How to promote your online fanzine

Someone dropped by the SF-Fandom fan fiction forum to announce a new fan fiction zine called Kasma.

After looking at the site I decided to leave the link drop in place, even though this was a first time poster. Most of the time we delete these kinds of one-stop wonder posts because these people usually just want to piggy-back off a successful forum (or blog)'s visibility.

You know, I've been there many times, having to launch a new site and needing to obtain both contributors and visitors. This blog, for example, is not exactly one of the high-traffic bastions in the Xenite.Org network, but it does get a fairly regular bit of traffic. And when I post to it regularly the traffic builds up gradually.

When you're announcing a new Web site you should really only do so through venues and channels where you are well-known and trusted. Let your online friends recommend the site to people they know in other venues. That's a form of viral marketing that doesn't offend most online communities.

But there is something else you can do for yourself: start a blog and post to it once a day. If you cannot do once a day, then aim for 2-3 posts per week. You don't have to say something profound in every post. People will stop by to see what you have to say.

You do need to let your blog ping search services. Usually blog software will ask you if you want your blog to be visible to search engines. Set this to YES (or ON) so that each of your blog posts goes out to services that announce your blog to the online world and search engines.

And be patient. You're not going to become an overnight sensation unless you create a substantially unique Web property -- and most of us cannot do that.

If anyone reading this post wants to announce their fan site at SF-Fandom, we do have a Fan Sites Forum where you can do this. But please do us the courtesy of joining our community and sharing in our discussions. SF-Fandom is first and foremost a forum community. It is NOT a place where you can just drop a link and forget about us.

That is really, really rude.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.