need advice on a new startup

Hey all,

Now there is alot of poeple here who now what they are doing when it comes to marketing products etc online.

I am in the process of putting together a new service revolving around the freelance industry. I am not trying to sell the the service or anything like that.

I was wondering what you guys might think would be a way of getting such a service off the ground ?

I do not have an advertising budget, so alot of self promotion and SEO work will need to be done. I am researching SEO and I an confident i can implement a good strategy.

But i thought I would ask some advice from people who have more experiance then I do when it comes to Marketing.

Really for me after I launch I need to bring on freelancers in a variety of differant categories. It wont cost them any money to be part of the service ( not like most other major networks ).

Would you think talking in forums where freelancers hang out would be a good start to get people invovled?

Starting an SEO strategie what is the most important thing to plan out in that?

Hey guys I am not asking anyone to hold my hand, but any constructive advice would be greatly appreciated.

Timbor.

 

A few ideas...

1) SEO is a good strategy, let me know if you need a couple links

2) We have also been successful building organic traffic with our blog

3) Once you have a site up, run it through www.websitegrader.com to see what you can do to improve the SEO and marketing aspects of the site

4) What tools would freelancers find helpful? Is there an online tool that you could build that freelancers would find interesting and would recommend to their friends? useful online tools are a great way to build traffic and buzz.

 

Hey thanks for that.

Well really the whole idea is too help freelancers find work without having to constantly go and bid for work. What I would like to do is let freelancers use their time more effectivley and spend more time working and not looking for work. YOu know without having to spend more time on another website etc.


So i think that would be a good point of differance, we want to bring buyers and sellers together in a new way.

So really i think that an incentive for freelancers to use this service and tell other freelancers is the fact that they are not having to do any work in finding jobs, they will be notified of work when it is available.

I think that getting the word out there after this is launched is going to be the hardest thing.

Does anyone know of any freelancers forums at all?

 

here's what I get after typing "freelance forum" at google:
freelanceforum.org
freelanceforum.co.uk
freelance-forum.nl
...

Seems there's tons of those freelancer forums. 3,110,000 results in Google.

 

Interesting site. Thanks for the link.

 

To start it up, you might give some small cash incentives for people to post their projects and for freelancers to sign up.

An idea might be, Lets say someone posts a $200.00 project, you could do like 1% of each project completed to the freelancer and to the one that posted the project ($2.00 in this case). If you did a flat rate of say $0.50 - $2.00 you would probably get LOTS of small projects posted because people posting $20.00 projects would love to save a little bit of money and the freelancers would love to make a little more.

Just an idea to get it known.

 

- Write articles on targeted keywords, submit to social networking sites.
- Submit your service on classified ad sites like http://www.webcosmo.com
You may wanna post some jobs there, with links to your site.
- Submit articles to blog, check the Buy Sell section at DP for this.
- Make business cards with URL printed on it.
- Put your site link on forum sigs. Post often.
- Link exchange with similar niche sites