Hi guys, I'll try to describe my plan on advertising a website I'm about to make and I would like to see your opinion if such a project can be successful and eventually what would you change in the plan. Thanks for any little help. Description Certain company has started making a technology, which is very quickly becoming popular, currently there's hundreds of thousands of users and growing fast. Many companies want to use this technology, but there's reportedly more job offerings than talents available. Currently, the only real way how to recruit a new talent is to use a dedicated forum section of a forum that's been set up to discuss the technology. I want to create a website that would allow specialists working with this technology to create unique profiles with a very detailed breakdown of their skills related to the technology + add their portfolio. Potential employers could then browse and search these profiles in a way that's not yet available online. Premium service If a recruiter or an employer wanted to contact a "talent" on the website, they would have to yearly subscribe to a premium feature of the website allowing them to contact the person. This subscription would cost 29€ and my goal is to have at least 20 subscriptions purchased per month, new or recurring. Strategy The service would be available in only yearly subscription form. Why wouldn't I offer shorter term subscriptions? An employer usually looks for a new employee once in a long period and is looking for about 20 days until is able to find someone (I know this from my own experience). If I would offer e.g. a monthly subscription for 4.99€ as well, which is twice as expensive as the yearly subscription basically, I think most of the people would say... "I'll purchase a month or two and if I won't find anyone who fits my requirements, I'll purchase more months." And in case it would be a small company, looking for new talents e.g. once per a year, they would most likely purchase only the two months per year, which is enough to find a suitable person. But the income would be 10€ total instead of 29€. If it was a big company, which is recruiting often, they would most likely purchase the yearly subscription, so there wouldn't be any advantage to offering a shorter term subscription. On the other side, the 29€ per year is not that much (a regular western-culture man would say), I assume such a price is not a problem for any serious business. There will be also a free option to contact a talent, but this way will automatically expose you as somebody, who doesn't have a lot of money and can't pay you as an employee, so I strongly believe a serious employer wouldn't use it. This option will be there purely for enthusiasts and will require them to help us to advertise our website, see the next section. Advertising The most attractive place where to advertise appears YouTube, because there's quite a lot of tutorials on this topic and they usually have tens of thousands of views. I'm thinking of the banner-like ads that appear while a video is being played, not a full video ad. Second option would be google search. I would like to run two individual "campaigns". The first one would be targeted to the users of the technology, the "talents", encouraging them to create a profile on my website to expose their skills and portfolio and a unique way and besides being able to show their profile to someone, they would also have the chance to be chosen by an employer. The second "campaign" would run a month later, when there's enough profiles to choose from and would be targeted on both "talents" and employers/recruiters, who are the actual potential customers. I want to split 600€ in between these campaigns, depending on how much the first one eat to get the website filled with a decent amount of profiles. Do you think 600€ spent on this kind of advertising can help me reach my goal at the end of the third month? There's one more way that should help me advertise the website - the free option to contact a "talent" would require the user to have a link to my website in their signature on the earlier mentioned forums about the technology. Personally, I believe it is a great way to get known, because I myself have discovered many services and projects thanks to only someone's forum signature. And comprehensive SEO is of course going to be part of the project. That's it. Please share your feedback. Thank you for all your advice and tips.
I personally like your plan. I think it will work. As for the two-part campaign, I'd like to add a bit there: For the first part, to get more people to join your site, try some more promotions. Try Adsense/Bing Ads. Find some forums or blogs where this technology is discussed. Join in, be part of the community, and drop in a link or two. Keep it as subtle as possible. I personally believe in this strategy as it has worked for me. The second part, I think shouldn't cost you much because you're ruiing the campaign on your own platform, so you can actually divert funds to the external promotion. All the best with your venture.
Hi, thank you very much for your reply. If anything similar worked for you, do you think you could mention some anonymous data please? For example what kind of service/goods did you sell, what was the price, what marketing budget did you have or how much did you spend on marketing, how exactly did you use the marketing budget, what were your total sales when your campaign finished. It would help me understand how things work, it would be very kind of you.
Sounds like a great plan, you mentioned that you were going to use Google Adwords for ad campaigns. I have had good success with Bing Ads as well and the CPC tends to be quite a bit lower on the campaigns that I have ran. I also just found a new service http://www.guestbase.com that allows you to run digital ads for free where you can create either image or text ads similar to Google Adwords and display it across their network.