6 ms·

Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup

60 points by pclark 18y ago

I've been coding away on my startup for a few months, the end is nearly in sight (for the beta at least) -- my product is a product similar to Techmeme and other news aggregators, but focussing on news recommendation of quality, not speed (ala Newspapers) 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?

swombat 18y ago
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.
- pclark 18y ago
  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.
  - swombat 18y ago
    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 :-)
    - ecommercematt 18y ago
      Any particular niche within the construction industry?
      - swombat 18y ago
        Not necessarily, but we're focusing on architects first. Why, do you have a suggestion?
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  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.
  - swombat 18y ago
    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)
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      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?
      - swombat 18y ago
        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).
- il 18y ago
  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.
  - cosmo7 18y ago
    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.
mattmaroon 18y ago
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 $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.
Tichy 18y ago
I think I wouldn't advertise, but maybe buy something useful with the 1000$. 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.
- ScottWhigham 18y ago
  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 $1000. Here's that Perry Marshall book: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/dp/1599180308/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231155345&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/...
  - Tichy 18y ago
    I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example. Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank. Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point. As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. 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.
jyothi 18y ago
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.
- alain94040 18y ago
  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 http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss
sutro 18y ago
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!
- rrhyne 18y ago
  Sorry, but I can't see that idea equating to links, quality targeted traffic, or interest in his service, only interest in 1000 dollars.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    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.
Tichy 18y ago
If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.
- rrival 18y ago
  This is actually much better / more valuable than it sounds.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Can you please elaborate/share some stories?
  - timf 18y ago
    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).
  - Tichy 18y ago
    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.
patio11 18y ago
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 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.
- pclark 18y ago
  I'd love to read your article :D make sure you submit it to YC
- apollo 18y ago
  100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    Google isn't very good for displaying backlinks. Try yahoo site explorer. Quarkbase (for buzz) & websitegrader are also excellent.
deleted 18y ago
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mikeyur 18y ago
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.
rrival 18y ago
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.
iamelgringo 18y ago
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/ http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/
- lpgauth 18y ago
  "* 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?
  - il 18y ago
    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.
axod 18y ago
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 $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more. A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.
- gvwoods 18y ago
  Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?
  - slig 18y ago
    I don't know about him, but I'd go to DMOZ and open all the links in the relevant category.
  - axod 18y ago
    One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/ http://dir.yahoo.com/ It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more. Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
    - rrhyne 18y ago
      sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche. Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?
- shafqat 18y ago
  If the website was getting 100,000, how was it abandoned? Just not being developed further? Why were people coming to the site? And why would the owner sell for 500$. These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
psyklic 18y ago
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 ...
- timf 18y ago
  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.
- axod 18y ago
  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".
timf 18y ago
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)
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
andrewljohnson 18y ago
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).
shafqat 18y ago
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.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  In an advertising sense or?
  - shafqat 18y ago
    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.
profgubler 18y ago
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.

60 points by pclark 18y ago

swombat 18y ago

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.

pclark 18y ago
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.
- swombat 18y ago
  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 :-)
  - ecommercematt 18y ago
    Any particular niche within the construction industry?
    - swombat 18y ago
      Not necessarily, but we're focusing on architects first. Why, do you have a suggestion?
mattmaroon 18y ago
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.
- swombat 18y ago
  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)
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    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?
    - swombat 18y ago
      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).
il 18y ago
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.
- cosmo7 18y ago
  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.

mattmaroon 18y ago

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.

Tichy 18y ago

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.

ScottWhigham 18y ago
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 $1000. Here's that Perry Marshall book: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/dp/1599180308/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231155345&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/...
- Tichy 18y ago
  I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example. Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank. Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point. As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. 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.

jyothi 18y ago

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.

alain94040 18y ago
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 http://FairSoftware.net: where geeks are their own boss

sutro 18y ago

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!

rrhyne 18y ago
Sorry, but I can't see that idea equating to links, quality targeted traffic, or interest in his service, only interest in 1000 dollars.
- gojomo 18y ago
  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.

Tichy 18y ago

If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.

rrival 18y ago
This is actually much better / more valuable than it sounds.
fallentimes 18y ago
Can you please elaborate/share some stories?
- timf 18y ago
  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).
- Tichy 18y ago
  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.

patio11 18y ago

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 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.

pclark 18y ago
I'd love to read your article :D make sure you submit it to YC
apollo 18y ago
100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Google isn't very good for displaying backlinks. Try yahoo site explorer. Quarkbase (for buzz) & websitegrader are also excellent.

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mikeyur 18y ago

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.

rrival 18y ago

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.

iamelgringo 18y ago

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/ http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/

lpgauth 18y ago
"* 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?
- il 18y ago
  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.

axod 18y ago

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.

gvwoods 18y ago
Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?
- slig 18y ago
  I don't know about him, but I'd go to DMOZ and open all the links in the relevant category.
- axod 18y ago
  One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/ 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.
  - rrhyne 18y ago
    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?
shafqat 18y ago
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.

psyklic 18y ago

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 ...

timf 18y ago
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.
axod 18y ago
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".

timf 18y ago

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)

deleted 18y ago
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andrewljohnson 18y ago

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).

shafqat 18y ago

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.

fallentimes 18y ago
In an advertising sense or?
- shafqat 18y ago
  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.

profgubler 18y ago

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.