What promotion methods do you think will phase out soon?

[Shortie]

For many years there have been so many marketing methods to bring traffic to your site that have worked but as marketing methods have changed, the more we see older marketing methods becoming less and less used now and maybe we will even see them phase out at some point.

Of all the marketing methods you have used in the past and also still use now, which ones do you think will eventually phase out completely? Do you see any of them phasing out sometime soon or do you think they may still be around for a while longer even if they are not used as much?

 

[Cory]

I don't see any necessarily phasing out, some people will do just about anything to bring extra traffic to their website. Even with better methods of marketing, the old methods may still remain intact due to people not having the funds for paid marketing techniques, they may just prefer the old methods because that's what they grew up using, and traffic is mostly driven by the force of a link on other websites, so I think as long as they can get their link out there in public then they will, by all means, find a necessary way to do it, whether it's an old or new method.

 

[Naiwen]

Social media is just a fad in my opinion.

 

[Arantor]

Social media is just a fad in my opinion.

Forums are social media though.

Anyway, as to old methods - link exchanges, banner ads, affiliates, link directories, these are all less prominent than they used to be. The grand-daddy of the link directories - Dmoz - sadly went the way of the dodo some time ago and while it was resurrected in spirit, it's just not the same as Dmoz of old.

I've seen site-to-site advertising boards, where you come and cross-post ads, but I've never been convinced that was ever successful.

There is definitely room for a better class of link directory within some niches - roleplay has a few link directories going, and they're always humming communities in their own right.

 

[Cory]

roleplay has a few link directories going

The Jcink directory my friend built may as well be an RPG directory seeing as 80% out of 164 boards are RPG boards, but that's Jcink for you, most people use it for RPG boards.

 

[Arantor]

Off the top of my head, RPG-D, Sourced, Caution, DDR, a Harry Potter one that I have forgotten, and at least two others I've seen and forgotten all based on Jcink, just for RP. I wish these communities were a little more broadminded about the fact that not *everyone* wants to RP on Jcink.

Fun fact, the last RP site I built, I *also* built a Jcink site for it, added a snazzy front page to disguise the loading of data from a JSON feed from the real site and made it look like the same theme, but all the links really just funnelled you to the real site. I don't think anyone *noticed* and it was definitely submitted to at least one directory as 'hosted on Jcink' which made me laugh because it made a mockery of all the 'ew I don't wanna on anything that isn't Jcink'.

 

[Cory]

Off the top of my head, RPG-D, Sourced, Caution, DDR, a Harry Potter one that I have forgotten, and at least two others I've seen and forgotten all based on Jcink, just for RP. I wish these communities were a little more broadminded about the fact that not *everyone* wants to RP on Jcink.

You pretty much named off some of the more known ones. I'm not really into RP so it kind of saddens me to see so few non-RPG communities on Jcink. I know most people want superior forum software, which Jcink doesn't necessarily offer, but just for hobby's sake, I wish there was more of a variety of boards than just RPGs on Jcink.

 

[Kale]

I've seen site-to-site advertising boards, where you come and cross-post ads, but I've never been convinced that was ever successful.

Same here. I've never seen that really be super successful.

Off the top of my head, RPG-D, Sourced, Caution, DDR, a Harry Potter one that I have forgotten, and at least two others I've seen and forgotten all based on Jcink, just for RP. I wish these communities were a little more broadminded about the fact that not *everyone* wants to RP on Jcink.

Oh, for sure. I wish the same here. I am on RPG-D and did join RP forums that way. I just got bored/burnt out RPing so never bothered to join or post there often.