I have a forum based on a YouTube discussion forum, where users can talk about anything related to youtube, post their videos for more exposure and generally chat about, well; anything. What would be the best way to utilise $100 for advertising and gaining traffic and registrations?
Hire a link builder here on DP (or hire a freelancer somewhere else) that will build some backlinks for your site - so that you get a better SERP of your site = you would get targeted traffic. However, I'm not sure if $100 would help you much. You would need to invest more money.
Link building is probably best long term but you may not see much immediate benefit. If you've identified who you want as your model member you might be better off driving immediate traffic by creating a facebook page and then driving traffic to it and to your site using facebook ads. You can adjust the demographics to suit the profile you desire and set a budget on how much to spend.
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That would be a tough site to monetize. I wouldn't spend a cent on paid advertising until you can be certain the site will make money.
Honestly when I have 100 to 200 dollars to invest I outsource someone to write or rewrite some articles. This is because with articles you can either place them on your website or you can submit them to article directories such as ezines which is a good long term investment in terms of getting relevant website traffic.
Hire people to post comments on Youtube. Not spam but actual comments and then on the profiles have a link to your site.
I'm in the Facebook Fan Page corner. It's free, you can name the page the same as your YouTube forum. Then do a search on Facebook for the keywords you want to target. The Facebook search will bring pages that are realted. You can "Like" those pages and use the @<facebook name> of those pages on your Facebook Fan page. That makes your comment post on their Wall as well as yours. It drived traffic to your Facebook page which of course you'll have a link to the YouTube forum page. Create a Twitter account and post some of the interesting comments people are putting on your Forum page and have a link back to the forum. I'd take the $100 and either buy ads on Facebook targeted your to keywords or use the money to buy prizes and run a contest suing something like ContestBurner software that helps build fans to Facebook. You probably could get some sponsors for prizes for your contest in exchange for promoting the prize supplier.
You can always try project wonderful which is an advertising network like Facebook ads/Google adwords.
Use PPC, advertise on youtube definitely will get you some member at the same time, try to implement some contest as well
Definitely keep your $100 and do some organic marketing press releases articles classified ads craigslist
I agree with cybella28. Article marketing is the best for long term. Link building? Too risky with so much greyhat/blackhat methods spreading like crazy. PPC/Adwords? If I were you, I wouldn't spend a dime to use PPC to promote your YouTube forum.