Briskfire.com - Ideas to boost site traffic & Attract interest

Hello all,

Right about 12 months ago i spent a couple of weeks designing and creating my website www.briskfire.com. I designed it and implemented by all my own code and even made the template on photoshop. It is a complete CMS.

Now its running and setup for the past year i havent really done much with it. Im looking for ideas on how i can attract more traffic to it, maybe earn a small income and base it on something that people will be interested in.

Ive got my own linux server downstairs which is connected to our home 3mb ADSL connection. The server is running apache 2.0 with php and mysql.

So i dont really have any limitations on what i can do. The only real limitation is connection speed. I run a counterstrike server which i was thinking of linking into my site eg. online stats etc etc and a psybnc server on IRC attracting more people.

If you look at my site you will see i have a proxy filter bypass (which is offline atm) and also a web irc, however i need new ideas and methods of attracting people and creating a small residual income at the same time.

Please could anyone guide me here or provide me advice and tips of how i can go about this bareing in mind i have all the software and hardware i need.

This would be much appriciated.

Thanks in advance

Jim
www.briskfire.com

to get more traffic, get a sponsor, nice site by the way. Good luck

Three things to keep in mind: 1) Content. 2) Content. 3) Content.

I didn't delve too far into your site, but I can tell you that the front page didn't really entice me to stick around for long. I'm not saying it's ugly, but from a surfing aspect, it's not one of those sites I'd hang around.

How can you fix that? First off, if you have any worthwhile content, add a sort of "what's new" feed to the front page, add some logo images, etc.

Second, the content will determine how much of what kind of traffic you'll draw.

My blog, for example, has a rather diverse set of content. I post about nearly everything, from life, to cars, to computers. Search engines spider the content, and I get a fair amount of traffic from search queries. It's not something that happened overnight, but I smashed the 1200 unique visitors mark back in September. Check out the lifetime stats for my site here.

In that same vein, submit your site to search engines and directories. Get friends to link to you. Post around here some more and get your signature enabled and drop a link to your site there. I did with mine, and believe it or not, I get a nice bit of referrals from DevShed each month.

As far as earning money is concerned, wait until you start drawing a large number of visitors. The snazziest looking website with a lot of content but only 5 unique visitors per month isn't a basis to draw revenue. When your numbers peak out, look into selling something or placing banner ads on your site. Check your ISP's TOS/AUP beforehand, and make sure that revenue generation off a self-hosted server isn't a breach of their terms.

Taking a second look, I see you have some ads on there already - Maybe take those off until you get your numbers a little higher. If you overload a page with advertisements, especially in the early stages of your site, they will tend to drive people away. That's not really what you want to do.

Also, look into doing a link exchange with some friends. Make up some nice buttons and banners, ask your friends to do the same, and put the buttons on your pages.

That should be enough to get you going for a little while. I hope things work out for you!