# General Business Category > Marketing Forum > [Question] How to go about launching a website?

## CharlesM

Hi there,

I'd like to gather info on the best ways to launch a new website without having a huge PPC budget?

Here are a couple of ideas I've had, with a fair amount of success:
1.)  Participate in forums that are relevant to your audience
2.)  Submit as many press releases as possible to press release websites
3.)  Make a video, brand it with your domain and post on youtube and metacafe
4.)  If you travel quite a lot, have a nice sign made and put it on your car's bumper, this way everyone behind you in traffic will stare at your name for a long time.
5.)  Participate on social networks and bookmarking sites

These ideas work quite well, but take quite a lot of time.

Does anyone else have a few suggestions?

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## IanF

> Hi there,
> 
> I'd like to gather info on the best ways to launch a new website without having a huge PPC budget?
> 
> 
> Does anyone else have a few suggestions?


Another is start a blog about your business and write articles and entries about your business it works for me.

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## Chatmaster

I see you are using Joomla cms on your website. Joomla is a very good CMS but being free comes with a few issues in terms of on-page factors for SEO. I would seriously suggest that you look at your onpage SEO as the first step of your online marketing strategy. For example, you have loads of spammy code within <a title> brackets. This is hidden text not visible to the normal visitors and will certainly have serious SEO implications. There are more like onpage styles, mod-rewrite, use of h1 and strong etc.

Conversion factors seems to be influenced between a portal, corporate and play mix design. I would seriously reconsider your site layout and design. The dark red and black background will certainly influence any conversion factors on your site. Consider focusing on a portal look and feel. The content you have is appropriate for a portal, but I felt unsure on what your conversion factors are.

Who would you say is your target market? What country are you targeting, or is your target global?

You can also think about publishing articles, think about current events specifically. Add content frequently and a news section linked to a RSS Feed. Also consider signing up with Google Adsense. It ensures that your site is frequently indexed by the adsense bot, although it is a seperate bot from the normal bot it does seem to influence Google alerts. 

Listen to talk show radio and email the show hosts when they do have discussions about your topic. For example 702 had several discussions this week about the debt and financial situation, you might get a live interview. Under your tools section perhaps ad a real tool that people can utilize to manage their finances. Suze Orman has a couple ideas in her books that you can perhaps formulate. Then utilize it in a Viral campaign.

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## duncan drennan

> I see you are using Joomla cms on your website. Joomla is a very good CMS but being free comes with a few issues in terms of on-page factors for SEO.


Other than your own proprietary CMS, what would you recommend? Is it possible to get Joomla working nicely by making use of the appropriate add-ons?

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## Chatmaster

Joomla is the best I know. But I seriously suggest you do modrewrite on it. Dave knows a bit about it, my php knowledge is very limited but modrewrite is the big benefit that php has and in SEO it definitely plays a major role.

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## Dave A

> These ideas work quite well, but take quite a lot of time.


I'm playing around with the idea that there are two budgets, money and time.

Everything takes time. The only issue is *who's* time?

If you don't want it to take up *your* time, then you need to hire it done - which then starts eating into your *money* budget.

Just a thought.

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## Seagyn Davis

Link swaps - if you understand Google's PageRank algorithm you will understand exactly how important that is. If you don't, here is a quick simple description:

If there where 2 websites, A and B, and A had 1000 links pointing to it and B had 10, then B pointed to website C and A to website D. D would have a higher PageRank because it has been linked by the more popular site. So the trick is to network with the big guys, sell your product/website and get them to link to it.

mod_rewrite is controlled by the .htaccess file and Joomla! comes with that functionality built in. Check your site settings and SEO on one of the tabs (I think).

One of the best CMS (very new and can be used as a very powerful CMS) is WordPress. Yes it is blogging software, but I can assure you that it is more powerful than any open source software I have ever come across.

Google Adsense funnily does play a slight role in SEO. It almost seems as if Google has factored in if you use it or not into their algorithm which would go against their initial beliefs.

Other than SEO, content is key. Having new content is essential. I used to get about 100 unique visits a day on my website and now that I am building a few other sites I cannot update it - the traffic is almost dead. The e30 club on the other hand gets about 200-300 uniques a day and 1000's of page views because there are about 200+ new posts a day. This is all growing all the time each feeding each other. (web 2.0).

All the other suggestions are very valuable.

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CharlesM (12-Nov-08)

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## Tamara

Llaunching a new website can be difficult because there are millions of other sites and blogs to compete with.

There are a number of things that you can do to improve your rating and be found by search engines. One of the things is getting your link onto a website that is already on a search engine like google so that your website gets registered on the search engine.

I came across an interesting article on this in the Succeed July magazine.

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CharlesM (12-Nov-08)

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## Dave A

That makes me feel quite good about all the link attempts we have off here  :Cool:

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## akhanna01

guys please guide me about the website managment , how to make a effective website which will benefit my business.

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## Butch Hannan

I am an I T challenged oxygen thief. May I suggest that you go to http://www.storiesandissues.co.za/ and have a look at the posting "Creation of this Website.
You appear to be where I was at one stage.
Good luck

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## comparepandauk

> Hi there,
> 
> I'd like to gather info on the best ways to launch a new website without having a huge PPC budget?
> 
> Here are a couple of ideas I've had, with a fair amount of success:
> 1.)  Participate in forums that are relevant to your audience
> 2.)  Submit as many press releases as possible to press release websites
> 3.)  Make a video, brand it with your domain and post on youtube and metacafe
> 4.)  If you travel quite a lot, have a nice sign made and put it on your car's bumper, this way everyone behind you in traffic will stare at your name for a long time.
> ...


I want to add some things like article marketing, guest posting and relevant blog commenting.

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## Eric76

Woah this thread makes me feel old  :Wink: 

There is a wealth of information online about creating website using CMS. I would suggest buying a test domain and renting a cheap shared hosting server (at least 1 database) and playing around with it. Install a CMS of choice and just practice with it.

I would recommend WordPress because it has much more information available for beginners. Apart from the huge amount of plugins available to help you, it also has a great support forum where you will most likely find an answer to your questions.

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David McG (18-Sep-15)

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## Tj.gift

can you please help with absolutely free domain servers.

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## abrits

Good Morning,

My name is Anton. I'm glad I came across your chat. I'm a beginner in the online marketing business. I went for a few courses with Chris Farrell membership. I really did learn a lot from him. Seriously, I've been struggling for 4 months and didn't make any money on line. 

Maybe my downfall is that some "settings" in the "back office" is not talking to the correct systems. I did everything that Chris said, but still no ROI.

Will you please share a few thoughts with me? It feels like I'm the only one in SA that is "dof" with this.

Thank you
Regards
Anton

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## Mark Atkinson

Hmm.. If you're using Joomla as your CMS I wrote a pretty popular article for Moz.com a couple years back which could help you improve your on-site SEO efforts. 

As far as driving traffic to your site goes, the above is a prime example of what worked really well for me. I spent a whole lot of time writing quality content for highly popular websites in my industry both locally and internationally and got a ton of links and references in return. The quality seriously has to be good though or you're wasting your time. 

Right now our advertising spend is zero and we run a perfectly sustainable business. 

At the end of the day, there is no substitute for expertise. Spend the time producing quality and don't go straight for the quick fixes. Relationships matter more than you know and contributing wholeheartedly on a forum such as this one could net you more business than you expect. 

Hope that helps. 

P.S. Don't bother with press releases unless you've got a really interesting story to tell. Even then, I'd hope to have a few relationships with popular journalists/bloggers before placing much hope in press releases.  :Smile:

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