Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
17 comments
You could always look for an abandoned website in a similar sector to yours, that has traffic. Then buy it.
There's some great bargains to be had out there.
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.
The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.
A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.
Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?
One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/
It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.
Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.
Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche. Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?
I don't know about him, but I'd go to DMOZ and open all the links in the relevant category.
If the website was getting 100,000, how was it abandoned? Just not being developed further? Why were people coming to the site? And why would the owner sell for 500$.
These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
In this particular case, it was abandoned by its owner, but not by its users.
It wasn't in development at all, it was just a simple install of open source software.
Further, the owner didn't seem to know how to monetize it, and was losing money paying the server bill for it.
I was, obviously very surprised and pleased to get it for such a price though.
I was, obviously very surprised and pleased to get it for such a price though.
Gah, you're about a week early for me to show you my article answering this question. Here's the short version.
$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.
$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.
I'd love to read your article :D
make sure you submit it to YC
100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?
Google isn't very good for displaying backlinks. Try yahoo site explorer. Quarkbase (for buzz) & websitegrader are also excellent.
So, you have $1k for marketing your current site. That's actually a ton of money.
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/
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/
"* 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."
Could you explain what their "thing" is?
Could you explain what their "thing" is?
Their "thing" will be spamming blogs and forums with your links, which, unless done skilfully, will create severe negative backlash and get your site banned from Google. Alternatively, their "thing" will be showing your site as a popunder on spam domains and botnet computers, giving you worthless traffic that only drains your bandwidth. Don't risk it.
The better thing they can do is to email all of the websites that link to your competitors and ask those websites for a link. But you can do that yourself.
Why do it yourself when you can pay someone $2-5 a hour to do it while you work on building new features on your site?
>* 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.
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.
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.
Keep that $1k to feed yourself. Start a blog, talk about your product, get yourself dugg, slashdotted, reddited, HN'ed, etc... That will bring much more than $1k of attention to your product.
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.
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.
I intend on doing that - I'm really excited about getting feedback from here especially - just not quite yet. Adding the final tweaks as it were.
I'd also add - get yourself written up by either ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch. They seem to be the two big'uns in the "tech-meme-like" market, and a write up by either of those will be free and will certainly be worth much more than a thousand bucks' worth of advertising.
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 :-)
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 :-)
Any particular niche within the construction industry?
Not necessarily, but we're focusing on architects first. Why, do you have a suggestion?
Submitting yourself to digg, slashdot, and reddit will most likely get you about $0.12 worth of publicity. Can't hurt to try, but 999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way. HN is much better.
The rest I agree with.
The rest I agree with.
Depends how and what you submit.
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)
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)
While I believe that you can do this, most people wouldn't have the slightest clue how. Also, my understanding is that it's highly unlikely someone new to Digg or Reddit will get a submission promoted far. Is that not true?
You'll definitely have to work on it to make it happen - i.e. become active on those sites. However, I only have 288 karma points on reddit and I can get a reasonable success rate when I submit stuff there. The longer your account has existed and the more active it is, though, the better, of course.
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).
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).
I didn't realize Slashdot still had that kind of traffic. Good to know. You're right about HN users. They don't tend to Digg or Reddit you much. But they do stick pretty well if your product is in the category, so they're worth quite a bit on their own.
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.
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.
One further thought...
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.
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.
Yeah that's true. If you do a blog entry about your startup, it improves to 998.
No, what I meant is that you build a reasonably successful blog and weave your start-up into the posts. You can't do that on every post, but it shouldn't be too hard to promote your own start-up on your own successful blog, right? :-)
Ah, the 37 Signals model. Not many people can build a successful blog. Writing is hard for a lot of people, and takes a lot of work to get good at. Most people would be better off spending that time working at Wal-Mart and plowing their salary from that into AdWords.
Writing is hard for a lot of people
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?).
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?).
Well, that route worked for me in spades with my previous businesses, but I wouldn't recommend it to others. I started the blog for fun, and only after a couple years had become good at it and built up enough readership to turn it into a successful advertising vehicle. Had I set out on that path from the beginning I surely would have given up.
As someone who has (succesfully) frontpaged dozens of Digg stories, I can tell you that unless you game the system with dozens of dummy accounts, there's a snowball's chance in hell you'll hit the front page. Spend $100 to hire some Indians to make an account and Digg, or use a service like piqqus.com.
