nurturing this site

Well,

I've taken some bold steps.

First, I've tried to contact some places to see if they will make a link to us.  Several have!  Y'all may have noticed more traffic here recently?

Second, I have purchased two ads in magazines.  One in "permaculture magazine" and one in "permaculture activist".  We'll see if that makes a difference.  I've attached the ads below.  In fact, it was while making the color ad that i came up with coloring the farmer guy.

And now ... there is something I would like to ask all of you:  If you get a chance to make a link here, that would be great!  In your posts you can make all the links you want to your stuff. 

If you do make a link here, I would like to request that the link goes to https://permies.com/permaculture-forums and if you can specify a title (or text) for the link, please use "permaculture forums".  I've done this in several places where I can link to stuff. 

It is all of the little links that make the biggest difference. 

I'm now exploring mashing some of my richsoil.com articles into something for some magazines so that it can mention permies.com!

I ran the ads and .... that was a lot of money with very little in return.

I still think the best thing for nurturing this site is links.  So if you have a blog or a web site for your farm or whatever your permaculture interest is, I would greatly appreciate a link! 

You are welcome to make a big ole link fest here from the permies.com forums to your site, I think I've given lots of suggestions on how to do that in this thread. 

Links, links, links, links ....  links from sites, from forums, from facebook ... even from mailing lists ...   I think the key really lies in the links!

Plus, I have so many ties between permies.com and richsoil.com, that links to my articles at richsoil also helps permies.com.  In fact, 30% of the traffic to permies.com comes from my articles at richsoil.

If anybody has any other suggestions on nurturing this site, I would like to hear it!

Do you read Seth Godin?

He is to be taken with a salt lick, but I enjoy his blog (Link) even though my interest in marketing is purely academic.

Even if 90% of his ideas are worthless, it seems like enough of them would pay off in a big enough way to make it worthwhile.

Maybe I should make some icons that folks can use for linking.

Anybody ever use any of that stuff like stumbleupon, or reddit or digg?

As I try to learn more and more about being a good site steward, it seems that everything comes back to people voting for stuff via links.  Whether the link is in a blog, on facebook, or a web site.  The link can go to a thread, or one of the videos .... it all adds up.

One person making one link from their stuff is worth 20 times more than than me spending an hour trying to do stuff. 

So now I'm thinking:  maybe I'm going about this all wrong.  Rather than trying to build usership through these other channels, maybe I should try to do things to help people make links to this community. 

What can I do?  Make a little banner?  Make a little icon?