Where would you advertise? Would you sponsor a relevant blog, or advertise via Google Adwords / the deck etc?
Or would you put that $1k towards "impressing" blogs and marketing tools?
The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.
A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.
These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
I was, obviously very surprised and pleased to get it for such a price though.
It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.
Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
$1,000 will buy you about one feature worth of magazine quality pillar content plus effort to launch the content (by contacting relevant blogs, news organizations, etc). The ROI on evergreen content over the long term is stupendous -- it brings in links like crazy (which translates into direct SEO benefits), brings in traffic for forever, and is just stupidly cost effective.
Here's a (cheaper) bit of evergreen content which is Pretty Darn Useful for my niche: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm . I think that probably took, with its sister page, 2.5 hours to put together, so call that $250. (I have since become vastly more efficient at pumping out the content. You can hear more about that in a week when the article is done.)
Those two pages have, at last count, something like 100 backlinks, including from some fairly high authority pages ("Would you mind if we included your resource in this year's copy of the [American state] reading curricula?" swoon). Buying links on that scale would cost me thousands of dollars per month (I do not recommend buying links).
That page alone had 30,000 visitors in 2008 alone. Buying 30,000 visitors, all of whom wanted something very close to what I sell, would cost me about $1,800 via AdWords.
Direct revenue as a result of it was only about $1,000 in 2008. (I say "only" because it is one of the most poorly monetized pages on my site. I tried to strike a balance between monetization and linkability, mostly aimed at linkability since that was published before anyone had heard of me.)
So yeah, with $1,000, I'd suggest writing (or commissioning) some pillar content aimed straight at the people who you want to convince to give you money/influence.
Here's a couple of ways to stretch $1k marketing budget:
* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task.
* Write a letter to English/Business departments at the three closest colleges. Tell them you have a 3 month marketing internship. It's unpaid, but interns will receive a $200 a month stipend. Have them write blog posts, blog comments, submit to bookmarking sites, write press releases, etc... If college kids are your demographic, be sure to give your interns swag.
* Get a bunch of users at once from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Set up a job called, "evaluate my new news service", and pay $0.02 a hit. 10000 hits x $0.02 = $200 Ask them to write their impressions in a comments form on your HIT description. Give them an option to submit their email address if they want to be updated about future changes to your site.
* User Amazon's Mechanical Turk service command line tools to script a recurring HIT. You can ask 100 people a day to look at your site, register, comment, etc... 100 hits a day x $0.02 = $2 a day.
* Adwords, but depending on your site, your keywords, you're probably looking at $0.05-.50 a hit.
* Depending on your site, you could hold a competition and submit it to whatever forums and BBS's you'd like to. The winner gets a brand new $200 iPod.
* Buy swag and hand it out to your targeted demographic. Or, give it to your first passionate users. People love free stuff, and you might be able to get some word of mouth/buzz from passionate users that just got a t-shirt from your site. Cost of a custom T-shirts in small batches: $10-15 a piece. Custom stickers in batches of 1000: $75. http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/
Could you explain what their "thing" is?
Bad idea; there are strict laws about contests and they vary by state. You don't want to have a VC doing due diligence 6 months down the road run across this and put a large penalty on your valuation or rule you out altogether.
Importantly, without being sleazy about it, always be happy, willing, enthusiastic to talk about your product. You may feel a little bit of shame at the beginning, but it will go away. After all, you're telling people about your product because it will make their life better right?
To start at the beginning: why haven't you mentioned your product name in this post? How about an "Ask HN: Review my news aggregator"? Seems like a missed opportunity already.
The rest I agree with.
I can reasonably easily get a few thousand hits out of a combination of these sites, even with a very young blog. Much more with an older blog. All you have to do is write something insightful, bite-size, funny, well written, appealing, with a great headline, and get your friends to upvote you. That works on Reddit. There's no guarantee for any particular article to make it, but over a period of a couple of months any decent writer should be able to make it.
(I'm speaking from experience btw)
Digg is a pain in the ass in that respect. The volumes of "diggs" required to even make a blip are so huge that you'll only make it there if either you've totally gamed it (like that guy who posted that article about it recently), or if you've made it through somewhere else and you're dugg as a side effect. I stopped bothering with it because I kept hearing that the quality of the traffic is also very low anyway (very high bounce rates).
