Some many people have so many opinions, which is awesome. I wouldn't worry about the competition b/c your site gives a new fresh perspective on how to get discovered. You obviously have a niche and with the property marketing, you can get loyal members. I to want to start a social networking site. But as everyone has stated, it takes a lot of work. Thus, i've ben planning accourding and i'll point out some things I'm doing to get people to my site. At some point, you'll get organic traffic, but for now, these are the things that I would do not necessarily in this order. 1. set up a monthly budget for marketing 2. set up a marketing plan 3. hire members to interact with your site members. People will lose interests quickly if they are not engaged or rewarded immediately with interaction. 4. hire blogs to review your site 5. Adwords 6. Some cold calling-I'm a real estate agent and although I hate doing it, I sometimes have to make some cold calls and every now and then, I get some who wants to talk about my industry; and some believe it or not, become clients. Or if its easier, try an email marketing campaign. You might get unique clicks from friends and friends forwarding your email to their sphere of influence. Also, there are some vendors on ebay that sell site visits of 10,000 even 1,000,000 for cheap. I've never used them before, but I'm going to try once my site goes live this month. 7. Hold Contests, which I see you may have done because some won $100 8. Invest in having someone manage your Ad Campaign 9. Spend 4 hours each day either interacting with site members or helping them get discovered. 10. Advertise on free directories, which you are already doing 11. Link and ad exchange. 12. T-shirts, pens, mugs, post it, i.e. promotional items with your logo (this is passive and expensive, but it starts to develop a brand recogition.) 13. SEO-Elance.com might be able to help you with that. i hope the above suggestions help.
that's like asking is it possible to top Google? MySpace and Facebook are always evolving. i'm not sure if she would identify that as her competition. She's working to get kids/people discovered. when she has a success story, that's when she's going to be able to blast that info all over the net and get more visitors.
Myspace has unlimited resources available from Murdoch, facebook has unlimited resources available from CIA. If you have equally unlimited resources, yes, you can top them.
i think the social networking era will end soon, there is no more networks needed, all cooked, you need to come out with a new idea to make a bug. and i dont like that video at home-page, so screamy and noisy, wont let me understand whats the concept about and drives me out from the website immediately
It's not about topping Myspace or Facebook or Bebo etc .... it's about co-existing with them .... DiscoverMeLive.com has a major point of difference to the other social networking sites ..... Myeeos.com on the other hand is similar to Myspace in that members can customise there profile page using the same tools or resources as Myspace, they can also send comments etc. We have made sure all the Layouts and comments work on Myeeos so members can obtain them from any of the thousands of Myspace resource sites out there. Part of our marketing plan involves bringing those resource sites onboard, Myspace has been giving resource sites a hard time lately by changing procedures and even blocking a lot of them, something Myeeos.com will never do. We also offer a lot of features that other resource sites don't have, giving the members more gadgets to play with LOL. A couple of those features are proving extremely popular. We are finding more features we want to add but at the moment are in the process of changing the Forum section over to vBulletin. But going back to the question "is it possible to top myspace and facebook??? " Well Myspace is getting onto shaky ground. A perception I have seen on a lot of Forums and in the media is that Myspace has become populated by Bands and Strippers, I support that view as I have a couple of old and very large Myspace accounts and over 90% of the people who are sending in friend requests are from bands and sexy looking girls. That wasn't happening 12 months ago. Also if you view active profiles you will find that the kids have gone from Myspace, they have migrated over to other social networks, Myspace just doesn't do it for them anymore. As for pre-populating, I'm not going down that road, it might make it harder initially not doing that but credibility plays a huge part in getting members to bring their friends over so everything we do on Myeeos is going to be strictly legit. At present we don't have a lot of members but the ones we do have are very active which proves we are doing it right and over time Myeeos will grow.
Thank you Suzy, these are all great pointers and a lot of them I know already but I just don't have the budget for that yet. As for cold calling, who should I cold call? And what made you assume I was a she, just curious. Exellent observations Cyclops and your right it isn't about being better than or bigger than Myspace, Facebook, etc... it is about co-existing. And saying that the Sns era is dead, that's like saying we have enough tools that work well already so we shouldn't try to come up with any more. We're always inventing new and better and more specific tools to make our lives better and if we just stuck to the chizzle and rocks where would we be? These sns are tools that can only be improved on. 7point4, social networking is not coming to an end it's just getting started. They said radio was dead after the invention of t.v. but that didn't happen. muncle does the CIA really fund Facebook? Or am I just being nieve?
Another thing you might want to do is pay for adspace on sites that's relevant to your content. For example, Dating forums, etc. etc.
One of the best ways that I know to advertise a social network is to sign up to other social networks and tell people, don't spam, just tell them about your site. Build a list, it's your lifeline! A social network isn't a social network without people.
Hello Your Website was nice, I personally liked your website alot.. I would just like to say that as you have a social network you should try to get visitors to your website promoting through a social network. Your social network will be User Friendly to a person who visits from a social network as the visitor already has spent time on a social network. And With that You can start some contests also and pay to the winners something so that this might attract new users to your website more and more. If you do these two things together than a person visiting from another social network will stay at your social network as he/she will be thinking to earn some money out of it.. I hope you will like my idea.. Regards
I've always been a little bit of captain obvious with my suggestions. I didn't know if you are a he or she. I took a shot. In my case I was either targeting homeowners looking for sellers or apartment complexes looking for buyers. In your case you need talent and talent scouts. if you truly believe your site will help people get discovered u should be advertising it offline. just my two cents...
Your absolutley right, I need to do both online and offline marketing. I already olan on going out to most of the summer festivals and giving away a lot of stuff. For example I will have some young good looking men giving away those big swirl lolipops with our logo on the rapper and my card stuck to the stem like a flower to the ladies. not very expensive at all, the stickers I can get for a few cents per sticker if I buy it bulk and also each lolipop will be less than a dollar and cards are $200 for 5000 and I'll pay the guys $50-80 each to hand them out and flirt a little (3 or 4 guys). And many more ideas but my budget is limited so I think I'm going to hire someone to create an investor ready business plan to get more capitol. If that happens I have creative ideas for days and it will be no problem for me to make my site a house hold name. I mean if these nerdy little college kids can do it and I got a lot more style and corisma (think I spelled that wrong lol) than them I have no doubt in my my that the site will have no problem becoming a leader in the industry. In fact mark my words you will be hearing HUGE things about "DiscoverMeLive.com" in the near future. I love all you guys and I won't forget this, I'll probably tell stories about these conversations in my memoirs. Thank you and keep the ideas coming and I'll let you know what I'm doing and what's working from what's not. So far whats really working is posting in myspace music forum. I've been posting a lot of relevent post nothing spammy and my page is getting tons of views, I have new friend requests everyday and I'm getting 6-8 sign ups a day to my site. Keep em coming, Jobfree77.
less than 200 in about 2 1/2 months. How did you do that? Oh and by the way the first month or so I wasn't promoting just letting friends test and play around with it.
Well I did not do much promotion. What I did was firstly build a buzz for a few months, I captured their email addresses using a squeeze page...and in just a month 400 have joined...I intend to do a press release soon...My members are "addicted" to my website..
follow the speech categories in school like dramatic duos humour extemp etc its been so long I can't remember all the categories. I think teens are your biggest audience.