Contest: Best Idea to Get Buyers to a Marketplace? | Prize: Established Website Earning $100/M

Ok I'll give it a shot,

You want viral, twitter is your friend. Here's the idea:

1. Record a funny/silly/interesting/content filled video (I guess something that 'fits' your market) and in it offer a prize (use that $300 budget here). Prize could be $300 of credit in your marketplace to the person who creates the best short video (1-3 minutes) that includes your logo. Have a theme, ie. the video must be about shoes, or detective stories, or cars, or whatever fits your marketplace.

2. Create a competition page on your site, where people go to see your video, read the competition requirements and see other peoples videos that have been posted. Make sure they can comment on the videos for maximum user interaction.

3. Build a twitter list of people interested in your particular niche. Find the big twitters in your niche and let them know about your competition. Should be easy to get them to retweet about it as there's a prize for their followers if they participate.

4. Every time a new competition video is posted send out a tweet, along with tweets about the approaching deadline and also the occasional tweet about your actual marketplace.

5. Make sure the videos are hosted on youTube and you're using appropriate keywords, so you pick up some youTube traffic as well.

6. Depending on the niche you could also go to the big bloggers and let them know about the competition. Basically the competition gives you something NEWSWORTHY to promote, rather than just "hey look at my cool marketplace".

Hopefully the competition will create a bit of buzz about your site, get more buyers coming in and have the nice side benefit of creating new content for the spiders.

Cheers,
Ben

Your offer is most tempting! I would love to win your site. Here is my idea to drive scores of buyers to your site.

Why not drive traffic by inviting a few upcoming musicians, rising YouTube stars and/or actors with very active social media sites to direct their "tribes" to your marketplace?

When you look at Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and other social sites there are a number of hot bands, video stars, and other "popular" people who have thousands and thousands of fans, followers and/or friends. Yet they are often not raking in much money and may welcome the opportunity to promote a site such as yours in exchange for cross promotion and or a small monetary gain.

Some of the hot viral stars on Youtube get thousands (even hundreds of thousand of views). Rising bands on MySpace have thousands of friends etc. If done properly, without violating any terms of service of the site, these "populars" can drive scores of traffic to your site.

They can send out an email to their list, post bulletins, make a voice blog or video for their fans and mention your site and enthusiastically share the types of great products you have. In addition to promoting the marketplace you have they may even select one or two products to pose for in pictures, endorse etc. There are so many ways they can promote you to tons of people all at once! Then you promote them on your site to the many visitors you have or provide them with some compensation that is agreeable to both sides.

If you use musicians you could sell their music on the site allowing the musician to keep the profits. If you use an actor you can link to their latest acting demo tape, etc.You may even work something out so they offer something original at your site which could drive tremendous eyeballs to your site as their droves of fans rush to see the latest!

It's a win/win. They get support and promotion to work towards their goal and dreams. You get scores of eager traffic that you can put your marketplace products in front of!

Finding these "populars" would not be hard either. A quick post on music industry forums at a site such as linkedin would bring out managers and others excited to boost the publicity of their clients. And of course you can look on the social sites themselves.

They get an opportunity to promote their dreams. You get the "tribes" they drive to your site. And the opportunity to support their dreams and creativity.

And keep in mind many of these "tribes" are made of rabid fans that will follow their leader and support them in whatever they are doing.. This will spread the word to even more fans and more fans and more fans......All of these potential buyers with a HUGE PAYBACK FOR YOU!

I'm not sure what type of products this marketplace has, but here are my ideas:

1. Advertise the product (maybe as a loss leader) on other places buyers might look for it (eBay, classified ads, etc) and bring them back to your site with an offer to join.

2. Create a report something like "Top 10 questions to ask when buying..." which will direct people to your site. Post it wherever you can online.

3. Send a copy of the report as to your existing buyers list and ask/bribe them to forward a copy to their colleagues in the industry.

4. Contact the sellers in your marketplace and ask them to send a copy of the report to their buyers list (maybe co-brand with them, or give them a discount on listing fees).

5. Create a buyer protection program kind of like eBay motors (guess this depends on how expensive the product is). If you can, advertise this at industry trade shows or in trade magazines.

6. Start a CPA program where you pay affiliates for each new registered buyer - let them do the PPC advertising for you.

7. Publish an industry directory. Collect buyers contact information so you can send a copy to them, and send them an updated copy every year.

8. Publish a short industry-related book through Trafford.com, get it listed on Amazon.com.

9. Participate in forums related to your marketplace.

10. Find other marketplaces/forums/etc. that are related but not in direct competition to you and exchange buyers lists or advertising on your sites.


Hope you find some ideas that work for you!

Jeff

Hey,

Thanks for the responses, these are great and will definitely start to get the ball rolling on them.

Keep them coming!

Not sure if this is appropriate for your market, but you could try ads in free local newspapers (e.g. PennySaver)

Love,
Shannon

Did you really mean August 31st? That would be hard to do, going back in time an all.