Today I launched a new service, aimed at taking on the middle-men services in the paid post / link market. To this point I've done everything myself, but my weakest point is marketing (just not much experience at it on this scale quite frankly) and so I was hoping to get a few pointers from some of the more experienced members of this forum. I'm willing to set aside around $1500 as an initial advertising budget. The site can be found here. Still putting the finishing touches to it (FAQs, page images and such) - but I now want to concentrate on the best way to bring in users. Specific target audience for now is Wordpress users, who own their own blog. The unique selling points I want to drive home are (a) the potential to make more as a blog owner, whilst still cutting prices to advertisers, since there are no commissions involved, and (b) the increased sales control / flexibility the blog owner can have over middle-men services. I'm still considering the different options - possibly a couple of ReviewMe posts on some choice blogs? I find that idea a little ironic, which I like. And the social networks I suppose? This is a 1 man (me!) team project at the moment, although partners are an option if the ideas sparks off, or someone shows enough interest. How would you go about doing it if it was you?
Considering that one line threads like this have been answered, I'm bumping this up (once) to hopefully get a few opinions. The direction I'm heading in right now is attempting to write to a few better known bloggers, to see whether any are interested in reviewing / promoting, in exchange for becoming part of an affiliate program. If a person signs up, then lists a site on the marketplace, they get a percentage of every month's fees - something like that. In conjunction with this, I'm thinking of opening up the marketplace (ie. no fee) for a month to encourage people to list, and try out the service as a whole.
I'd start with searching through webmaster forums and looking to see if they offer advertising. You can usually get relatively cheap banners on very popular forums. You won't get many hits (only say 10-30/day depending on where your banner is located), but they would all be extremely targeted visitors, and you'll find that they convert very well. Also invest around $100 into signature links here at DP. Not only will they increase your PR and SE rankings, you'll get a bunch of hits from them too. Best of luck with your site. Everything looks fantastic and I'm sure you'll do very well.
Thanks for the kind words. And for the advice too. I'll definitely check out a few forums later on today for some ad offers. Interesting that you mention signature advertising, as I actually have a another project ready (but on the back-burner, since I chose to go with this one first) that targets forum signature advertising. I think some sig space here would do nicely for starters.