Best Way to Promote a New Site

So I have kicked around ideas for a site for years - started a few but they always died because I never had the time or energy to devote to them.

I want to get back to those ideas and start another - it will likely by a NY area sports themed site and may very well only be a forum.

So what is a realistic goal to start and promote the site? If I use Adwords, if what sort of return would I get on say, a $500 investment?

You're in the right track bud. Joining forums is one of the basic factor to consider if you want to start and promote it online. Of course join also to sports forums and include your signature links there. Create an account on high PR social bookmarking sites especially Digg. Seek for sports bookmarkings sites.

grishamist - He really didn't mention joining forums and promoting it via that. He said his site might only be a sports forum itself. Joining other forums and advertising in your signature is a way to advertise, but that is not the question northjersey78 had.

With regards to adwords and the $500 investment to get things running, I think that could be sufficient and you could get a good return if you do things right. When Ozzu started it was also only a forum (and pretty much still is), and I ended up investing about $200 right at the beginning. That was enough for me to get the kickstart I needed. Besides the intitial investment though, every single visitor I got from running those ads were extremely important to me. I made sure that I responded to every single post, and I tried everything I could do to keep everyone around so that the place was alive and people were helping each other out. When I first started I accounted for about 50% of the posts and that lasted for months.

So my advice to you is to also be prepared to do alot of work and to check your website often, especially in the early stages. You want to make sure everybody who posts gets a response in a timely manner. I think $500 could have a good return, I know the $200 was a great return for ozzu as I didn't have to talk to myself on the forums. You just have to make sure you work with whatever traffic you get from it, and try to create as much useful content as you can so that others want to link to you and participate.

Finally make sure the keywords you choose are exremely targeted to your site. Don't waste money on terms that won't get people to signup. Try to target people looking for your type of site, that way your initial investment lasts longer.

Thanks for the advice. I'm actually planning on making the site a bit more comprehensive, but I would imagine that the forum will be the bulk of the activity. That sounds like a pretty good return on only $200 - what words did you target to get things rolling?

I am not sure whether $500 is for the whole marketing efforts or it is your monthly marketing budget.

Still, you can use :-

a) Organic SEO
b) Paid SEO ( Adsense/Adwords)
c) Forum Promotion
d) Social Bookmarking Promotion

If you are well acquainted with the SEO marketing, then you can explore article promotion in order to promote your website on search engines.

Along with these techniques you can indulge in banner/link advertisement on high ranking websites.

All these activities will bring best results.

I'm doing it right now

couf couf* signature. lol

seriously though..here is what I do..

bookmarking
active on forums/social networks
quality content
get onto google index
have other sites link to me (for me I dont care who links. pageranks mean nothing to me. but thats just me.)
uhm.. text instead of pictures (search engines can not read images, so how will they know what kind of site you are?)

it all depends on what your site is all about though.
Obviously, an rnb musical site like mine already has an easily target-able (is that a word?) audience. They are easy because my audience are teenagers.

Teenagers = always online

Plus I know where they go online, and how they think.
PS - I'm a teenager. lol

When starting a new site, of course you need to make sure that you did a proper on-page optimization. And using adwords is good too but knowing how to handle it well and promoting it without spending too much is better so goodluck!

hi... there are a lot of alternative ways on how to promote a website. In fact, you can even do it with your own. well, you can do blog marketing,link exchange, forum marketing and SEO Marketing

just learn the basic of page optimization, such as on and off page factor.....

OK, the site is up and running (see signature). Still need to tweak the layout and such but the company that designed it has it optimized and provided some keywords to target. I'll likely spend some time just creating some content before I go the Google Adsense route.

SEO
Posting in forums
Social bookmarking
Blogs
I would say these are some of the best ways to promote a website.

You can check out a software like http://www.socialbookmarksubmit.com/ to submit yours sites to many social bookmarking easily.

While reading your first post... I feel that you already know what you are doing on promoting your site, because of your signature link to this forum... do you know that this forum is a 'nofollow' forum site?

also you can try commenting on blogs... to those 'dofollow' blogs

Optimize your site, make use of meta tags and keywords. Write relevant content then promote your site through link exchange with related niche, article submissions, directory submissions, comments on blogs, social bookmarking, forums, web pages with signatures linked to your site.

Other seo trends are yahoo and wiki answers. Create a wiki profile, join social networking sites and promote your site in yahoo and google groups.

yes google groups are very effective i also recommand forum signatures and stuff like that..