Asylum Promotion
asylum_promo
.....: .:.:.:..:


IJ Asylum Promotion Info
This asylum is dedicated to asylum promotion. It is important to list your asylum, tell a little about it, and a link is always nice. Happy searching and posting!

Find the right asylum for you!

March 2024
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

A [userpic]
Asylum Promotion!

Hi, I'm Aristoboule, another new mod here, and I've drawn up a list of things that can help you promote your asylum and increase your membership!


Helpful Hints on Promoting Your Asylum!

1. Give a clear, concise description of your asylum, the intended audience, and types of content featured in the asylum. Any special limits or rules should also be listed or a link provided. Just like advertising for a new TV show, food, or car, you want to give potential members as much information in a limited amount of space as you can. A memorable asylum title, slogan, or tag line that gets a smile out of someone is something they're likely to remember, while something overly esoteric -- in either the description or tag line -- might leave them wondering if they'll need a secret decoder ring in order to get started in your asylum.

2. Fill out the asylum's interests! Listing interests will help users find your asylum, and you can list up to 150 interests per asylum (which is the same for users). As long as at least two people share the interest (and the interest is less than five words before the next comma separation), you can click on the interest to see all asylums and users that share that same interest. If you list cats, you'll see over a dozen asylums and hundreds of users in the results. Don't forget alternate spellings too, such as "role playing" or "roleplaying" or "role-playing." I can't stress this one enough, as I've found and joined a number of asylums on IJ just through the interests feature!

3. Before you promote your asylum in [info]asylum_promo, or elsewhere for that matter, make sure you have contact information, rules, and any other helpful information for users listed on the info page of the asylum. Asylums that have clearly stated rules and guidelines are much more likely to have people join up and start participating than those that don't. If you have a lot of people joining your asylum or one that might require a lot of moderating (membership requires approval is one example), consider having at least one other moderator to help you out.

4. Have a post or two already in the asylum when you promote it! That's not always going to be feasible, but just like going to a deli or choosing a color of paint, people like samples. Give them an idea of what kinds of posts and information to expect so they'll have an idea of whether or not the asylum and its content is something they'll enjoy. If you have an icon asylum, fill up the userpic slots for the asylum (you get 100 with free accounts!) to act as a portfolio of what you offer.

5. Be flist friendly! When a user joins your asylum, they're inviting asylum posts into their flist. You might consider putting long posts and those with large graphics behind an LJ-cut (go here if you're not sure how to make one). Icon asylums may opt to only offer a few icons as teasers before an LJ-cut. Also, typing in ALL CAPS, using unusual fonts that may not display correctly for some users, or unusual font colors can also be a turn-off for potential members.

6. Update regularly! Asylums show up on IJ's home page, and both asylums and users' journals show up on the IJ statistics page. Chances are someone who's interested will see you at either place.

7. List your asylums on your user info page. If you maintain or moderate an asylum on IJ, that also means that you'll also have your own user account. Listing the asylums you maintain, moderate, or even participate in is another way you can find new members. Likewise, you can create clickable asylum promotion banners for use on members' profiles. If properly coded, interested visitors can simply click on the banner to take them to the asylum!
Click this to try it out!

Here's the coding: <a href="http://www.sitehere.com"><img src="http://www.image.com" border="0"></a>. Replace http://www.sitehere.com with the link to the site you want to promote, and http://www.image.com with a link to the actual image. Also, hotlinking, which is linking to an image that is not one your web site or that you do not have permission to link to, is a bad, bad thing since it steals from that site's bandwidth and will get a lot of people mad at you. Photobucket, Flickr, and Imageshack are only a few of many sites that provide free image hosting.

Promotional icons are another means you can spread the word about asylums you're passionate about, and it can be as simple as something like this:
Photobucket

8. Keep track of the places and times you've promoted your asylums by using the Memories feature. Another reason to use Memories is to keep from having to retype and reformat a post every time you want to promote an asylum. Simply go back to your Memories, find the post you want, edit it, and grab the text and coding. You can view all of your Memories at http://www.insanejournal.com/tools/memories.bml, and when you add a new Memory, either by clicking on the icon of the heart with a + while in the post you want to add or by clicking on the "Add to Memories" link in your Friends List. Not all styles support the "Add to Memories" link, but at the very least you should see the heart icon. When you click on a post to add it to your Memories, you'll be prompted to add a description to the post as well as assign it a key word or words. Using key words like "Promotion" or "Asylum Promotion" can help you differentiate between promotion posts and say, posts about kittens or icons. But if the promotion is for an asylum promotion about kittens, you can add both key words and separate them with a comma. You can also set the security for your Memories, and make them viewable by everyone (Public), Friends, or Private (just you).

I hope this is helpful, and if anyone has any suggestions or comments, please let me know!

Comments

These suggestions are very helpful -- thank you!
Also, love your icon, it's adorable :)

Thank you! :D

And I do have a version of it without the text if you'd like it!

Oh yes, I'd very much like to have it -- Thank you :)

You're very welcome! :D