Advertise - Market!

Hello DC!

I have noticed that it's somewhat quiet in here and I think you should consider advertising and marketing in other forums and websites.

This may include:
Posting at other forums with your sig to this forum.
Make a whole topic devoted to your community and asking people to come and enjoy their stay.
And if possible, have a banner on other websites.
Or, even affiliate or parter with other design sites.

Just a few ideas.

Oh, and one more thing...

I think the Splash page (front page) tends to make viewers just close the window, instead of visiting the Forum link at the top.

I am working hard on promoting DC and I do have a link (and also a short description!) in my signature on the major web development forums where I post. I also try to exchange links with popular design related websites and submit articles about DC to news sites.

As for the front page, you might be right, it needs some feature to attract more attention to the forums and maybe some clearer description of the whole project. We should work on it together...

As far as promotion there are so many free ways to get people to notice. I personally have gotten a huge amount of work by shameless self advertising on forums other than design related.

Take for example rap. There are hundreds of popular rap sites and almost every site has a design section where rappers who need album covers, logos, websites, and the like can look for a designer. I just designed a site for an aspiring rapper and he payed me $500...

There are so many other places as well... Yahoo groups - search for design groups and post in those places, google groups as well.

Basically any popular forum no matter what it is for, is worth taking the time to post. I've gotten work from vegetarian sites, adult sites, etc...

The biggest thing is just being shameless in your advertising. Heck if you would hire me with a commission per guaranteed contest started I could get you contests very fast... and for more than $150. Trade Secrets

Davidude,

Thanks for your advice! There are some valuable tips there in your post! We would be happy to pay for promotion but for the fact that we are a non-commercial site. I wish we were, but we are not, at least at this point. The 10% commision fee leavs us less then 5% after the paypal fees paid. I am not even able to give some reward to the other admins and mods who are doing a great job helping the community! Well, when we have enough money from the fees we might buy the moderating team t-shirts or something else, but there is not enough even for that now. They are doing this lot of work as volunteers! You might ask about google banners at the top... they pay less than a dollar a day.

Anyway, we are discussing ideas on how we could go more commercial so we could reward people involved in the community development and if you have any, feel free to share them. If you come up with something interesting we might realize it. And if there is an opportunity to pay you commision, we'd be glad to!

And still if you have more ideas for free promotion of DC community, please, share them with us!