World Famous on the Web (Part 1)

What if they posted a Web site and nobody came?
Unfortunately, this is the fate of many, probably even most, sites on the Internet. How does a webmaster fix that? I'm gonna tell you how.
What are my qualifications? Nothing more than hard-won experience, mostly learned the hard way. Two years ago, The Flick Filosopher was averaging 20 visitors and 50 page views per day. A year ago, it was up to 200 visitors/300 page views per day. Right now, I get about 1500 visitors/3000 page views per day. Days with more than 2000 visitors/4000 page views are not uncommon, and coming with increasing regularity.
Granted, numbers like these don't compare with those of a site like Ain't It Cool News, which reportedly gets more than 2 million page views per day. But my numbers are enough to have both Go2Net's 100hot.com and Worldhot.com rate The Flick Filosopher among the top 100 movie Web sites. And if nothing else, that means my URL is listed on two additional popular pages online, which, as you'll see, is the key to building traffic. This is the kind of positive feedback you'll going to be looking to create: more links means more traffic, and more traffic means more links. Mmmmm, links....
You can spend a lot of money promoting a Web site, but you don't have to. Be warned, though: if you don't have millions to shell out for a Super Bowl dotcom ad, you're gonna have to spend time -- and lots of it -- to get yourself online recognition.
You're probably gonna lose some sleep and some lovely Saturday afternoons, and you might have to be extra nice to spouses, significant others, and close friends to make up for all the time you're not spending with them. But if you're serious about making a name for yourself on the Web, this is what you need to do.
(By the way, these tips are aimed at movie reviewers running their own sites. If you're contributing reviews to a site that belongs to someone else, only a few of these suggestions will be applicable to you. As for the ones you can't implement, pass them along to your webmaster! Of course, many of these tips will be applicable to those of you running sites that have nothing to do with movies, too.)

What's in a Name?
If there's a geocities or a tripod or an angelfire or one of those squiggly little tildes in your URL, you're fighting an uphill battle. It's virtually impossible to be taken seriously online if you don't have your own domain name. Many search engines will not list sites hosted at freebie servers like Geocities, and many surfers look upon them with disdain. Fair? Maybe not. But surfers know that you get what you pay for, and a quick look around most of those free-home-page services will tell you that the vast majority of them are not worth anyone's time. Sure, you know your Tripod site is more than just JPEGs of your adorable kitties and insipid love poetry dedicated to your high-school sweetheart, but the average surfer is not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Web-hosting services that can handle your domain registration are abundant. Expect to pay anything from nothing to about $50 or so as a setup fee (that's in addition to the registration fee for the annual stake on your domain name, which can run, again, from nothing -- it may be included in a package deal -- to $35). Monthly fees for maintaining a site run about $15 to $30 per month -- some services limit your server space and the amount of traffic you can receive; others offer unlimited space and transfer. Check with your ISP -- it may offer domain-name hosting for even less.
When I started my site, I was using the free server space that came with my AOL account. Now, I use Simplenet and I pay $25 per month to have two URLs point to my site -- flickfilosopher.com and girlmoviecritic.com -- and for one vanity email address. It's worth every penny.
You'll find it worthwhile, too. You're gonna be splashing your URL on every available surface, and you'll be proud to display something like coolmovies.com instead of a monstrosity with slashes and tildes poking out of it.
So, now you've snagged that incredibly cool domain name that you can't believe no one had grabbed before. What do you do with it?

Submit, Submit
Go to this page at Yahoo!. See all those search engines listed there? Go to every single one of them that sounds even remotely like it might list a site like yours, and submit that fancy URL of yours. Keep track of which engines you've submitted your site to, and go back and check that they're listing you. If they aren't, submit again. Rinse and repeat.
This is tedious, boring work, I know. Do it anyway.
Also, don't forget to submit your site to the appropriate category at Yahoo! It's much tougher to get listed here than it used to be. I had no trouble getting The Flick Filosopher listed back when I launched it in the Internet Paleolithic of 1997, even with its cheesy AOL address -- today, I wouldn't hold out too much hope for getting listed. But it's worth a try.
For more detailed help in this area, check out "Search Engine Submission Tips."

