bla.st : 6 months of website promotion tips in 2 minutes

I just had an email from Lawrence with itsbusinessbaby.com wondering if I had any tips on how to get traffic for their "business card directory". Here's what I've been trying for the past 6 months. Note bla.st isn't successful yet, so I'm probably full of it, but hopefully something will be useful.

Make sure your domain name is catchy, simple and never changes
If you're still working on your design make sure it looks clean, simple, but not too commercial - if it looks too slick it may put people off. At the same time you don't want to look too unprofessional. Think youtube, google and craigslist style
Show you are a person behind the site, not just a big company. Like "tom" on myspace, or that fulla on mybloglog
Use mybloglog - I've had a few visitors from that, and I put it on the site. Shows there are real people using your site.
Make sure people actually want what your offering- even though bla.st is free, it was still hard to convince people to try it out in the early days. I even offered to make people cards for them, and they STILL were an effort to convince.
It will take ages, perhaps years to promote and take off- be persistent
If you get a big burst of publicity, it will probably be a spike, and die off again unless your product is really viral. it will probably take years of tweaking to figure out the recipe to make it viral (if you're product is like that). See mybloglog as an example, took them a while to take off. Pretty much all the big sites grew almost exponentially and took years to start growing fast: href="http://tinyurl.com/2ev5gw">http://tinyurl.com/2ev5gw (alexa graph)
Write press releases, there's heaps of advice on the net how to do them
For reporters, magazines and newspapers, write the story for them- it's less work for them as they can use it as a starting point, or as a filler article. I wrote an article about another project for a magazine, and they pretty much used it as I wrote it.
Write useful articles on your blog, and promote your site on that. Register your blog with technorati
Use RSS on your pages to promote new stuff
Submit interesting stuff to digg reddit, netscape.com etc. Has to be interesting, and don't post too much or it's spam
add digg and del.icio.us etc buttons on your pages
make it easy for people to link to you. Give people the link code on every page in the footer for example
add helpful/interesting comments to popular blogs, and in your footer include a link to your site
try paying for stumbleupon traffic - if people like it, it will take off, if not don't waste too much money. I tried $40, but I mainly get natural stumble upon traffic. This is in fact the biggest source of traffic for bla.st so far
try google ads and other advertising networks. It didn't work for bla.st, I didn't get far. Advertising anything to do with advertising is hard. There are a so many other advertisers out there better at it than I am and with more money
More tips on growing a site from scratch in this blog entry
read problogger
make sure the site is search engine friendly, good headings, title tag, use normal html, link outwards, make a site map
use only one URL eg. make www.bla.st redirect to bla.st
most importantly, put a card or three on bla.st!

Hope that helps someone out there

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6 months of website promotion tips in 2 minutes