

Ask HN: How to virally market an individual website? - ninjaa

My friend is a professional photographer (http://hshahani.com) who feels (and I think, quite rightly so) that a good website and a strong online presence can take his career to the next level.<p>To this end, he has contracted a designer/developer to create a good looking blog to complement his already impressive online portfolio. Being a photography website it's designed for larger monitors, and in general scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. It's pretty cool as personal websites go - check out his horizontal, all javascript photo blog (http://hshahani.com/php/photoblog.php).<p>Now that he's done with the website (I'd call its current state beta) and already started pumping content into it  and soon out of it (RSS feed is the next feature ...), he grabbed me the local Web 2.0 guy to advise him on how to market it.<p>I have no idea. I told him that his blog should be about his photoshoots, that he should work on regularly coming up with some linkbait, and that he should forward his more interesting posts to everyone he knows and several people he wants to know via email/facebook/myspace. But all these suggestions were off the cuff - I have no idea if these are good approaches, nor any idea of what he should expect as a return.<p>So as usual, I turn to the community. Has anybody on here had similar or has anecdotal advice or recommendations?<p>My friend and I are both looking for answers to questions such as: 
- How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two?
- Are any targeted ads worth paying for?
- Should he CC license some of his work (he's a pro - so no chance of him doing all of it) so others can play with it? Will they if he does?
- What kind of linkbait is good and what kind is bad?
- Where to find traffic?<p>... and so on. Any specific comments (features you liked, didn't like, would like to see etc) are always welcome as well, tho really it's the marketing part that has us stumped @ the mo ...
======
iamdave
_How to virally market an individual website?_ You don't. Simply saying
"viral" doesn't make it so.

 _How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two?_ Totally
depends on how he does as a blogger. Write great content, get readers. Write
shoddy content, get naysayers.

 _Should he CC license some of his work (he's a pro - so no chance of him
doing all of it) so others can play with it?_ Yes, but not soley so others can
'play' with it. License it to protect his work and his name.

 _What kind of linkbait is good and what kind is bad?_ Personally, I think all
linkbait is bad if you're creating it for the sole purpose of labeling it as
linkbait. Make quality content, give people something to read, don't just
dangle flashy headings in their face and then let them down with bad or even
irrelevant content.

All of what you're asking is dependent on your content. Don't fall into the
corporate America trap of thinking because you use the latest techniques and
resources you've got the right to use buzzwords inappropriately. Viral
marketing movements are organic, unpredictable, but most importantly: they
aren't made. They _happen_.

------
ScottWhigham
I'm confused - does he want international, nationwide, or local shoots? He has
a few celebs on the photo gallery so I can't tell. If local, I would suggest
taking each photograph and creating separate pages for each that include the
town/city/shoot info as content (all in an attempt to raise the PageRank for
searches like "beverly hills photographer").

There's no way to make a photographer's site "viral" though, at least none
that I can think of. I do somewhat disagree with "iamdave" - not all viral
marketing movements are organic. Many of them are carefully planned 1+ years
in advance. Either way, no one's going to be emailing around links/videos of
your photog friend.