Submit, Submit: Part Deux
Go to this whole nother page at Yahoo!. See all those Cool Site of the Day sites listed there? Go to every single one of them that sounds even remotely like it might list a site like yours, and submit that fancy URL of yours.
This is a little trickier than getting listed at search engines (and that's tough enough). With enough persistence, most search engines will list your site. Cool-site webmasters are much choosier, however, and each has her own idea of what qualifies as a "cool site." Check out sites previously dubbed "cool" for an idea of what piques a webmaster's interest.
Typically, if you've got 'tude and style, that'll help. And if you don't? Since most of the cool-site sites ask you to tell a little about the site you're submitting, and why it's cool, you're gonna need to boil your movie-reviewing mission down to a sentence or two. You'll need to be able to explain, in a pithy way, why you're online -- and if you can't, perhaps you should figure out why you can't. Your "mission statement" doesn't need to be deep and philosophical, but it does need to be honest and distinctive. (Mine typically runs something like this: "At The Flick Filosopher, I avoid the thumbs-up/thumbs-down brand of reviewing. Instead, I try to recreate the kind of conversation intelligent film fans have while the credits roll or the video rewinds.")
If your site looks cool, that'll help, too. Looking cool, though, is not about animated GIFs and embedded sound files -- in fact, I strongly recommend that you don't use anything fancy in your site design. A clean layout, a consistent color palette, and simple, stylish graphics are the way to look cool. Pick a theme and stick with it. Cool on the Web, as far as I'm concerned, is about minimalism. Want to know what cool isn't? Check out Web Pages That Suck.
Also, visit portals like Netscape Netcenter, which tend to have daily site recommendations. Submit your site to any and all you can find. My single biggest traffic day -- more than 8000 page hits -- came on February 1, 1999, when The Flick Filosopher was a What's Cool site at Netcenter.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
Some cool-site services aren't on the Web but come directly to your email in-box. Email newsletters like The Internet TourBus, Netsurfer Digest, Weekly Bookmarkz, and Cool Web Sightings point surfers to interesting Web sites. Suggest that they feature yours.

Check Out the Competition
When you're visiting those search engines and portals and cool-site sites and reading those newsletters, stop and smell the Web. Look around and see what other webmasters are doing with their sites. Look especially at what other webmasters in your field are doing: examine their designs critically, and try to figure out why they work -- or why they don't; look at what awards and other recognition they've garnered, and apply for those same awards yourself; and sneak a peek at which sites they're linking to -- you'll probably discover some related sites you didn't even know existed.
Which brings us to....

To Link or Not to Link?
Actually, the question isn't whether to trade links with like-minded sites at all but how discriminating you should be in placing links on your site. Some webmasters will place a link to any old site on their own pages in exchange for a reciprocal link. Links are vital, it's true -- and now so more than ever, since some search engines have begun to judge a site's popularity (and hence how high it appears in listings) based on the number of links it has on other sites.
I think it pays to be a little choosier, though. The only links that get listed on the Links page at The Flick Filosopher go to quality sites that I genuinely like and think my readers might enjoy as well. I feel that my links page would lose any value to my readers if I became a link whore. And disdain for the people who are gonna make your site popular will only backfire in the end.
And as it turns out, integrity has an evolutionary advantage when it comes to building site traffic. Links on crappy, seldom-visited sites aren't gonna send many people your way anyway, so there's not much point in trading for one. There are plenty of good Web sites out in the Internet ether. Find them, make friends with their webmasters, and exchange links. Your mom was right: you feel better about yourself when you maintain high standards.
You want your URL listed everywhere possible, yes, but the links that are gonna do you the most good will be on sites with lots and lots of traffic. So make nice with the 800lb gorillas of movie stuff online:

The IMDB
There's no reason whatsoever why your reviews should not be listed at The Internet Movie Database. Go to the page for the movie you've just reviewed, scroll down to the bottom, and click the Update button. You'll get a giant list of category choices -- scroll to the bottom of the page and choose "URLs to other sites (including reviews)." (There's an option at the top of this page that offers to send you an "easy to use off-line additions template" if you click the Request Template button. Don't do it. The template is a pain in the neck.) You'll then get a page with three fields. The URL for your review (the direct URL, not the one for your site's entry page) goes in the first box. In the second box, labeled "description," put something like "John Doe's review" -- I'd suggest always using the same text (I always use "The Flick Filosopher's take") to help build name recognition. In the third field, choose "review/commentary" from the pull-down menu. Then click the Format button, and on the next page that comes up, click Submit.
You'll receive two acknowledgments via email regarding each submission. The first will have "IMDb WWW Additions" as its subject, which just confirms your submission. Soon after, you'll receive a second email -- if its subject is anything other than "[ADD DATA] Thank You.," there's a problem with your submission that you need to address. Otherwise, you can trash these two emails and forget about it. You're done.
Submit review links to the IMDB the minute you upload your reviews. Don't procrastinate -- don't tell yourself you'll do it later. Do it right away. And be sure to submit your entire archive of reviews as well.
You'll need to register with the IMDB to submit updates. Do it.

