Who needs website design for their haunted house?

[wickedfarmer]

Sounds better!

I was pretty sure you meant; the way you expanded on. But Ronald Reagen said it best..."Trust; but verify".

Think you saw I fully admit my website is lamest of anyone posting. But I am crazy to not capitalise on kick butt website. Then again I am crazy like a fox as well. Totally hear you on "run a business" too many do not. I'm crazy enough to limit hours of haunt and shut down ticket sales by 10:30..11:00 tops; pace customers for best experience, shut down by midnight and onto other business of farming rest of night during harvest. Would be able to increase customer throughput now so website improvement is one of next things on top of all the guerilla marketing I do. If halloween was a August event instead of October; I would had better website years ago. Then again if it never quits raining this spring I will have several hundred acres less to harvest this fall and could run haunt till industry standard hours. Running a haunt is much less stressful and more fun anyway. If we do end up getting everything planted I think this fall will be like 2009 when we had to run the corn dryer 24/7 becasue of cool/short growing season and crop never dried down. Those nights customers thought my Mtn. Dew IV was part of some gruesome scene.

Wicked Farmer

[wickedfarmer]

Jolly jumped in just before I replied.

Around me there is so much I hear over and over of how people were disgusted with hype in promotion...but lack of substance of haunts. People took on a 'Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me." attitude. To the point hype was starting to be a red flag for "that place must suck if they have to promote it so hard'. This is from exit polling. NOT so true with high schoolers... age 20 - 30 yes. My waiting line was long; had customers I wanted; and I need to shut down by midnight to keep farm rolling (and keep GREAT neighbors happy I have to live with all year long) Now I can capitalise on more people and website upgrade is in order.

Wicked Farmer

[X-Treme Torment]

I would probably be interested because our website sucks right now and we are looking around at different companies to see what they all offer.

[drfrightner]

I think most of you would agree with this... we don't just hype we deliver. Our haunted houses get the total attention they deserve we do our best on everything we try to do ... every single time. Sometimes your best isn't good enough and that should drive you to do better! It drives us!

At the same time you can't but crawlings spiders, and buy hard coat machines and everything between unless you are getting the attendance that drives your attraction.

I would never say that there aren't smart business people out there who have dumps for haunts but unreal marketing... hey they are trying to make money. Can you blame them? In the end you might have the better haunt but they have the better marketing, so why do you allow them to get away with it? If it bothers anyone that some haunt gets all the business while you have the great haunt DO SOMETHING!

Time to get moving... it starts with your website, then bleeds over to driving traffic to that website that is how you market your haunt there is no other way. DRIVE TRAFFIC TO A GREAT WEBSITE... how do you get that traffic? Doesn't matter just get it pay for it and then focus on having a great haunted house and you will win.


The haunt that can bring the hype and deliever will do the most business and build a brand that lasts a lifetime.

Larry

[xtremecreator]

I thought posting your haunted house site on hauntworld.com was supposed to get me all the exsposure I needed?

John

[drfrightner]

Banner ads on Hauntworld.com sent my website about 20,000 direct hits... I was talking to some other haunts who got more than that from Hauntworld.com ... everyone should have banners on Hauntworld and if you don't contact Patti today!!!

Outside of that I got traffic from all sorts of other sources and for me its not Hautnworld and nothing else... in fact I look at everything.

I'm working the SEO angle a lot, I will buy web advertisement from other sites not many but some, I promote my url on everything you can image from billboards, radio, TV, flyers, youtube, to everything between.

I have to hit up everything you can find. Some things work and some things don't... your local radio stations DO NOT work, local newspaper sites, and things of this nature are WORTHLESS based on what you pay for them.

Google ads work, but chase keywords you are not already strong with... things like facebook and myspace I've found do not work.

Blogging works, post lots of blogs on your website and make your website social media friendly that is our new thing. It works.

Larry

[HauntedPaws]

Are you using FB correctly? You should have a landing page that's worth viewing #1. FB also allows you geographical targeting, plus your feeds pop up on a fan's page which other potential fans will see.

