Unless you're building the next social news site or a bittorrent client, this is the wrong initial audience for your product. You want to find people that are actually in your target demographic, not the fickle digerati that try 10 new web services a day but never stick around at any of them.
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.
I never really thought of the "digerati" as actual users for the product; they're more like "carriers" for a (memetic) disease--they'll talk about it to their non-technical friends, set up their own stuff using it as a platform, and so on.
(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?
There are also a lot of more specialized communities where you can promote an idea for free amongst the appropriate target market by simply joining a particular corner of the blogosphere, joining certain forums, etc. So this idea may still be applicable.
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.
Often, actual cash in hand is more of a limiting reagent than your own time. Since the OP was about minimizing cost, it seems fair to assume that cash in hand is the appropriate limiting reagent.
If you're selling things, you might consider an affiliate program. In one of my startups, I had a couple of hundred affiliates signed on before I launched by giving away free copies. It resulted in hundreds of thousands in income the week we launched. Most of the sales came from the top 20 affiliates.
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.
Ignore standard (and popular) BS of "promotion through blogging and social networks", that's a myth. A successful blog is a business on its own. PR companies have full-time bloggers, Facebook "friends" and even wikipedia editors to spread the word about their clients, and it will cost you serious money: on par with several full-time yearly salaries. And don't expect to become a Facebook after spending that much. Building a brand in consumer-space entertainment business costs millions of dollars (and some luck, still)
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.
I find low traffic sites on adbrite.com and use there CPM option to advertise on them. A website might have 500 visitors a day and cost .05 cents per CPM. So I can spend a few dollars (a month) and get full time advertising on a number of websites. For higher traffic sites use the fixed rate pricing if it is available.
I once paid a guy to write articles and submit them to these article sites. There were a few visitors coming from those sites at the beginning, but it didn't help much. (This has also been 2 years ago, things might have changed)
These are things we all "know" but never quite put together as a system. I just came upon this system myself and I have started implementing it, I am not much of a writer and so I had two articles written for me. I just started on this myself so I have not gone all the way from step 1 to 7 but when I do I will compile the results and post them.
You really need to work backwards from the value of the customer. If you have something that directly monetises then you can calculate value of a register user and of a visitor. Back out your marketing budget from there.
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.
With social media its hard to get above the noise level. To start out, you should have a company blog.
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?
I hope you guys realize that the above comment is the OP answering questions about the site trying to get marketed, so there's no need to vote him/her down.
We've spent 0 so far, and have had pretty good results. The blog is huge, and I started the company blog almost six months BEFORE launch. I'm also active in the general tech community and try and leave meaningful comments on the blogs that matter to what we're trying to do. And it has paid dividends. We're still in private alpha, but will be opening up our doors in 2 weeks.
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)
".. What is the minimun budget to promote a site? ..."
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.
Agree with Kyro. Try to go as far as you can without any marketing budget. It takes a lot more effort, working on getting discovered by users, but I don't think it's any less effective than paid marketing, and possibly even more effective in the initial stages.
Your all living in dreamland. No one is going to really give a toss about an article here or there, in whatever blog or whatever advert they see. The point is: The internet works a specific way. People who are 'in need' can find that on the net by 'search'. These are the only people that are worth targeting because they are the only ones who give a shit about what your selling/offering. The point is very simple. If you want to launch a Website you have to spend a small fortune, and heres what on:
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!
Couldn't agree more. Rather than spend time posting your link to 1,200 social bookmarking sites and writing press releases, spend your time on SEO. This is the #1 way people will find your site.
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.
Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first): Google, Apple, Craigslist, Ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube... I could probably think of more, but you get the jist.
SEO is important to a lot of businesses (especially ecommerce and UGC plays), but not worth early focus for a lot of others.
so when i search google for a red widget i never see ebay listings? are you f kidding? MS was before the net, as was apple, so count them out as they are manufactures not websites, google came up with the best search (given my argument is that the net is all about search) algo and thus gained success, so they dont count. Myspace made its way through the fog with SPAM, youtube got big because they tapped into myspace offering the best music video service, and lost 1 million a month in the process (im still not even sure if they have actually made any profit and I seriously doubt it), social networks have poor quality traffic, albeit alot of it, which costs them a fortune in data centers and makes no cash, Can I safely say the only social network to be in profit is linkedin.
"but not worth early focus for a lot of others"
Total crap.
"Total Crap"? Normally I don't respond to people who can't manage to be polite, but I'm going to make an exception. Here's the quote you should re-read:
"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.
This response is at least an argument! Sorry to sound impolite, but bad advice/decisions costs money. Your main point is that there is another way. OK of course I accept that, but your examples are pretty lousy mind, these are not mum and pup stores, (like the free car ads site the author of this question is promoting).
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.
RescueTime.com is my current startup (YCO8). Previous startup (which sold in 2006) was an SEO play, so I've done it both ways.
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.
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.