The MRQE
The Movie Review Query Engine is exactly what it sounds like: it's a search engine of movie reviews. Send webmaster Stewart Clamen a short email requesting that your site be added to the MRQE's searches. Your site will need to have a single page that has links to all your reviews. Frames seem to throw off the MRQE. (Frames are generally a bad idea anyway -- avoid using them.)

Yahoo! Movies
Remember how I said it's tough to get listed at Yahoo!? I lied. Well, it's much easier to get a link at Yahoo! Movies, at least. Send a short request for a link, along with the URL of your review, to movies-submissions@yahoo-inc.com. (You can send a batch of links in one email. Remember to include the title of the movie along with each link.) Yahoo! Movies generally seems to accept links to reviews at least until a few weeks after a film opens, but you'll find the biggest boost to your traffic if you can manage to get linked here by the first Monday after a movie opens. They seem selective about which critics they link to, but it can't hurt to submit links and keep your fingers crossed.
Links at Yahoo! Movies have given me the single most consistent boost in traffic, on a regular basis.

I See Screenings, People
If you are able to review movies prior to opening day, be sure to submit the text of your review (just paste it into the body of an email), as well as the direct URL to the review, to Rotten Tomatoes, which offers roundups of critical response to new flicks on opening day. You need to get your review to RT by 8am Pacific time on opening day, however, to have a chance at getting quoted, so this is strictly for those with advance screening privileges.

Jane, URL Slut
Be shameless. Drop your URL everywhere you can online:
* Your URL should be in your email sig -- all the better if it can be in your email address, which you should be able to manage if you have your own domain name.
* Contribute to movie-related newsgroups, forums, and bulletin boards -- and be sure to sign your posts with your URL. Getting into a heated discussion about the hidden themes of THE FLINTSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS is sure to be memorable, but if you can simply find a clever way to invite surfers to your site without sounding like you're spamming, that's good, too.
* Volunteer for a service like BriefMe.com, which sends out site-review newsletters on various subjects (like Movies). In exchange for writing a short site review in your subject area, you get a credit with your name and URL, which gets seen by lots of interested surfers every week.
* Join affiliate programs, like those for Reel.com or Amazon.com. These typically highlight member sites on a regular basis. The Flick Filosopher was recently a Reel Affiliate Site of the Week, which seemed to lead directly into Reel recommending my site to a Web journalist who was writing an article about being a successful affiliate. Bingo: more links to The Flick Filosopher at several sites devoted to affiliate programs.

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity
Once a month or so, I do a little ego surfing. I plug my site name -- or, for even better results, my URL -- into a metasearcher (I like Profusion) and see what comes up. Rare is the ego surf that fails to contain at least one mention that surprises me.
Ego surfing is a great way to keep tabs on what's being said about you online. If you're lucky, you're gonna find your site showing up on everything from Joe Surfer's Giant Web Page O' Links to a disparaging reference to one of your reviews in another critic's work. There's just about no variety of link that isn't good for you (see above for the link-whore caveat). In fact, the only times I've been upset at what I've found is when I've discovered that other sites had re-posted my reviews in their entirety without even linking back to my site. (Those sites took the reviews down at my request.) It's not a compliment when someone steals your work -- it's theft, and it's not cool. Ferreting out underhanded stuff like this is another reason to do a regular ego-surf.
Once you find out what people are saying about you, use that as a springboard for your next round of promotion. Maybe your review of an obscure movie about, oh, horse racing, picked up a link on a Kentucky Derby site. So there's a whole new realm of online interest for you to exploit.
Okay, surfers are knocking at your virtual door. Cool. Now, how do you keep them there, and how do you get them coming back for more? Stay tuned for Episode II, coming soon.

MaryAnn Johanson
The Flick Filosopher
August 8, 2000

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MaryAnn Johanson.
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