Ask HN: How to virally market an individual website?
To this end, he has contracted a designer/developer to create a good looking blog to complement his already impressive online portfolio. Being a photography website it's designed for larger monitors, and in general scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. It's pretty cool as personal websites go - check out his horizontal, all javascript photo blog (http://hshahani.com/php/photoblog.php).
Now that he's done with the website (I'd call its current state beta) and already started pumping content into it and soon out of it (RSS feed is the next feature ...), he grabbed me the local Web 2.0 guy to advise him on how to market it.
I have no idea. I told him that his blog should be about his photoshoots, that he should work on regularly coming up with some linkbait, and that he should forward his more interesting posts to everyone he knows and several people he wants to know via email/facebook/myspace. But all these suggestions were off the cuff - I have no idea if these are good approaches, nor any idea of what he should expect as a return.
So as usual, I turn to the community. Has anybody on here had similar or has anecdotal advice or recommendations?
My friend and I are both looking for answers to questions such as: - How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two? - Are any targeted ads worth paying for? - Should he CC license some of his work (he's a pro - so no chance of him doing all of it) so others can play with it? Will they if he does? - What kind of linkbait is good and what kind is bad? - Where to find traffic?
... and so on. Any specific comments (features you liked, didn't like, would like to see etc) are always welcome as well, tho really it's the marketing part that has us stumped @ the mo ...