[drfrightner]

FB I guess is facebook... I even read an article that said on facebook they have the lowest click through rates of any website. They have determined that people using facebook do not look at ads the way they would on other sites, they are there to network and socialize. It has the absolute worst click through rate... fortunatly they have the same style as google so if people don't click you dont' pay but you get very few click thoughs.

Larry

[wickedfarmer]

Tried contacting about banner several times over last year. Just tried link to patti again and got failure notice.



Wicked Farmer
mark@bestmaze.com

[MDKing]

Facebook is changing for the worse with all the ads they now sell. It used to be a few ads along one side now they are on both sides and bigger, even on the middle of pages and it's like the old myspace ads with "looking for local singles" and things like that.

Allan

[Spookyfinder]

Allan,

I don't know how your Facebook is, but I only have ads in one spot...right side midway down.

Also if used correctly, social media will be the BIGGEST advertising you do. I will say this, even knowing it may get deleted, Facebook gave us more click throughs than Hauntworld.com AND HauntedHouse.com COMBINED!!! Just sayin...

-Tyler

[drfrightner]

Couple things...

1) Contact Patti at this number 314 629 3940 or blacklightminigolf@sbcglobal.net If you want a banner ad contact her asap.

2) Tyler why would I delete your post... that is silly. Let me however clear up something for you however... you didn't get all those hits off of facebook because of your facebook page no no no... Yahoo, Google, Bing, AOL, Ask or whatever are all search engines right... well MySpace and Facebook also have search engines. When a site like facebook gets hundreds of millions of people visiting the site weekly you can trust people are using their site to find things and boom that is how you got most of that traffic I assure you. So while these people spend hours upon hours on the site they end up using the search feature that I'm positive is where a huge chunk of that traffic comes from.

However let me say this... Google was number one for me, then Yahoo, then Hauntworld.com, then Bing, then About.com and then Facebook.

However I'll bet you guys something, and this is a whole other subject but where did DIRECT hits rank on your site??? Direct traffic is a DIRECT result of how good you have built your brand in the market, how well you market your haunted house locally because my direct traffic is almost 50/50 with Google.

So if I am to put this another way ... Google is #1 and Scarefest.com is #2 or almost tied. This is very very important because if you can build up your traffic to a point where over 50% of your traffic comes to you directly then you are doing a great job in the market marketing your brand.

Secondly I would advice everyone that google analytics doesn't work 100% its a free program and unless you've embeded the codes on every page every single year many of you are only getting front page stats, talk to your hosting company and get a program called SMART STATS you pay for it but once installed on your server it moniters all pages accuratly.

Larry

[Spookyfinder]

I'll agree...Google was our #1 as well. I think kids today are turning more to their social sites to find things to do instead of searching for it on something like Google, Bing, etc. Myspace is dead and it's NOT coming back.

I think so much credit is given to Facebook because not only does it provide, and provide well, it's also FREE! I think haunters are just now learning the importance of having a social site for their attraction, but at the same time I think they're ALL using it wrong. Oh well. Where other fail, others succeed!

I also agree about the direct clicks/views. That's really the only thing we look at when we look at our web traffic!

-Tyler

[MDKing]

Tyler,

Maybe it's a regional thing, but Facebook where I'm at it's in the middle of the page, each side and at the bottom. They just keep updating it so you hear it constantly clicking when ads change over. Maybe they're testing it here in the mid-Atlantic I don't know but it's happening.

Allan

[HauntedPaws]

FB I guess is facebook... I even read an article that said on facebook they have the lowest click through rates of any website. They have determined that people using facebook do not look at ads the way they would on other sites, they are there to network and socialize. It has the absolute worst click through rate... fortunatly they have the same style as google so if people don't click you dont' pay but you get very few click thoughs.

Larry

Yeah FB is facebook, to much of a pain to type. =) Ad concept does suck! but the social aspect for the teen crowd is valuable. Getting them to intact is the key. Discussion,, contests, etc etc.. The more the traffic appears on their friends feeds the more people see ur brand and the more free traffic you get.