Little Help w/ My Site?

[stormcloudmedia]

I'm a web designer and a hosting reseller. I just finished my new site...

http://www.stormcloudmedia.com

I have a few questions for the community here.

1.) What do you think of my site? I need some constructive criticism on design, functionality, and services offered.

2.) I need some advertising recommendations. Please don't say AdWords. That's an obvious one and I've tried it and received little success. My opinion is that the market there has become saturated and is only effective if your service is very unique. Will Ebay work for what I'm offering? How about some other form of advertising?

3.) Anyone interested in reselling my service? I have some resellers here in my area and I can afford to give them $125 per new account. Not bad, huh? I'm putting together an "official" affiliate program, but right now it's simply based on trust.

4.) Does opt-in email advertising ever work? I just bought the lowest package from http://www.spamfreeadvertising.com and I'm not real please, to be honest. Is this market a joke? Any alternatives?

Thank you, everyone, for your help. If there's anything I can do to be of assistance, please let me know.

-Andrew
andrew@stormcloudmedia.com

[stevie]

1) It looks great and is easy too read. The only thing I'd change is the way you group your products. At the moment they are grouped based on technology (Flash, OS, PHP-nuke, swish) etc. Your customers are not going to be as web-wise as you and these terms are probably going to be meaningless to them. I'd group them perhaps as: Media rich, e-commerce, news, basic etc.

2) I know what you mean about adwords, Ebay is pretty saturated with web design ads too, though trying out a homepage ad might be worth a try (though e-bay sometimes pull homepage ads if they deem the service not to be specific enough, but if it is pulled you do get your money back). I think the old fashoned methods are still best for small advertisers, run an ad in a business magazine, or the business section of a classifieds paper. If you're feeling really creative try making a viral and submit it to sites that carry viral ads for entertainment such as yahoo office attachments, lycos virals and milkandcookies.com, it's hard to come up with something interesting enough for them to carry, but if you manage it it's a huge amount of exposure for very little investment.

3) No thanks, $125 is a good commission though. If you do formalise that, give commision junction a try (www.cj.com) I don't know what they charge advertisers for signing up with them, but $125 would certainly get you noticed on there and they have a huge number of publishers willing to promote you.

4) The only kind of e-mail campaign that works is one that offers something to the reader, like a newsletter on a topic of interest to them. These carry articles and covertly slip the ads into the editorial. Anything else will normally be deleted on arrival. Remember the definition of opt-in is often "didn't see the tiny little box at the bottom of the page saying 'click here if you don't want every advertiser under the sun hitting you with 20 emails a day'".

[js_thind]

Hi,

I may be wrong at this but I guess you are probably a Template Monster's affiliate. And as far as I remember, Google does not accept or index affiliate site with little or no original content.

So you need to put some orginal templates of your own if you want to get a good google ranking.

Regards,
Jatinder Thind