Ok, have an idea for a website, now how to market it?

Duality32 - intriguing idea. A friend of mine owns his own company and we spent a year trying to find investors. It was frustrating and time consuming!

Couple of thoughts. This site in particular might benefit from offline advertising as well as online. Many small business owners turn to their network of contacts, friends, and advisers for information on how to find funding.

SCORE (Senior Corp of Retired Executives) in the US is a non-profit group that helps small business owners with all phases of business operation. You can find their website online by just Googling SCORE. Not only might they be a good source of leads but they'd probably give your friend some advice on how to advertise, target the right market, etc. If your friend is in the US, maybe they start out having a meeting with SCORE around their own business concept and lead into a discussion about how to tap into SCORE clients.

My brother-in-law also did something interesting for a new website he and his partners were working on a couple of years ago. They wrote a solid business plan and entered their plan in a competition. The winner received $25,000 in funding. Not only did they win, but they got great advertising as a result. Hunt around for local groups supporting entrepreneurs and offering such competitions.

Press releases would be a good advertising mechanism, if not already done.

Also, look at and do some digging around "prosper dot com". It's a peer to peer lending group that has been around for years now and built a name for themselves in this type lending on a smaller scale. See if you can find out what marketing strategies they used (follow their links, dig up their press releases, news items, etc.).

Just some thoughts. Good luck!

Thanks for the info. Right now, I'm working on some PPC things just to get the traffic up for him. Then I'll start doing the heavy promoting. Any ideas on how to get more traffic faster?

Market just like anything else. Find the market that is dying to get your information. Become part of their internal conversation. Make them an offer they cant refuse.

I would have been a target on this a few years ago. My biggest concern was that I didnt have any expert investors to review my business plan (and business model in general). I would have paid for someone to review.

Now on the other side of the experience, I would NEVER use a vulture capitalist when I would be able to bootstrap any business now.

Like I said earlier, this is my friends site and it's gettin a total makeover as we speak. I'm just working on gettin the traffic rank a little bit higher. I understand that the site does need ALOT of work. So hopefully within the next few days it will get better. Thanks

Free traffic strategy: keyword research for targeted keywords, optimize site for those keywords, outsource/write articles for those keywords, send those articles everywhere, bookmark the site using those keywords in tags, bookmark the articles using those keywords in tags, outsource/write press release, submit press release everywhere, bookmark those press releases, submit RSS feeds to RSS sites....

For the traffic to be of any value, the emphasis should be on focused keywords. As John said, get to know the market. That will help you find the key phrases that would get the attention of that market.

For free traffic you want to produce a lot of content pointing back to your site and spread it around. All of those steps can be outsourced for faster distribution (and there are great service providers in the Warriors for Hire section).

(John - neat ideas and useful information for any market!)

Here is the best advice I can give you to generate targeted leads/prospects for your investor/venture capitalists offers.

Go to craigslist classifieds: jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, events, forums

Set up a FREE account to post. Find the services section in your city. Post in Financial.
You will receive a ton of traffic from investors! I know from experience.

I hope this helps you.

Thanks lilhay!