So, you want to help promote GC. Excellent!

There's one way that's more helpful than anything you could do: Tell people about the site. Tell them your username, ask them to join and friend you. If it's email, it's easier. If it's real life, make sure they understand that there's a hyphen in the domain name (that fucker at gothicpersonals grabbed up the version of the name without the hyphen jus tto snag GC traffic, as far as I can tell, and won't return emails requesting he at least link to the right place for users who may have forgoten the hyphen).

Again, word-of-mouth is the best promotional effort possible. Ever at a club or something and find yourself wondering if you should give someone a number, but afraid you will have to change it because they look too desperate? Give out your GC instead. Did they ask for your MySpace? Feel yourself starting to blush because you actually have one? Give them your GC. If they say, "Are you on Facebook?" you say "I'm on GC..." This will usually prompt a "What's GC?" response, whereupon you get to evangelise.

Your GC account is really simple to give out, too. It's your username after the first slash. I'd tell you what yours is, but you aren't logged in.

If you're shy, or you just want to help out in a higher profile or higher volume way, you can always print out some of our flyers, cut them up and hand them out at the next club, concert, Goff-Coffee, or whatever.

Again, the URL for those flyers is:
www.gothic-classifieds.com/GCFlyer2_4up.pdf

Of course there's always web promotion. We're never going to complain about you pointing a link our way for people. Moreover, we're especially never going to complain about getting higher in the Google ranks.

Ever heard of Google Bombing? It's the trick where with enough links of a a word to a website, you can be on top of Google's search results. Look up 'Miserable Failure' on Google some time and you'll see what I mean. The biography page of GWB is right up near the top (and used to be on top, before talking about it in respect to Google Bombing becamse a bigger deal than the link itself).

As a result, the best and most wonderful way you can possibly help via links, seriously, would be to simply link the word 'Goth' to GC every time you post it anywhere else.

For instance, maybe on your own personal homepage you have a little bio about yourself. Instead of saying "I like to hang out at goth clubs" you could say, "I like to hang out at goth clubs". Get it? The word 'goth' linked to this site ups the chance of someone searching Google for 'goth' and getting us.

Of course, you could be more specific. For instance, you could link "goth clubs" to http://www.gothic-classifieds.com/events thereby upping the chances that someoen searching for goth clubs will find the GC events calendar. Keep in mind that not everything you may want to link to would be right for an outside link. If a person has never been here before, a link right to the chat won't help them. A link from the outside to the messages system is pretty useless and will just result in a bounce off the site.

In those cases, instead, link them to the main site, that way they can join, first.

Now, here's some HTML, BBCode, etc that you can use to link:

Seriously, just stick it everywhere. Be creative. You can even link directly to the logo name-image if you want, like so ((the alt text is important to make Google and stuff know what the image means:
     <a href="http://www.gothic-classifieds.com" alt="goths - fetish - occult - chat"><img src="http://www.gothic-classifieds.com/include/images/GC_simplelogo_2-tone.png"></a>

Remember, the more you promote, the more people use GC, and thus the better GC works!