Promote Yourself On altnation.com

[Woolies]

Alternative Nation would like to hear about good, interesting and relevant events, bands, clubs or any sort of project you may be thinking of telling us about. The important words there are interesting and relevant, we do not have a penis enlargement discussion area, we do not have a free iPod specialised audience. Posting commercial advertising in an inappropriate manner will get you banned from our website.

So how to avoid that happening and get the most out of promoting yourself via the AN forums?

A few tips:

1. Keyword the thread title (always start them with MyProject - blah blah blah)– not all capslock though as that looks childish – get the artist names in there and date if possible but keep to around 10-12 words MAXIMUM. This is the most identifiable to folk scanning lists of threads and best for searches.

2. Without dedicated forum then you'll have the luxury of two threads on altnation. One in Gigs (if they are gigs!), the other prob best in Glasgow Venues or whatever it becomes. Don't use the same title/content for each, especially title as that can place them into an automatic blindspot for folk browsing. Add to the Gig Listings if there's bands playing live rather than just DJ sets.

3. Don't, ever, ever, EVER use the shoot-self-in-foot techniques of using fancy colouring, formatting or anything larger than size=4. Have the main info as normal line-breaked text with simple formatting only — left-aligned, line-breaks for spacing, bold/italic important parts, extravagance is one size larger than normal. [img] in a flyer pic if one is available but make sure the small print is readable while not making the image too large.

4. Consider taking out advertising, Stavka is very relevant and of possible interest to huge numbers of AN Members. People will blindspot similar threads from the same people very quickly as soon as they recognise they're promotingthe same-old same-old. Banner ads have more persistance and can cross much larger areas of the site than threads occasionally appearing and bumped.


And a note on bumping and thread maintenance:
Try to add more info (or at least reword/rehash existing info), people reading AN will soon learn if “*bump*” is the only new content that gets added.Don't bump more than you can help.
Don't think that starting a new thread later about the same topic will be good - much better to cultivate a good relationship with a site's moderators. Ask them to change thread titles or important first-post info if things change.


the most valuable thing to do is stick around and join in discussions on anything you find that interests you, if you are known and recognised by our members then they will be a lot more enthusiastic for anything you recommend to them.