Thread: Need Help on Advertising My Halloween Website

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Hi, We put a great haunted house in our garage every year so I made a website about it and became an affiliate for a few places like Oriental Trading, buycostumes.com, etc. This is only my second year, but I am having trouble getting traffic to my website. Are there any good places to advertise for Halloween?

I do have an ad with Google running, but it doesn't seem to be working very well.

My website is: http://hauntedhouseforkids.com


Thanks and happy haunting. This is my absolute favorite time of the year.

Believe it or not, I had actually been to your web site before. I like the video - I especially liked the floating sword. Very cool - I bet the kids loved it.

Anyway, I know what you mean about having trouble attracting traffic. Short of paying for advertising (which isn't in most of our budgets), the best you can do is make sure your site has good, well-formed, well-organized, and correct content.

The first thing to do is take care of the basics. Things like misspelled words or bad page titles, for instance, confuse search engines and make them either not connect people to you, or connect the wrong people to you. Make sure your images have proper alt tags so that people come your way via Google Images. Make sure your web pages are formatted correctly so that everyone can view your site, not just, say, people who use Internet Explorer.

However, none of that will save you if you don't have good content. Look critically at what you've got to offer people. Looking at your site, it looks like the only real content is the video. It's fun to watch, but video is notoriously difficult to hook up with search engines, so you've got a strike against you already.

The question is: what are you trying to do with your site? If your primary goal is to get your video in front of eyeballs, your best bet is to post it to YouTube and other video sharing sites.

There's also the "shop" on your site, but it looks like that goes to some other, third-party store. Is that true? Or are you trying to sell those things through this site? If the former, what's the point? If the latter, well, it's not clear at all, and you need to somehow connect your site content to the offerings. Integrate the products with a conversation you have with your visitor - show them HOW those products can help them, make them want them. Otherwise, no one will be wanting to buy from you.

Regardless, if you want traffic, increasing the amount of usable content on your site will always help, if only because you have a greater chance of people wanting to look at it. Post how-to's on your site, add photos, add videos. Choose your topic, and focus on making it compelling for visitors. No one cares about what your kids do for Halloween beyond a "hey, that looked fun" level. But they care a LOT about what their own kids do. If you provide tips and how-to's specifically geared towards helping kids build their own haunted houses, then you'll start to see hits, because it's something that is a service to your visitors, rather than just something to passively watch.

nice site and great job on your haunt! I'll tell my friends!

I like you video too, we play by the same rules..........keep it kid friendly and no gore and blood, and the only monsters are our actors, we made flyers and put them in newspaper boxes to get the word out and to increase our traffic that night. Again nice garage job.

Originally Posted by jmc87

Hi, We put a great haunted house in our garage every year so I made a website about it and became an affiliate for a few places like Oriental Trading, buycostumes.com, etc. This is only my second year, but I am having trouble getting traffic to my website. Are there any good places to advertise for Halloween?

I do have an ad with Google running, but it doesn't seem to be working very well.

My website is: http://hauntedhouseforkids.com


Thanks and happy haunting. This is my absolute favorite time of the year.

Last time I was trying to get visibility to a web site, assuming this means it returns near or at the front of the appropriate Google searchs, your ranking depended on the ranking of sites that linked to you. A good start would be getting the forum sites to link to you. Google toolbar used to show you the ranking of sites you are visiting, this would help you identify which sites to try and get linked from. Also, I would make sure you get your site geographically registered (not sure how to do this, but I know it can be done) so people who live near you will find your site when they search. Good Luck.

One thing you DON'T want to do is pad your html with strings of searchable text or long meta-tags. Yahoo is fairly forgiving, but Google will completely ignore you if you do. I believe Google has a page listing DOs & DON'Ts of searchable content. I will post it if I can find it, unless someone else knows where it is...