I've been working on this project like a week and is finally done (talking about the operational part of the site) Basically, my website is a directory of people..... freelancing white pages... I'm not trying to build a social network. I have thinking about provide features... as email, weblogs, hosting and things like that.. but the budget doesn't allow it now (it will come in the future).... actually the only person involved on this is me and i have no money... I have schedule a couple of meetings to get money from angel investors... but at this moment.... budget is preety much one buck. What kind of marketing can be done to make people get in the site an sign in?? Any help will be highly appreciated!
Important thing to do is create something that will make the visitor either tell it to his friends(viral marketing) or something so good that he will link to you.. When the budget is low, such dirty work becomes huge and hard..
<---------- that's more and les the idea... it will have a rating and feedback system; and profiles will be indexed as in a web directory. profiles will be searchable by name, profesion, ranking and zip code.
budget may increase as soon as I got some investors interested.... the thing is that honesly I will like to ask for money when the webpage get big enough to make this guys pay for dedicated servers and mirrors... Marketing is important; but honestly i'll prefer to spend the money in resources.
If that is your idea,you are against quite stiff competition already.There are some very decently established sites in that category and you do require some financial muscle power to compete,atleast in the beginnning. Getting people to sign up early will mostly have to be done by paying and therefore raising finance is quite important to give it a kickstart
Exactly... But I feel this is a vicious circle, in that as long as you don't have enough resources, it is difficult to get the webpage huge; and for ready resources, you need to have a big website.. This very website suggests something on marketing.. It offers webmaster tools that make webmasters prefer this to other webmaster forums.. Similarly, think of some tool that you can create for your users..That will get you really worthy customers..
Do you have a business plan? Is there or will there be demand for they type of service that you are offering? Can we check out the site?
I've been thinking about it...briefcase, email, blog.... but exactly what to give out??? preety much anything is out there for free... besides,... i'm not planning to charge people for been listed...
honestly, my business plan is quite stupid... i just want to have a big database of people... sordable by profiles categories.... and build a comunyty arround...
Your plan looks very much like what Google Inc. has been doing all these days...use community builders like Orkut to bring in members for Gmail, and use them for their other projects like blogger, which earn them money through Adsense.. This is the kind of work you can do if you can get a database ready..now, think on lines of what will get people sign up to your site(in short, how you can get their email ids..thats almost the ultimate)... You say you want them to write some white pages...i am not sure what it exactly refers to, but probably, you could write an ebook on how to write a white paper...c'mon a free ebook on how to write one, will get anyone interested and sign up...
Haven't think about it that way.... seems that all this idea is just stupid enough to think in discard it.... i'll probably will have to write a blog insted...
Offcourse not.. but i mean... i'm not rich... and offcourse i won't spend my hard earned cash and/or worse.. .my time in a faulty idea... so basically what i should do now is go back to the dashboard and desing something new... I do not intend to do business with this.. why? because for me won't be so easy due i live in the third world (aslo known as central america). I just want to generate cash flow enough to keep a service website for free.
My position is not very different from yours...I generate a lot of ideas, but have neither time, nor money.. also, dont have enough patience to persist with one thought
Your idea does hit up some heavy competition. You need viral marketing. The key? You need a reason for people to choose to use your site rather than a site they're probably already using or familiar with. What's your site got that others don't? Without much money it's not impossible to promote your site. I've done it. It takes time, effort, energy, and you must WANT it. Viral marketing is free as far as money goes, but it's time consuming. Good luck.
Then i'll need some training in viral marketing. also... some ideas for the service... What will you guys will like in a website like the one we talk about in this thread?? i don't mean to have a social network site... but wtf... any sugestions???
Basically, look at what kind of content is eventually going to come on the site..To begin with the simplest example, say the white pages are going to be on 'making own websites'..That means you can go and speak on relevant forums such as DP... A simple signature can get you a few hits from the relevant people, and in this case, webmasters..And now, when you have a 'free ebook' that you provide for your members, then the news spreads..hope you get an idea of how to go about it.. think of more innovative ways..
honestly i was thinking to go a little bit further than just webmasters.. I am electric-electronic engineer and I did a lot of freelance jobs for a while. Some of them where really billed cheap because i wasn't aware of the prices of the market. I realize i was billing based on the time I spend and others where earning more billing based on the impact that their service will have; so I learn that the hard way. Some day I read a newspaper saying that here Panama, for the head hunting companies where much more dificult to find builders, contractors, plumbers and that kind of people (who are much of the time self employees) than a CEOs ... so maybe that situation is global... that's why i belived this kind of site may success; but i see now this is way more dificult.