As someone else who has regularly hit #1 on digg and reddit without even being aware that the stories were submitted, I have to disagree.
Impressing blogs is free. Labor intensive, but not something you can really buy.
$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.
$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.
Announce that sometime within the first 10 days of its launch your service will float one fake news story or headline amid the stream of real news. The first reader to email you identifying the fake wins the coveted $1K "User Editor at Large" award. In addition to the money give the winner a temporary featured column on your site. If the contest generates interest, repeat it as often as you can afford to -- perhaps quarterly? Good luck!
Sorry, but I can't see that idea equating to links, quality targeted traffic, or interest in his service, only interest in 1000 dollars.
It's novel enough it might get some secondary reporting. That it also raises ethical issues -- a news quality site giving out fake news?! -- also helps, by creating potential controversy/arguments/discussion threads.
How's your logo? StartupSchwag.com will put you on a sticker (for free) and distribute those stickers to its subscribers (also free). People take pics that wind up on flickr, talk about what's in the bag on their blogs, etc. Good times had by all.
If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.
This is actually much better / more valuable than it sounds.
Can you please elaborate/share some stories?
I only know that some specialists recommended it as a bargain at a barcamp a while ago. Your site get's thrown into the stumble stream, so people actually stumble upon your site, they don't have to click on an ad first to get to your site.
Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors, more than the average digg I think.
Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors, more than the average digg I think.
I have some anecdotal evidence that may or may not be relevant to technology related customers using stumbleupon.
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).
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).
Don't advertise.
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.
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.
The most surprising thing here is the number of posts that say "don't spend the money -- don't advertise." I think that this clearly shows that many people on here are techies rather than businessmen ...
The general sentiment I'm seeing is not simply "don't advertise" but to make those dollars count more than buying adwords etc. can do for you. In some cases that even means doing time consuming things that don't cost money. That's all business motivated, still.
I don't think that's true.
If you just spend $1000 blindly on advertising, you'll get pretty much nothing back. It's not enough to make a difference.
It's better to either spend it creatively, for example as I posted, buying old domains that still have traffic, or just keeping it, and using the far more valuable and scalable "word of mouth".
I dunno about the thousand bucks, but one thing you should do is get in touch with Bacon's Mediasource. For a couple thousand bucks a year, they will let you subscribe and make media lists (lists of contact information of reporters). But just get them to let you trial it for a week, make your media list, and start making phone calls.
No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for free).
No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for free).
[deleted]
A lot of great ideas on here. Since you are the only one here who really knows your product, you are the one that would have to choose. I work for an ad agency. We are very much into asking questions. Our goal is to interrogate the product or service before we recommend anything. Once you do a soft release to us at hacker news and we know more about the product, you will start to see even better responses to your question about where to spend your thousand dollars.
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.
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.
This is not related directly to marketing but I have seen a lot people recommend usertesting.com
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)
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)
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Google adwords for a news aggregator kind of product is mostly going to go in vain.
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.
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.
You can use adwords on the partner network (not search traffic, but targeting other sites) and pay a very low CPC ($0.05). Google will eventually spend it for you and you'll get quite a few visitors from it. Not super-high quality, but may get you started.
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
I think I wouldn't advertise, but maybe buy something useful with the 1000$. For example, pay somebody to write a press release, or pay a web designer to improve the looks of the site or create a cool new logo.
I've got to say that sending out a press release if you only have $1000 is just not the best use of funds IMO. Press releases have their place but is it really what you spend your first $1000 on? No way.
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/...
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 $1000.
Here's that Perry Marshall book: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/...
I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example.
Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank.
Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point.
As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. 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.
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.
I think that whether it's a one-time opportunity or not depends on whether you capture that email. If not, then yes - it's a one-time oppty. But if you capture the email, you have many chances to get in front of them - on your terms as well.
And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)
And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)
Having just put out a press release yesterday and having been covered on TechCrunch the same day, I can tell you one thing: the press release has nothing to do with getting covered. It's a waste of money if that's all you do.
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
Sounds like there is some overlap with my startup, NewsCred. Have you taken a look? Get in touch if you want some tips.. will be happy to help.
In an advertising sense or?
In that we also aggregate news and are focused on quality (hence the name "cred-ibility"). But that is just our consumer facing side and not our revenue generating biz model.
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?