Just curious as to where you guys think Pixel2life should advertise to create awareness to people that we exist. Where would you advertise Pixel2life? I would like real suggestions by the way... places that actually offer ad space and such, not fantasy places like Adobe's front page

Dan

I would have if it was a new site opening up but P2L is so popular nowerdays It dosn't need the advertising.

I wouldn't - I'd rely on word of mouth. Ok, it can often be slower than ad campaigns, but I find it delivers the most 'loyal' hits.

Alternatively you can involve your visitors in free advertising. Encourage people to link back with a variety of buttons and banners - even outright asking for support can work. For example, I encouraged members of a community I run to post a blog entry about the community on one day last year in exchange for a link in a thank you entry on my personal blog - about 50 members took part and it's only a small community (driving a huge spike of hits and applications to join). Imagine the amount of people that might consider taking part in a similar thing for P2L?

Well we have a 468x60 banner in rotation with paid advertisers at 13, we also used to pull the RSS feeds but after numerous complaints and trials I finally pulled them off.

Outside the web you should be looking at people that will interview you, Oprah and Ellen Degeneres would be great people to contact and don't laugh at this idea lol because it does work.

Your local newspaper/radio stations - the editors love personal success stories and anything web related is a good story these days.

Merchandise - pens with pixel2life on them etc, hats, caps even a calendar of pixel2life's best artwork selected by members. And t-shirts I would love a t-shirt with that pixel bowl looks so much nicer than the previous P2L arrow

Contacting educational institutions with flyers on pixel2life etc

On the web companies charge a small fortune for advertising you could be looking at $1,000's just for a few page impressions to get all of 10 clicks and maybe 1 new member. I'm personally against ad campaigns of any sort I have tried numerous ones and the stats are not great, word of mouth is free and works a lot better.

Try several leading software companies for a partner spot, I added P2L to SwishZone and they accepted P2L immediately - your promoting their software by offering a service in tutorials so all is fair and some of these guys give nothing back to the little people if you get what I mean.

And personally I feel every webmaster that submits tutorials to P2L should have P2L somewhere on their site.

Adding a proper download manager, Art Gallery, Resource Center and maybe even Blogs to Pixel2Life to increase member participation and the word will spread P2L has it all (btw IPB has all of these components and they are a simple install that fits into the sites look no skinning nothing) I use them at 13 if you want to test them out.

That's it for now

Me and a friend have an idea on somthing we thought of a bit ago to advertise P2L a bit

That's all I can say for now, It's a suprise. ;P

TV! Create P2L commercials so it will be broadcasted everywhere in USA and Canada.

^im sure it will be expensive though *_*

I would reccomend (cant spell, cries) http://habbohotel.com - Aimed at teenagers.. over 15,000 Unique IPs a week (might be a day) .. But may cost a bomb to advertise hehe http://sulake.com/

Sulake are the owning company of HabboHotel.

Im sure they could give you a quote

EDIT: HabboHotel are a fantastic site to advertise with, you will see hundreds of user signups and site stats risen I can almost guarantee that..

This is the first time I heard about "Habbo". I registered and started "playing". Its a very weird pixel game. Its like you live a life except in a game. And you have to pay real money to get money in the game. It sounds stupid. ><"

I dont think thats a good place to advertise. Like I mentioned before, TV commercials is a good place

What about placing an ad on Adobe's Homepage .

Word of mouth, contests, joining rival forums.

A high speed chase durring rush hour on a major Los Angeles freeway with a big P2L banner on top
of the car would get some attention.

On a serious note why not try one of the many "techTV" type shows.

In the states we have shows like ScreeSavers I'm sure there are other such shows around north america and the rest of the world.

hmm. Thought a few other things after reading donna's post in more detail.

How bout setting up webmail e-mail addresses for your users. Instead of someone using gmail or yahoo mail they can use p2lmail. user@p2l.com etc.. You can then run advertisements that way when a user sends e-mail to a family member or buddy.

Along those same lines you can offer free blog or website templates that people can use free of charge as long as they keep the copywrite info in place. You can then run p2l adds on those tempaltes and esp the blogs. The blogs would work great as I'm sure there are tons of people out there that need/want blogs but simply don't have the time or knowledge to set one up. I'm not sure what you bandwidth issues are but if you can host the blogs pre-set-up it would really get some attention.

Contact ISP's and hosting sites. Work with them to include P2L as a resourse. Having run a hosting company for a while we used to add links to P2L to in our welcome message to the customer when they signed up. We did this without even asking you for a dime and you may or may not have known about it. P2L was a site that we recommended to our customers who were getting started on the web.

Hope that helps
Paul

I also think Billboard ads is a great idea. Especially in Los Angeles, California.

Zenom.. Sulake make $18,000,000+ a year on Habbo..

