spammy I did.

So I hope this helps anyone who’s thinking about a domain name change or just going through the process now. If I can offer two Google tools that really helped me, they are the Google Webmaster site, and Google Analytics.

The webmaster site allows you to see everything that Google knows about your site, what pages it has indexed, how often it spiders them and what backlinks each page has. Forget about waiting months to see what your page rank will be, see the real time ranking of every one of your pages now.

Also Google Analytics is a great free traffic analysis software that gives details information, on who visits, what they looked at, where they came from and how long they stayed. I know I sound like an advert for Google right now, but really these two tools were vital for me to get back to where I once was.

Good luck with it.

I noticed just a few days ago that Google has finally given this blog a page rank. I had guessed a page rank update was coming as they tend to be roughly quarterly. So I know have a page rank of 4, which for a first ranking I am fairly happy with. Now I know most people discount page rank as not being very important any more, but at least is seems better to say that I now have a PR 4 site instead of saying my site is unranked.

So now that I have a page rank I feel a little more qualified to ask, if anyone reading has a blog based on similar subjects to mine and would like to exchange links either in the blogroll or some other way, just let me know.

As I run quite a lot of competitions on my entertainment site I thought I would post my experiences of competitions and they’re benefits to a website in case anyone reading is considering it. Competitions are an integral part of my site now, there is never a time when I do not at least have one running and quite often there could be as many as half a dozen. However I am probably in a good position with this compared to sites for other genres as our prizes are always donated by film and game studios as a way of promotion for them.

Is running a competition worth it?

A competition can bring a lot of traffic to your site but the traffic is not very targeted. A lot of the visitors are veteran competition hunters and they will come, enter and leave. However you can also hook some of these visitors with newsletter subscriptions, advertising etc. A good tip is to have an opt-in box on your competition entry form for your site newsletter. If the entrant ticks the box, have some system to subscribe them.

Also if you have an agreement with a sponsor, and you make it clear on the competition form, you can share the entry data with the sponsor, possibly for a fee. If I ever do this I always make sure it is through an opt in box on screen. For example I would have a tick box that says “Click here, to receive future updates from xxx company”.

How much to give away?

Obviously the bigger the prize, the more visitors you will get but you don’t have to spend a fortune and if you can get someone else to sponsor it in exchange for promotion, all the better. As most of my competitions are for three to five sets of DVD’s I would say the general prize pool is somewhere between the £40 to £100 range.

How can I tell people about my competition?

There is no point running a competition if no one knows about it. If you do a search in google for competition sites you will find lots of sites that list online competitions. Get yourself registered to these sites and add your competitions immediately. Some great UK sites for this are: Loquax and ThePrizeFinder.com, these are both very big competition portals but are UK specific.

What sort of competitions work?

In my experience competitions that ask the entrant to do too much will fail. I have tried to run competitions to get reviews, and to get forum posts and they have never worked. The best use for a competition is in my opinion just for getting your site name out there to as many people as possible. With this in mind, I now never run a competition with any more than a simple entry form, sometimes I add a question but that is it. It is also a good idea to set your competition to allow daily entry as this will bring some people back day after day.

Which brings me on to another subject, make sure all your terms and conditions are clearly stated on the competition page. You do not want anyone to come back at a later date and say that your entry / winning conditions were not clear.

General tips

Here is a list of general tips I have learned from running my competitions.

• Run the competition for around one month
• Make sure each competition has its own dedicated landing page
• If you run multiple competitions, have an overall competition summary page. Entrants will want to know the status of all competitions. Here is my example: http://www.digitallard.com/CompetitionsHome.aspx
• Contact winners via email and ask for their home address. Be quite strict on how long they have to reply otherwise you will be could be waiting around for weeks for them.
• Keep the entry conditions simple but make sure you capture that user data but don�t do anything with it without ensuring you have requested permission.
• Depending on your genre, look for competition sponsors, this makes the whole process considerably cheaper for you.
• Promote it, show the competition on your home page, your newsletter, your feeds and any competition sites you can find.

Good luck and I hope this post will help anyone considering a competition.