Whats a good way to spread the word about the site ?

[ism3t]

we need cards, that we can print out, and leave on yarii that dont have yw stickers yet

[sherryberry]

just get one of those people on ebay who are willing to tattoo things for businesses on them for a few bucks. Make sure it's a good lookin' girl though. voila! instant attention.. and probably get mentioned in a lot of those strange ebay auctions thingies.

[Rich Norman]

Originally Posted by YarisBueller

It seems like alot of Yaris people are spread all around, I think it would be really nice to let everyone know that we have our own little home here where we can share our thoughts and experiences, what do you guys think a good way of letting everyone know to come and hang out with us is ?

Well, you can sleep well knowing half the battle is won. Coming up with an idea to generate enough interest. I must commend Yarisworld for producing a high quality forum here. Things seem presented in a well-organized, useful manner and there is encouragement for individual members to participate ( i.e. making a difference ). The fact that a good medium ( forum community ) was used right from the start shaved years of struggling to get something off the ground.

Maybe my own experience can help. In 2000, I created the largest and most recognized of the Ford Festiva websites, FordFestiva.Com ( archived version from 2001 - link , gives an idea of the scope of the site ).

Despite being a static website whose only "real interaction" was me answering about a thousand technical questions a year about the car, it became very popular and created it's own "persona" within the online Festiva community. The site enjoyed very high search engine placement early on due to aggressive html meta, relevant content, and most importantly, lots of reciprocal links. This placement made things very easy for subsequent owners of the site to attract new people for a forum that they added ( which compounded the popularity of the site immensely ). I gave it up in 2003 to be fair to it's followers because I wasn't doing the site justice since I refocused my efforts to start a local Festiva car club ( which proved futile because nearly anyone in town I could find that drove one had no motivation to customize their car ).

All of my experience with that site though predated King Google, and to be honest, Google mainly sees your site through how many others are linking to yours, and how those sites that are linking are also displaying relevant content. Bottom line is, the more link "namedropping" of Yarisworld across the Internet the better. I would take efforts to gain lots of reciprocal links wherever possible. Members can help a lot in this ( links in blogs, other forums, CarDomain, MySpace, etc ).

I see the Google placement for Yarisworld as follows:

"Toyota Yaris" - # 12 ( 2nd page ranking )
"Yaris" - # 5 ( 1st page ranking )
"Toyota Yaris Forum" - # 3 ( ist page ranking )
"Yaris Forum" - # 7 ( 1st page ranking )

These are good rankings, though I would like to see YW higher for "Toyota Yaris" searches. That is a lofty goal given the broadening of the search term.

While the Internet is all fine and dandy, so many sites fail to carry this on to the "offline world". To me this is where the real fun lies.

Good ways to advertise, car shows, cars themselves ( very effective in large metro areas or popular interstates ), open clothing / accessories e-store, look into possibility of inclusion into dealer brochures ( but is Toyota really aggressively pushing Yaris sales ? ).

A import magazine advertisement would do wonders, not only for Yarisworld, but for Yaris performance image as a whole. The expense of the rates could be countered by offering a "group buy", where the advertising space might be shared with YarisWorld and selected Yaris specialty vendors.