What is the minimum budget to promote a site?
I have a site, and I would like to know what do you consider it is the least amount I should spend promoting it and where should I spend it? thx
The Museum of Modern Betas always good for a couple hundred visitors. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/
Killer Startups is an ass ugly site but can send some traffic. http://www.killerstartups.com/
Simple Spark has not sent me a ton of traffic but they have a nice looking site and will hopefully gain more of an audience. http://simplespark.com
I'm also looking for more ways to get the word out so the more advice the better.
Techcrunch, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, news.yc, etc. are all extremely effective places to create buzz for no cost.
You want your initial customer base to be your target demographic because their initial feedback will help shape future iterations of your product. If you just launch with the web 2.0 social news scene, their feedback will be less relevant and will take your product down a distracting path.
Then again, if you are producing a website targeting automobile tire wholesalers, no amount of free online promotion is likely to have the desired effect.
(Not that I have any idea how the religious book market works, but) if you want to sell Bibles, do you go door-to-door, or do you just go to churches and try to get the preachers to use you as their source? The tech crowd are the preachers to the regular joe user--they're the ones interviewed for tech color pieces in the news, they're the ones deciding what software to install in your schools, libraries, workplaces, and government buildings; they're the ones who set your router filtering policies. If the students in a school can goof off on Facebook but not Myspace, guess which one the school's network will live on?
Make your site worth talking about and you don't have to spend any money (at first).
Read "Made to Stick" (great book on the subject of sticky ideas).
Potential affiliates are not hard to come by and you only pay if they perform. Just pretend you are a customer, search for your product/service in Google and contact everyone who is on the first page as ads or natural search and give them a copy of your product and ask them to promote it if they like it in exchange for a healthy commission. They've got the traffic, and many of them probably don't know how to monetize it.
It also helps to suggest ways for them to promote your product. For instance supplying custom emails for them to send out to their list, promoting it in their blog, adding your product as an up-sell when their customers buy their stuff from them etc.
You can also setup things like cross-promotional auto-responder messages, where you have a message in your auto-responder promoting them, and they do the same for you. No commissions required.
It all depends on what you're doing. If I knew what you were doing, I'd have much better advice.
Despite what at least one person said, article writing is a great way of getting natural traffic and being slowly gaining traction in Google. It just takes time and has to be done right. Don't over post and make sure you post it to your own site and get it indexed by the search engines before syndicating it.
There are other things you can do as well, like buying domain names that have pagerank and putting content on them that references your site. Risky if you ask me. Google will eventually black-list everyone who does that sort of thing.
That is a bitter truth, assuming you're after building a sustainable business. That doesn't apply to you, however, if all you need is to get a couple thousand "early adopters", living mostly in Bay Area, create some awareness of what you're doing in SV-circles, hopefully reaching an ear of a potential acquirer so you could flip it for a few million, then hire a good SV-connected PR firm: that will cost you $10-20K/month or get admitted to YC and their PR machine will do the trick.
The first thing you need to do is create an "engine". Something where you can reliably introduce a user to it, and have that user ultimately invite at least 1 other user (on average). In modern hype-infused parlance, this is a "viral loop" (with a viral co-efficient of more than 1). But really, it's as old as the Internet.
You can achieve this in one of 3 ways:
1) Be surprising, controversial, funny, or useful. People always tell their peers about fabulous products.
2) Get scientific about viral marketing. Widgets, facebook apps, etc. This is hard for most businesses (but for others-- it's laughably easy... I know a guy who is serving up hundreds of millions of widget views on a product that essentially didn't evolve past the first 20-30 man hours of work).
3) Get smart about SEO (if your biz is a content play). This is really just a different flavor of viral marketing. Yelp, Digg, and other UGC sites have a great viral loop. Visitors come. Some create content. Content gets indexed. Indexing generates google traffic for new page, which brings in users. Rinse, repeat. Wait 2 years and you have a vast pile of indexed content.
If you can't do these, then you're stuck buying attention with time or money-- which scales VERY poorly unless you have a great opportunity for revenue/profit. If you can pull these off, then marketing dollars/time is just adding gasoline to a healthy little fire.
Step 1: Write an article between 300 and 500 words on your products target market, then suggest your product as the solution
Step 2: Submit your article to article submission sites such as articlebiz.com, crixi.com, electrictext.com, contentdesk.com
Step 3: Rework your article into a press release and then submit. PrLeap.com or PrWeb.com (about $120)
Step 4: Rework your article into a video. You can read your article over a slide presentation. Submit this to Youtube and other video sharing sites
Step 5. Turn your article into a podcast (audio only) and submit it to iTunes http://www.apple.com/itunes/tutorials
Step 6: Create a blog intro with your video code in it.
Step 7: Create a Squidoo Lens
Step 8: Social bookmark everything you have just done at propelier.com, digg.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com, twitter.com, reddit.com, tagza.com, fark.com, newsvine.com, furl.net, swik.net, connotea.org, sphinn.com, blinklist.com, faves.com, mister-wong.com, spurl.net, netvouz.com, diigo.com, backflip.com, rawsugar.com, bibsonomy.org, folkd.com, linkagogo.com, indianpad.com, plugim.com, myjeeves.ask.com, jumptags.com, mixx.com, wirefan.com, danogo.com, ka-boom-it.com.
Repeat process!
However I am assuming you have a consumer app where it is very hard to calculate the value of a visitor/user. In that case you are looking at viral, social media, SEO and paid ads. Viral works if your product is intrinsically viral product (send to friend doesn't count). Social media works if have rich content (how to's, great photos, recent news). SEO is what you do if you can't do the first two (I know of one of the world's biggest travel social networks who never paid a penny on SEO). The problem with SEO is it takes a lot of time to build up traffic.
