Re: Website marketing! Let's promote www.barefootherbalistmh.com part 2

More ideas to market
http://www.barefootherbalistmh.com
:

#4 I would re-design the whole website to reflect the personality of MH, the objectives of the site: free articles, herb sales, the school, link to the ask barefoot forum, announcements of special events like the the Amish event etc.

#5 Simply CMS, the platform you are using is good, but so far it is just the default layout that is being used, must use a different layout to replace the default menu guides.

#6 The fastest way to complement the existing site is wordpress from
http://www.wordpress.org,
out of the box it can give you a blog so you can post your articles and they are automatically published as RSS. In fact wordpress can replace your public website. The private members only section can remain under Simply CMS, I've experienced logging into the members only section when it was still password protected, and the implementation was really good.

You could wind up with wordpress up front and simplycms as the private area.

#7 Re-design your shopping cart so that it jives with your public website design. Say the menus on the left are the default OS Commerce shopping cart layout, replace them with something that looks like your public website menu. The theme is to go for a consistent look and feel.

#8 You could also open up a thread or section in your website to solicit user comments and suggestions, you have a great number of fans in the ask barefoot forum and their thoughts will be very valuable.

#9 You could look into accepting donations, but make it clear that in no way will those donations affect the content of future articles and healing methods.

#10 Once the new articles, blog, and rss are open, we can then proceed to marketing your website using the usual promotion efforts:

- article submissions to free article submission sites
- you could pay to submit press releases to the international press, this costs some money but used wisely your website gets promoted to more people worldwide. I did this for my website and this is the example:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/5/prweb389350.htm

- once you have your blog running you can participate in blog carnivals that ask for contributions like the carnival of healing, etc.
- I think a volunteer driven form of marketing can be used, a DONATE page can be setup and they can either donate money or donate their time to promote the website in different forums, article submissions, directory submissions.

These are all initial thoughts, I'll come up with more. I'll try to come up with some web design ideas for the front page.

I hope the other MH fans can post their thoughts on this thread. Tweet