I have $50,000 to spend on marketing my site, need some advice on where to spend it!

Take a look at Quibids. They were doing some pretty smart things with social media when they launched. Bidz.com is also another one you might want to look at.

Once you have your site complete and your metrics down, hit up the cpa networks with a low daily cap (unless you want to spend that budget in a couple days and you have the infrastructure to handle the volume). Otherwise, there's a million places to get traffic if you have a couple guys to build, test and manage campaigns and know how to buy media.

PM me if you want to discuss some ideas. I'd be happy to chat with you.

Hey Ryan.. I sent you a PM with my contact info, looking forward to talking with you tomorrow. Thanks

In my personal opinion any marketing can be done on a small/limited scale/budget.

Each demographic and niche is different what I would do is play with many things from PPC to articles and track your referrer data to see what packs the most bang for the buck. Only then would I start using a considerable amount of money so you know you're going for the method with the best/highest return on your investment.

Spend slowly and carefully, and keep an eye towards always tracking and measuring ROI.

Im also interested in partnering with people who have substantial networks that would cater to online shoppers. If you have an offer please let me know. Thanks

What do you consider "substantial networks"?

I have a list of online shoppers. I thought it was fairly small but have been told it's a very good sized list.

PM me if you want to discuss further.

I would use a combination of Media Buys on sites like AdBrite, Zedo and ADSDAQ. You need to have some skills in optimizing these types of networks. I also think Google and Yahoo PPC campaigns are still great ways to get traffic for those who have big budgets.
Lastly, I would look to Twitter and Facebook PPC Campaigns. Along with getting your content to go viral with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (if you have videos)
Good luck !!!
P.S.
Social Bookmarketing...

I PMed you my info.

Robert,
What's your target demographic? In my opinion the answer to your question has much to do with that. Various online channels work better for different demographics. If you are looking to launch a fast and furious, one size fits all campaign you will be disappointed with the results.

Early adopter activity should be looked at with great skepticism.

The early adopter's values don't represent the core values that
will build your site. I may not be saying it well... but they are
there because it's new and funky to play around with but they'll
mostly leave for something newer when it comes along.

I haven't seen your site, but saying "we're a mixture of Craigslist,
Ebay, and Facebook" makes me fear for you. I don't know what
your strategy is, but it seems to me you're casting a very wide
net demographically -- like trying to say "we make hamburgers
so if you love McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's you'll love
our shop even more".

OK. A few things I noticed right off the bat.

1) You have not told us your niche or what the site is about. Sure, you may want to protect your new venture from plagiarism, but it is going to be hard for us to give you a good idea on how to promote this.

2) It sounds like you are going out there with the purpose of spending all of your budget. It may be good to have a sizable budget, but going out there with the intent to spend it (for the sake of spending it) does not sound like a smart strategy.

3) You have not told us how you gained your 200 beta customers. That may help us give you a good idea.

Either way, good luck.

-Simon

I'm probably not giving you anything new, but have you consider joining a CPA network, maybe paying for each new subscriber/lead (membership) someone brings you?

You could aslo purchase some solo ads to help get leads..

YOu could aslo hire a VA to help link building to help rank in the search engines.

You can also try PPC on a trial bases. Pay close attention to the results and see if its worth it. When I saw worth it I'm not only talking about the money it takes to get the results, but the time and energy as well.

If you'd like to try something a little different. Hire a consultant that can work closely with you. Check references and don't be afraid to pay a reduced rate for the first week or month to test them out. IF they're good, their work will show it.

Okay, I think my hands caught a cramp, but if I can think of anything else, I'll let you know. Best of luck and congrats on such an accomplishment!

P.S. Now is the 50K your totally for your investments period or just this project...I think answering that will get your better replys and more solutions/suggestions.

Hey Robert,

I checked out your site. Looks like an interesting concept and recommend you check out the sites I mentioned before and look at what they're doing. I started seeing them about a year ago, and looks like they now get about 100k unique visitors/day in traffic.

But to get there, you need to take it slow. Even the heavy hitters test and scale up slowly. Only the market and raw numbers can tell you what works. Everything else is just opinion.

