New website - marketing and what adserver to use?

[HWT]

I have a brand spanking new website - Online Photographic Dictionary | Online Photographic Dictionary and Encyclopedia (http://photographicdictionary.com)

Has a pagerank of a big fat zero and an alexa rank of 5 million (up from 7 million last time I checked, yay).

So there's two questions to ask.

1. I haven't quite finished the website, but I have another, much smaller dictionary (which is quite popular and why I made a second dictionary) with Google Adsense on it. Keyword advertising is possibly the crappiest, most useless kind of advertising for a dictionary. None of the ads are even vaguely relevant to the content and you can't tell Google what ads it *should* serve. Result? Click through rate of between 0-0.1% and a per-click payoff of about 1c just to make what clicks you do get borderline worthless. Pathetic. I'd rather have generic ads for cameras or antivirus software or something.

What other advertising networks are there that are NOT completely keyword sensitive? The only one I know of is Project Wonderful, which the site is currently using and with the low traffic of a new site, both Google and PW pay the same - ie, less than it costs to host the site.

2. How to get the site traffic up?

Its the kind of site that needs to go viral to get hits. The content is very pretty and all but it ranks so low noone will find it. Bing hasn't indexed it yet so you can only find it in Google. The site already has content and keywords and I've submitted it to a few directories but they take so long to approve new entries directories aren't exactly a quick fix. A small problem is I submitted it to some directories before I bothered to check that any decent domains were free (I thought there was no way in hell I'd get something as good as photographicdictionary.com but lo, there it was) so it has been submitted as a subdomain hanging off a different website.

The current traffic - bearing in mind that this is pretty much an unmarketed new website - is around 100 visitors, 600 page views a day with a very gentle increase each day. Most of the visitors seem to be coming off a link from one of my other websites rather than from searches.

[Brendan]

Can you explain why you think this is the case? '..Keyword advertising is possibly the crappiest, most useless kind of advertising for a dictionary...'

I would think the opposite, I know if I was looking for the meaning of a word, albeit described with a photograph, I would still type something like - what is a crayon, or meaning of crayon and if I was linked to your site, I would be pretty happy about it.

I like how you have broken down things into categories.. that will be a great SEO tool, and probably one I would focus on first.

I think if you try and target the broad search - photographic dictionary, you probably wont get much traffic.. but if you were to target more specific keywords, such as the categories I think you would have much more luck to get ranked for those specific categories.

One other way to drive traffic to your site is to submit articles on your chosen category to online web2.0 platforms, such as squidoo, hubbpages, ezine articles, wordpress etc..

For Instance, you might want to write some unique articles about Art Supplies, use your dictionary keywords within the article and link that article back to your main site.

This gives unique content that relates to your site to get indexed and backlinks to your site..

[HWT]

I mean advertising keywords for making money with Adsense not spending money with Adwords. Advertising a dictionary with Adwords would be dead easy.

I had Adsense on, I got wildly inappropriate ads for useless drivel that noone wants to click on. I'd like to somehow be able to specify what kind of ads I get, and I can't do that with keywords.

The worst example is something like a page with Walrus on it gets adverts for Walrus brand stationary. The ads are literally laughable in how bad they are, which is why I can get 15,000 page views, 20 clicks, $2 off them. Anything with food/herbs/spices on it gets diet ads - I'd rather get gardening or recipe ads, the site is quite heavy on food and plants.

[HWT]

Ironically I've been hitting the same problem with advertising for quite some time - needing nice, generic, 'safe' advertising that is perfect for a G rated website and isn't heavily keyword based. Google ads are heavily polluted with crap, I get complaints from visitors about what it serves me.

One of the domains I've registered recently is 'safeadverts' with the intent of putting a Project Wonderful or Adbrite clone on it. There's some commercial software out there that claims to be an Adbrite clone, all worth looking into, I really don't want to roll my own freakin adserver code.

[Mat]

If your content needs to become viral for some decent traffic, then the best solution is to engage in social bookmarking, that is, submitting the content to social media websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc. As for ad networks, there are literally thousands out there. I know of a current promotion MySpace is having for its advertising platform where you can receive $75 of free clicks. Every new user receives $75 worth of free clicks and existing advertisers can get a free $50 voucher for use on the platform.

Check out: http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/08/27/75-myspace-myads-coupon-for-new-users-and-50-for-existing/ for more information regarding the MySpace offer.