That brings you to paid advertising. I think paid advertising is great for getting everything kick started but the business model for paid ads doesn't stack up for free consumer apps. Hope that helps.
Also look for advertising coupons for Yahoo, MSN and Google. You need good analytics so you can tell what keywords/ads do the best. Only target search ads, avoid the spammy content networks when starting out.
Once you have some traffic coming in, look at what users are doing, tune your website to try to increase conversions.
Spend more money as you bring it in. What type of site? How does it generate money?
Then its SEO, SEO and more SEO.
The standard (2) options are search engines and their paid advertising platform.
The "2.0" option is social media.
Option (1) Search Engines
have SEO done on your site; any traffic you don't have to pay for is the best, second register with only Google, Yahoo and MSN paid ads; spread your budget according to engine traffic and technology to catch click fraud, 65% google, 25% yahoo and 10% MSN (live).
- adjust your budget according to cost per action on your site (setup analytics) to the correct engine for your audience (google = mainstream, every genre) (yahoo = less technical audience) (MSN = industrial and older)
option (2) social media
this is the hardest option and unless your site is naturally viral or something people would care about (in which case it would have probably already got "buzz" or users) trying a social media campaign on a site that your mom,dad,sister,brother or friend wouldn't visit more than once a week probably isn't worth your time (unless you have that in abundance)
if you need any free advice email me.
How much does it take to make a demo, blog about it? Show don't tell. Tell some friends & let them loose on a demo. Getting users is the objective, then some feedback. Create your (scalable) feedback loop: email, blog comments.
0) Have an old domain, New domains are penalized thus take 6 months or more to get top for 2 word search terms. 1 word search terms can take 2 years.
1) Correct SEO, your site will be indexed properly and optimized for your targets. Miss this and miss your target.
2) Link building, this is getting harder all the time. Google see link building as the enemy and are doing all they can to discount unnatural links.
3) Remove all barriers to entry, no sign ups etc, immediate gratification.
4) Innovation and content. Killer apps that people find useful and content that is compelling.
For the record, I have about 10 popular domains, have been recently featured on Techcrunch twice and all of the suggested blogs, which are all good, but at the end of the day, search traffic is what counts in the long run.
This is precisely why Facebook and other social platforms perform so badly for advertisers, people using them are simply not in search mode. That and the adverts online are totally crap!
Basic SEO is very simple. Choose good titles first and foremost. Make sure your homepage links to all of your most important content. Make sure google can spider all of your content, and create a sitemap.xml to help with this.
Secondly, setup google analytics, and keep an eye on how people are landing on your site from search engines. A high bounce rate is sometimes inevitable, but try to build you pages in a way to entice the user to keep clicking to other pages.
Make signup super simple (I'm sure 90% of people on Hacker News disagree, but OpenID is going to confuse 99% of internet users).
To really get your SEO kicking in, have links to your site from other sites. A good widget strategy can help with this. If someone puts your widget (and you build the links properly) on their blog, and their blog has 2,000 posts, you instantly have 2,000 links to your site. If this blog has high pagerank, great! Some of that pagerank will trickle down to you.
SEO is important to a lot of businesses (especially ecommerce and UGC plays), but not worth early focus for a lot of others.
"but not worth early focus for a lot of others" Total crap.
"Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first)". Note the "at first". Ebay is certainly focused on SEO right now.
The point is that you can get great without SEO-- and companies often do. And the (unspoken) point was that for some companies, search isn't how their products are found.
Low cost distribution is key for startups, but SEO isn't the only way to get that, and often it's a really inefficient way.
If you were starting salesforce.com today, would you hire an SEO specialist among your first 5 hires? Your first 20? How about 37 signals? What percentage of their traffic do you think comes from generalized search (beyond search for their brand name(s)). How about Slide and RockYou? iLike? Do you think SEO should be an early priority for a widget company?
FWIW, I ran a web consultancy for 7 years with a lot of focus on SEO. I'm a big believer in the value of SEO for many types of businesses... Just not all.
Also FWIW, I'm currently running a business that is growing 7-9% per week for the last 16 weeks (that's 3000%+ annual) with no marketing and negligible SEO (virtually all organic search is for a brand name search). We've got some interesting SEO plans, but I maintain that it's a bad thing to focus on for us right now.
I insist, even if you have a viral web app/widget, to not focus on SEO from day 1 is missing the whole point of the net and will cost you bucket loads in the long run at best.
FWIW I would be very interested to hear of the app / widget that you are enjoying the 8% weekly growth. Mine is myplaylist which is also enjoying high viral growth.
Again, the point I was making (with 10 years of professional SEO experience under my belt) was that for some companies, search isn't how their products are found... If that's the case, an early focus on SEO (the time consuming part-- not the "low hanging fruit") is distracting from more effective distribution channels.
The degree to which you focus on SEO should be proportional to how much your customers are searching for what you offer (you should also roll into the equation the KEI/competitiveness of the target keywords).
There are plenty of businesses whose target customers do NOT USE GOOGLE as a tool find the product. 37Signals is a great mom-and-pop example. Building the next great search engine is another example (people wouldn't search for "search engine"). There are countless others. In addition, any business that's diving into mature verticals where Google is claiming the "2nd click" (weather, images, etc) ought to seriously consider eschewing SEO as an early strategy in favor of other distribution efforts.