Be very cautious with going to the big ad networks. I can't stress that enough. I've seen too many dudes watch $10k instantly vanish without a completely tested and proven campaign and having the infrastructure to handle the volume.

There are some very critical things you need to know about your market first... some of which you can gather from doing some research, but mostly you'll collect during your testing phase. Especially since you are rolling out a product that is unique, you can only look at case studies and data of comparable products.

For one, you need to figure out who the people are that respond to your ads and become members. You could blow through that $50k in an hour displaying ads to dorm-room gamers and get 0 clicks. But the 30-55 year old stay at home moms that like cooking and celebrity gossip could make your rich. Only you know what your demographic is and what it takes to get them to take action. And your demographic is not what you or anyone thinks it is, its what your data tells you.

As your testing, also pay close attention to the geolocation of conversions and the day of the time response is highest. Are your users the people who are up all night stressing about not having money? Or maybe they're at work wasting time online during the day. Could be people in the South who are into finding and selling rare antiques, or are they the LA types?

With a $50k budget, you need to stretch your pennies very far, and eliminating wasted impressions can help tremendously. Knowing this data will help you do that.

Besides getting your targeting down, the creatives play a huge roll. Let's say you're paying $1 an ad impression. If you have a banner with a 1% click-through rate, you're paying $1 a click. Make some changes to bring that same banner to .5% and now you're only paying $0.20/click.

With a $50k budget, that's a difference of buying 50,000 visitors or 250,000 visitors with the same ad spend.

Those are fairly realistic numbers, but the amount you pay for an impression will depend on the deal you can negotiate with the ad networks. You may pay $5 cpm or more depending on your placements.

How fast are you recouping your funds? Is there a membership fee or any other kind monetizing going on right away, or are is there a time period before you can break even and start to recoup your marketing investment? If right away, than you can probably get the kind of traffic you're talking about daily no problem - even if its on credit. Otherwise that $50k is going to go pretty fast.

Regarding your conversion rate on your landing page...

Don't get too excited if you haven't sent cold traffic to your site yet. It sounds like those registrations came from people who beta tested your site, were pre-sold in some capacity, or have been anticipating your launch. Your conversion rate will vary greatly on the quality of traffic coming to your site.

As for traffic sources, I'd stay away from the big ad networks at first. Start with networks that offer PPC so you can get your feet wet, limit your risk, find out your demographics, and test creatives without getting burned. Once you're ready to scale up and ready for heavier traffic, you'll want to have an enterprise class adserver configured to help you optimize your ads, and negotiate to bill off your numbers. Otherwise you'll get robbed by paying for 30% of the impressions that nobody ever saw.

What is your ultimate goal and what do you consider a successful conversion from a visitor to your site? Are you trying to build a registration base for a hopeful buy-out. Selling the data? Or are you trying to turn an ROI with memberships?

Depending on how you measure success, your best bet might be to approach the cpa networks. But don't go to them without having everything set in place and your landing page optimized to the max. And chances are you'll have to prepay.

Hope that helps.

I think that your best bet is to use a portion of that money to hire a person or firm that has the answers that you are seeking. I would hate to see you take the advice of an anonymous person on a chat forum and then wonder why it didn't work. $50k is a good budget for a kickoff, but you need to be sure that you are spending it wisely or else it will be gone before you know it.

Lots of very expericencedIM Gurus that I'm sure would be interested in doing some consulting with that type of budget...pM me if ya need a few names...

Quote:
Originally Posted by thomarv29
Our Demographics are online shoppers, and anyone who would use Craigslist, Ebay, or Facebook.

RE: Loren You're asking for a load of trouble with this kind of statement. That's
not a targeted demographic. You should be narrowing this way, way
down and coming up with a mission statement that reflects exactly
who the site is for.

I agree with Loren, "anyone who would use Craigslist, Ebay, or Facebook", that could be just about anyone online, its like saying your target is "anyone with a computer".

You need to drill down much deeper, create profiles of your prospects or targets with as many specifics as possible and develop campaigns to match. Otherwise, as it has already been pointed out you are setting yourself up to waste your advertising budget on a shotgun approach that will provide very little in the way of results.

Shotgun as in "ready,fire,aim" not "ready,aim,fire"