Plus you registered once :rollseyes: You cant really slate something you dont know about lmao.

Habbo is a good place to adveritse.. Disney and O2 always advertise there.


Also this is about TV Advertising:



Lowest price = short time and at around 4am lmao

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double posts merged:

I also like Xis idea too ;p

Yeh and think of the more hits Habbo will get when they bring out there new TV show and game.

Advertising on Habbo would be like advertising on TV as soon as Habbo goes on TV Habbo will get more hits, and if your Link is on there so will P2L.

Can we also take into consideration It's not about the game but It's about the people that even glimpse the site for a few seconds.

Also... Habbo is filled to the brim with Photoshop and other Art creation users. Some of which already come here. Now lets reel in the rest.

Thankyou for the backup Dale

You're 110% Correct.. 9 times out of 10 the people you meet on Habbo are Pixel enthusiasts (Cant spell, damn my retardedness lol)

Yeh, you only need to go on Habbox forum too see the 100's of users always creating stuff in the graphics section.

They already adore P2L, ya see P2L tutorial links going around all the time.

Contact Kevin Rose of Systm, I'm sure he would interview you .

http://revision3.com/systm/

Other than that, perhaps just start a bunch of small ad campaigns on design related sites . You can check webmaster forums like NamePros.com or SitePoint.com for listings of people looking to sell text and banner links.

Xis, I thought of a high speed chase for my own site lol. But I figured the news would just blur out the 10 foot banner I was going to trail behind my car .

Nah, the beauty of it is that it's live and the media is too stupid to blur it out. It won't be till later that night or the next night before someone from the IT department at the local news station clues everyone else in

If i had the money it'd be TV or the google homepage!

I was offered a comercial on much music for free, since they were going to sponser a company of mine.

Hoot

I don't know if it's done now, as I don't write tutorials, but I would be more than happy to link back to P2L and if I submit tutorials to P2L, have some sort of link back to MY site. Like a list of Tutorial Contributors avaialble so that I can see all the sites of people that have made tutorials. Not necessarily seeing the tutorials themselves.

Heh I stick by the Habbo advertising Idea. It will bring in by the thousands.

a few large scale ideas of mine. im not talking about how much it would cost or anything like that just that it could most likely be done.

1. Try and get adobe to put a link to p2l in there help manuels for users new to the design comunity. In exchange adobe could posibbly sell more products from users seeing what the programs can do from the tuts. Thats what got me into 3d was the tuts on this site. It told me what programs to use and who to buy them from.

2. Try to get on a tech tv show. Im from the US and the have i think 2 or 3 tech channels on extended cable. Maybe try to work out a once a week live tutorial from the p2l staff.

3. Buy ads in magazines such as pc mag. Only the tech people would read this mag and im sure most of them design as a hobby but would like to learn more.

4. Games such as warcraft 3 and starcraft on battle.net have sponsered tournaments and also have a space for an ad on their battle.net online gaming. check out blizzard.com

5. Sounds lame but open up accounts on places such as myspace and facebook with the account of pixel2life. Lots of people hit up those sites. Not always tech people but this type of advertising would be free.

Some things i wouldnt do is the email idea people will just come to use and abuse it.
I wouldnt do the blog either cause that wont get to many people and will be a huge bandwidth use.


Hope that helped out some. Thats all i could think of now.

Yeh thats a idea that would be good that didn't come to my mind.

I second the idea for adverting in PC magazines distributed all over the world and go for the exzact target market. People with PC experience that may want to start graphics.

The magazine idea is very good. Try putting some in gaming magazines too! i mean i'm a part-time gamer and part-time designer. I'm sure plenty of other pc gamers would love to be part of P2L. I also second the ideo to advertise on battle.net! Over 500,000 people use it a day and the advertisements are clicked all the time! The MySpace idea is pretty good too as so many people go on MySpace nowawdays and i'm sure you'll find plenty of designers wanting to join P2L!

Personally, I feel that even with just the Toplist there's too much weight placed on IPB around Pixel2life. Now you have TWO coders, and 1-2 others that are working on smaller 'google ad' sites I feel that you could code any of these features yourself - and to use IPB mods would simply put more focus away from the main site and onto the forums.

You know.. You have the perfect advertising resource right here.. US! If you alow us to have our own page like DevArt, people can post on forums "Check out my P2L Page" [p2l.com/$user$] - Then when they check it out you can place an ad on our page"Make your own P2L User" Or something, and you can charge us $5 - $10 to get rid of the ad

Just a suggestion

Tom

Could you imagine if Pixel2Life had their own coded Forum - can see now all the comments that would turn up in the most strangest places saying the coding is bad.

