Tips for increasing traffic (or just visitors) to a piece of land

Besides the traditional ways of placing a classified and other ways of advertising, who have other tips of getting more visitors to a place like a mall???

I don't like to put up camping-things as these are not the visitors needed...

Any suggestions? Will be useful for a lot of people I think ....

hold a event

*Walk around busy places handing out $50L bills and Land marks.
*Hold Events at Your mall, with sales and specials.
*Get your freinds to spread the word.
*Get out and meet people, If they like you they will stop by your mall.

OH -

*Have a better Mall that anyone else.

::MIA:: has some very popular promotional campaigns every season. A set number of feebie gifts are scattered around the island, with at least one in every store in the mall. For Christmas, people searched for 40 stockings (each with an individual and very appealing design) with a different gift inside. Easter, it was golden eggs.

Every time I've been there during a hunt, the island is teeming with people in hot pursuit of all the items. And in the search they see every single store. So even if they don't buy at that moment, they still are going to remember what they saw when it does come time to buy.

At the opposite end, I'm about to pull my items from a mall that apparently does no promotion. It's a fairly large mall on an island, but whenever I do my rounds, there's no one there. Not suprisingly, my sales have been a disappointment.

I'm getting some good traffic with lucky chairs, you could see if you can talk each of your vendors into setting up a lucky chair, get a whole load of the gathered together in one place and call all of the letters yourself to the group.

But keep in mind that there are more malls now than shoppers, so you've got your work cut out for you

Vale

Well, some useful tips already.

Problems is always the link between vistirs and renters.....
I mean, renters don't rent in a mall without visitors, but visitors don't visit a mall without renters (empty mall).

So, in my opinion, the 'art' is to get both at once....

If you own the land you could try changing the description that comes up in search to include the more obscure stuff that the mall holds. If you're advertising "hair" or "skins" you're just one of thousands. If you're advertising other more unique stuff that could get you some hits. It works great for me, granted I have my own land and not a mall.

Try the lucky chairs and Money trees. And advertise all over, set your store up in other malls with a land mark back to your shop in your mall. I agree with the no camping bit, it only gives a false sence of actuall shoppers and is never accurate. I don't need a traffice of 16K if only 2 people shop there lol. My merchants need real shoppers and your lucky chair peopl are also shoppers for the biggest part.

i think traffic helps to get you noticed in the places search and when noticed
that draws more peopel in, but the secret is having something special there to keep them
comming back or getting them to tell their freinds about.

I'm not convinced generic malls can work anymore, I can name a whole load of businesses off the top of my head, can't name a single mall though. If I was going to try to do this I'd find some small neich, build a place that people wanted to spend time in then bolt on a shopping area. I sell ordinary womens clothes, but the only rented vending areas I ever get sales from are the kinky ones. I get loads of sales on Bondage Island, but none from any of the generic malls I've ever rented in.

Vale

Some great advice so far to which I will add that a newbie friendly area will bring in traffic, and begin to build a customer base.

By newbie friendly I mean having an area within your mall where your merchants donate a few high quality free items. Not only will people come to collect the goodies, but this gives the merchants a chance to show the quality and style of their work to prospective customers.

Best,
~Ari

My suggestion would be to group your vendors by type and then make seperate "stores" each of which is advertised differently. So, if you have 8 clothing/hair vendors, put them all in the same area, subdivide the parcel and call that spot "The Fashion Center at Acme Mall." Then advertise just the clothing and hair in classifieds and search. Yes, this costs you more money in listing fees, but most people will shop at "clothes & hair" before they will shop at "clothes,hair,bling,furniture,animations,gadgets,sex,poses,tshirts,fish,skins,eyes"

Too often people can't find what they are looking for in malls and give up, eventually they don't bother shopping at malls at all. Setting up different "departments," each with its own landing point and advertising gets people in and puts them at what they were shopping for in the first place. Once you have them there, pretty much anyone is going to at least camera pan around to see what else is at the mall.

slgeocaching.com a small simple prim, your place registered...and geocache hunters come a' looking for it. Some of the best SL placed are doing this..

Here's what's worked for me a bit...

**PROFESSIONAL LOOKING PICTURE IN THE SEARCH AREA**

Unless you have unique architecture going on with your place it's better to get a professional-looking photoshopped picture that accurately and stylishly represents what you're about. The picture speaks much louder than traffic.

Most people I know actually ignore the first few results that come up if they're too popular because that usually means low quality and campers. I actually go from least popular on because the best stuff is made by people that pay more attention to quality than advertisement.

**ADVERTISE IN YOUR OWN PICKS**

There have been many times where I found a cool item that someone owned and went to the "edit" screen to see who made it then look at thier profile to find a store.

**WEAR YOUR PRODUCT**

There have been many times when I was out wearing what I make (mech suits) and people compliment me on it. I tell them I made it myself and have a store and pass on a landmark. This happens whenever I'm out in public wearing my stuff around people I don't know.

**BE SLIGHTLY CHEAPER THAN EVERYONE ELSE**

If you undercut other people making stuff in your same field (furniture for example) by $L100 or more then you get more sales which more than makes up for it.

THat's what I've figured out myself anyway...

Before investing a lot of time/effort/money into boosting your traffic...

keep in mind:

(quoting from the Town Hall transcript at http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/03/transcript-cory-linden-town-hall/:)

Lewis Nerd: When can we expect to see “Traffic” removed? It serves no purpose, is entirely inaccurate and gamed, and most likely adds to many other problems we have

Cory Linden: Removing the current traffic metric is part of the new search project, so the goal is to pull it as soon as possible.

There have been quitte some useful tips, thanks so far....

I am not trying to get 'unreal' traffic to my place by using camping or so; just ways to attract potential buyers/renters.

I noticed more people are interested in this topic, so any more info is still welcome