Well, round one of advertising can be declared complete, time to move into round two! Apparently journalists/editors don’t answer their email (only one response, from Eric Benderoff of the Chicago Tribune — thanks for that, by the way). I’ve also released a press release on eMediaWire, which I’ve had some limited success with. If you search Google News for virtualroadside, you can find my press release easily!

As a result of trying to promote this website, I’ve been reading a ton of literature about well.. promoting. And it just seems like everyone talks about  ‘viral’ marketing and other cool buzzwords, but it seems like most of the time people are just pointing out the obvious. Like I’m doing, if you’ll notice. But it seems, nobody really has ‘it’ down yet — its just throwing stuff up against the wall, and seeing what sticks. So, thats what I’m doing.

This reminds me of my experience at Boys State in 11th grade. Boys State is an educational program that puts a lot of students together for a week, and lets them run a fictional state. It sounds corny, but really its quite cool. In any case, I was determined to make my mark there, and so I put up probably around 250-500 flyers in the space of a day promoting my candidacy for attorney general. I ended up losing the actual race — but by the time I left at the end of the week, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t know my name.

I still run into people from time to time, and they still remember me as the guy with all the crazy signs. Heh. And thats my goal to some extent here on this site — is to create something that people will remember. Because really, this site is quite entertaining and unique. Not many sites will allow you to blow its advertising up.

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Is a view the same as a hit?? is a blog post written by Mark Cuban, which I recommend you read. He brings up a good question — what exactly is a view or ‘hit’. And how exactly do you determine whether it was a ‘successful’ hit?

For example, this website has a semi-addicting game you can play with the advertisements shown on it. However, theres not really a way I can measure whether people enjoyed it or not — maybe a survey, but thats hardly accurate. In any case, its brought up some thoughts for me to see how well my promotion efforts are working, and we’ll see where this gets us.

As for this site, it continues to get around 100-150 unique visits a day (1200 this month already), so my thought is that as more ads come in, more traffic will. Round two of site promotion is coming up soon, so check back here soon!

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