My issue would simply be, why re-invent the wheel? The IPB systems works great, why change it? I think we could put the efforts of the programmers to better used, especially with their very limited time now that they are back in school or just about to be. I don't think there's anything wrong with a heavy focus on the forums, I'm all for developing a larger and more active community, but there's always over 10 times more guests that members on the site at any given moment, and you can bet they are using the tutorial areas, not the forums. In fact, the forums aren't even in the top viewed areas of the webstats stats yet.

Anyhow, I am looking for ad specific solutions right now, not what to add or remove to the site to generate traffic... that's an entirely different discussion. Jay - if you read this, what was that high end tutorial site/blog you showed me once where they are ubber specific about who advertises with them? I can remember the link.

Dan

I think I may have phrased it wrong or you guys may have read it wrong... I meant code the additions yourself into the site - and not use IPB mods. Thus bringing more value to the site itself (which as you said, is mostly used so will have the new features used more).

Ah ok, that makes sense... yeah that's what will probably happen anyhow because the IPB mods usually have some kind of limitation or it's just not quite right or something along those lines... the topsites thing is a great example... Neil ended up re-writing the entire security backend to it for us because the old security was... well... non existent lol! And that was just a small app. It's probably safe to say the bigger and more significant the mod, the more things that won't be quite right it'll have and require customization and coding added to it.

The other factor is I don't want to rely too much on IPB for stuff outside the forums because their large updates tend to cluster fuk the entire system. So the more I put on the IPB system, the more stuff I risk breaking when a major update is released.

So yeah, I see exactly what you mean and I agree.

Dan

Exactly

Toplists/Topsites is not coded nor supported by IPB that's a 3rd party mod and well you take the highest risk installing any non supported 3rd party mods.

Mods are also a little outdated it's all components now and a 100% easier to install and maintain.

But anyways back to the original topic before you have a attack.

How about myspace? It seems to be the most popular thing nowadays. Why not create an account for P2L and post artwork, pictures, etc. I would also try Google Video and You Tube. Create some funny videos or animations that show P2L and include a link to the P2L website. For example, have someone dress up as a "pixel" and hatch from an egg or something!

Not exactly true. If you do the upgrades by hand it'll work and if your too lazy to do that then you just need to redo the edits for the mod in the files that were updated.

Anyway, If I owned P2L I would print out like 5000 flyers and put on it "Free Hammertime! Use this coupon at any P2L store or at www.pixel2life.com and get your FREE hammertime!"

http://www.federatedmedia.net/ is also worth a try looks pretty good actually.

SPAM, always the way to go is SPAM. Well if you want to lose people..

SitePoint it only costs $1000 a month I think. Although you can get traffic through PR and IBL so the more people you get linking to you the better.

You could advertise at dynamicdrive.com, its a site that has free DHTML scripts. Maybe P2L and DD and become affiliates or partners or whatever you may call it.

Guerilla marketting: Find out the closest Graphic Design specialist colleges and university (and if you want secondary schools/high schools). Flyer & sticker the place like hell.

Viral marketting: Viral marketting is something which alot of people would feel compelled to share (e.g funny videos & pictures).


Really if your considering heavy duty advertising you need to do alot of research. Find out where potential users hang about, their age, their gender and their education.

Also might be a nice idea to ask the community how they found the website to see what your current best marketting approach is (if you havn't already).

BTW: Do some more search engine optimization or something, if you search "photoshop tutorials" on google pixel2life.com is on the 5th page! (I would have thought it would have come up first as I consider it bigger than both good-tutorials and absolute cross).

Hope all is well,
- Adam

I think google is probably the best place to hit. Although it may set you back a rather large sum of money I think it may be worth it in the end.

Spam is a BADBADBAD idea. Greycobra recently had a spam issue, lost quite a few members as a result.

I don't think it would really be a stretch to get P2L advertised on Adobe.com, you host Adobe Photoshop tutorials which may attract even more people to use the software if not only to create what your hosted tutorials have shown they can do.

if i owned p2l and was advertising i send leaflets to the unis and collages that do courses in the stuff offered on p2l, that way i would hit the target market, i would never spam anyone! i hate reciving it, it really gets me down when my only email is trying to sell me stuff

Nice and interesting idea youve got there.

I'd advertise it on places such as yahoo (if its possible, not overall sure) but, when I get my site and stuff back up and running, ill pm you Dan for a link to your banner and advertise it for free.

make sure P2L url is in the top when anyone tries to google "photoshop" or "tutorial" or whatever..

that would effectively be spamming lol

Simple, take down the competetion, hahaha.

Well this isn't really advertising but i would make a magazine for pixel2life not a monthly thing at first to see if it would work. It might hit a larger audience that way.

i would go like: Eeeeeeeeeeeek @ Bandwidth!!!! no more advertsing

Nah for real: gamerenders.com.

That's a neat idea we could pop NGPixel in as the centerfold lol

Seriously that would be great say in a pdf format to start off with

AFRICA...