Building Site Traffic
Ok, so you have a Drupal-based site up and running. Now, how do you drive traffic to your site? Have you been successful? What worked, and what didn't? Let's talk about the legitimate ways to generate (and then analyze) site traffic and make a Drupal-based site successful.
Here are some things we can discuss:
- Do we need new modules to help us accomplish our goals?
- What modules (if any) (like ping, multiping, service_links) do you use?
- What web directories (if any) do you submit your site to?
- How do you track results? Do you use:
- Native Drupal logs
- add-in modules? If so, which ones?
- or an external log analyzer? If so, which do you use?
Wishlist of extra stuff on the module pages to save time on researching the right ones
I would like to see a hiearchical view of modules, that require dependencies, both in images of the actual module on its page, and also in the URI/URL. It cements the idea I have of it, if you know what I mean.
Leaderboard.nl implements Drupal at 5 Agricultural web 2.0 communities at The Netherlands
www.Leaderboard.nl have implemented Drupal successfully at 5 web 2.0 communities for the Agricultural business sector at The Netherlands. For this we cooperate with our business partners Ontwerpwerk from The Hague and aeMotion from Culemborg the Netherlands. Examples of these communities are:
http://www.melkveeacademie.nl
http://www.varkensnet.nl
http://boomkwekerij.groenweb.nl/
http://boomverzorging.groenweb.nl/
http://bloembollen.groenweb.nl/
Release Management Engineer | ReachLocal, Inc.
Release Management Engineer (Woodland Hills, CA)
Freelancers/Expert PHP developers | Parentella
Parentella is an essential network for parents. We have a basic site and we are looking to take it to the next level with customizations. We need solid developers who are fluent and clean coders. The opportunity can easily become long term (or steady freelance work) for the right candidate. We are looking for individuals that have extensive Drupal experience developing custom modules and working with complex integration projects.
Please email me at avrota@yahoo.com if you are interested in learning more.
Freelance drupal programmer/module developer | wasteofpaper.com
Drupal 6, CCK fields.
I have on my server the capability to, from the command line, capture a screenshot of any web address, manipulate the image using imagemagick and then save the resulting image/images to a directory.
I need a module that will, during the 'create content' form editing, send a field value, on advancement to the next field, to a script (provided on the server by me) and at the same time un-hide a preview window alongside the field with a pretty 'loading' gif (provided by me) and display the subsequent thumbnail image after a predetermined time (5-10 seconds).
Developer | clubcollective
We're looking for a Drupal developer to work full time on our project in Amsterdam. Contact us at info@clubcollective.com
Skill Requirements:
- Drupal installation, including Plugins
- ability to apply custom design themes (no actual graphics work needed)
- ability to make custom changes in the Plugins
- ability to understand Drupal core and expand it if needed.
Work Experience: At least 3 years of experience in PHP/MySQL is required for this position, at least 2 years of experience working with Drupal.
Professional Attributes:
Developer | Sarita Media
We're a nightlife, social networking site in multiple languages looking to have our site upgraded to the latest version of Drupal, we're looking for serious upgrades to our social networking features, usability and SEO.
Send Resume to info@clubcollective.com
VP Engineering/Director | Parentella
Hello:
This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur with a technical flair and panache. Parentella is a site dedicated to connecting local parents. We have the plans, the business model, we need a technical guru who knows how to build great sites.
Tips for Building Traffic: Our Story So Far
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p>I work on Cruise Savvy , a Drupal 5 site that helps people plan a cruise (esp. important for the first cruise ), and browse and share their own cruise ship pictures and cruise stories.
Data Entry assistant | Need Quick Data Entry help using Drupal
Thank you for all the offers. This job offer is no longer available.
Hello, I am in need of someone to do some data entry. Reposting html pages into Drupal. I will have example posts. The categories will exist already. I have about 500 pages. I need 50 per person. Will pay 0.85 per page via paypal. You must reproduce the URLs exactly like it exists on my html website
DrupalCon Business Presentations Needed!
Hi all!
We are looking for speakers for the upcoming DrupalCon in Boston. Since you are subscribed to the Building Site Traffic group, you might be especially interested in the "Business and Marketing" track (see http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/business-and-marketing-track-descriptions ).
This track covers the following topics:
- The Drupal ecosystem
- Businesses learning to use Drupal
- Case studies
- Showcases: NPO, Education, News, Media, Government, Healthcare
Should someone write a "Submit as" module?
Yesterday I downloaded and played with the Drigg module. Among its features is an option to let a privileged role submit content as a different user. The list of spoof users is also an administration option. The motivation for this is clear... it lets a handful of people easily make a site look like a bustling community. This is great for jumpstarting your Drigg site (which is designed to be a Digg clone), but how ethical is it?
Freebies/Giveaways
I've found one thing that works very well, if you are a programmer: create small/simple utilities and give them away on your site.
I've found no better way (short of buying ads) of generating massive site traffic. I've put several free Windows utilities on my site, one of them caught on in January of 2006 - mentioned on digg.com, lifehacker.com, and dailycupoftech.com, to name but a few. This single item is now responsible for much of the traffic to my main corporate site right now (I'm taking steps to increase traffic to the other content, organically, so it'll take time.)
Social Networks: MyBlogLog
I've found MyBlogLog to be a useful tool for promoting a site and gaining new sources of site visitors.
I've created a MyBlogLog module to simplify the task of adding MyBlogLog support to a Drupal-based site. You can check it out here:
http://drupal.org/project/mybloglog
If you have any experience with MyBlogLog and building site traffic, let's talk about it here!
Pinging other sites - what has worked for you?
I've had some success in building traffic by using the Ping module (and more recently, the multiping module (more info here).
I have the multiping module configured to ping ping-o-matic and technorati. I've seen some new traffic coming in from those sites, but it's not growing very quickly. So, I'm trying to figure out how to get people's attention on those kinds of sites.
Changing a page's URL alias breaks existing links. "would be nice" if a module could track and provide 301 redirects
Currently, when you use a URL path alias to an existing node, and later decide to change the URL alias, the old path 'breaks' - so, if you have an older page that has inbound links from, say, Google search or some web directory, people will get a 404 error - not good for SEO or building traffic, in my experience.