Reddit and HN, however, are relatively easy to promote to, and if you get really picked up very well on reddit (which should happen with 1 article every few months if you're good and write reasonably often), it'll spread to other places too. Articles that succeed only on HN don't seem to spread around too much, however.
The best place so far, though, was Slashdot. Get yourself slashdotted (on their main page), and you can expect 100k+ hits from it, and many links from blogs, and probably you'll get reddited, delicious'ed, dugg, etc, soon after. Be sure that your server is ready to handle it... It's a complete lottery - an actual editor has to decide whether to push your article - but if you win it, it's worth it - so submit there when you have good slashdot content, it's free and might bring you untold amounts of geeky traffic!
Bear in mind also that none of these methods guarantee anything - not even traffic, and definitely no guarantee that people will stick around. But they're not overly hard to achieve if you're a decent writer and have something reasonably interesting to say (those are the hard bits, really).
Definitely I would recommend just running a blog on Wordpress.com or TypePad or blogspot. Some service that can withstand the heat of any big press releases. Just in case. You can spend a few bucks to make it look like a subdomain of your main site anyway. Blogging can net you some organic search traffic too.
1) Hacker News
2) Reddit
3) Stumble Upon
999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way
I think that comes from submitting your start-up as opposed to submitting a blog post about your start-up. Each submission has a small chance of success (especially early submissions), but if you write and submit often, your chances increase, as does your skill in how to submit successfully.
If you only have one shot at it, though, then yes, it's a waste of time.
If your product is something that needs to be marketed to the blog-reading masses, I'd say that having a decent writer on board is roughly as important as having a decent salesperson would be for an enterprise-facing start-up.
If you can't write, better get started. Practice makes perfect. You don't need to be an amazing writer to write a successful blog, imho. You just need to be somewhat articulate and have interesting things to say (which, as an entrepreneur, shouldn't be too hard?).
As a side-note, if anyone knows of any way to reach the construction industry that would be as effective as TechCrunch is for geeks, please let me know :-)
$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and just work for the traffic.
If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.
I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.
Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors, more than the average digg I think.
My wife's craft blog sees spikes sometimes into the 10k unique range (from the usual 1-2k) from stumbleupon, and that's just from someone else recommending (i.e., she's doing nothing to try and get that to happen).
Be enthusiastic about your product. Have a twitter account? Talk about your product. Start a company/project blog and pimp that content as much as possible.
Email every single blog that covers what your product is about or have influential writers who would like your product. Simply introduce your product in the email and don't ask for a post, link or anything. Ask them for their opinion.
This is the best marketing.
It's extremely time consuming but I have much more time than I have money, not sure about yourself. You could outsource this but personal emails from the owner/developer will get you further.
No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for free).
One word of advice though, find out how you can quickly and easily explain your product to your target market. When you target market understands your product after tagline or sentence, they can easily explain it to their friends. This will help you in all marketing efforts, but particularly on small budgets.
The startups that users understand are going to do better than the ones that users need to spend forever explaining to their friends.
And one thing I was thinking about doing in this vein is to go to local coffeeshops and offer people coffee or $5 etc. to sign up and try your website while you watch and take notes etc. You know, just say "hey do you have 15 minutes, I'll trade you ___"
Has anyone had good or bad experiences with that? It might even get those people to sign up / stick around for good.
If you don't get people interested, you at least get usability feedback. (obviously if you don't need that feedback simultaneously with marketing, then this would be an unreasonable amount of time and money to spend)
Advertising on relevant blog would get you a better reach.
Beyond that a well chalked out email marketing and as others mentioned heavy social media penetration would work for this.
Additionally adding some kind of a virality into your product to increase word of mouth, some interesting ways where people would find it useful or intuitive to forward it to friend would work.
Finally, a very aggressive seeding from your own team - send it to all friends, repeatedly request them (if they would and if no, why not) send it to their first circle.
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
Adwords seems the most logical choice. I'd spend $20 and buy Perry Marshall's Adwords book and learn how to do split testing. With a $1000, you shuld be able to generate enough impressions to figure out what keywords work, what your competitors are doing in Adwords, and have a handle on what your landing pages are doing. Once you have that then you can more ably spend the next $1000.
Here's that Perry Marshall book: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/...
Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank.
Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point.
As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. Actually one can make them for free, but with my app back then I just felt it might be good to pay someone who is more skilled at writing to do it.
And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss