Hello, I have designed and developed a new social networking website. It is not comparable to facebook yet but it can be compared to older ones like friendster and orkut. The problem is that I have never marketed a social network in international market space. I need to have at least 10000-20000 signups in 1-2 months in order to have a sustainable incoming traffic. What are the cheapest ways to boot up this website? What is your estimate of the costs? Previously I tested Adwords and it proves that each signup will cost at least $1 which is very expensive for me. Thank you
Try some Adwords and Some other Like Email maketing, Sms marketing, + Your own work will give u Boost
10K signups and you can't spend $1 each. You have your work cut out for you. Time to get some cheap help and hit the forums, blogs and articles.
I agree $10k for 10,000 members is actually a solid investment to say the least. Also have you researched the referral % For instance, if you paid $1 per member for 1k members how many of them can refer 1-10 people to bump you up to where you need to go. I would focus more on how MEMBERS can get the viral marketing methods done for you versus you simply doing it on your own. If it costs you a $1k investment to make that happen, it would be a reasonable cost especially in that market.
Thanks for comments and suggestions. My previous experience with another (local) website shows that 10,000 members in 1-2 month will produce enough referrals to sustain signups (this will however lead to at most 70,000-100,000 members in a year, otherwise you need to invest much more). The problem with the 10k is that I do not have the money . I guess I will try to use affiliate model to pay members which refer more members. However this won't be easy. I need to use more than a few fraud detection methods as I am sure a lot of users will try to exploit this. Thanks you again.
Wow, I think your goals might be a bit unrealistic. However, if you do find a way, please share it with the rest of us. Most of us are using good old fashioned SEO to promote our sites. When I was using adwords, I was paying as low as 10 cents per click/visitor. My ratio was about 1/3 actually signing up. This meant it was costing me about 30 cents per member. Now I'm getting about 150 members a day just through my keywords in the search engines. That would cost me about $45 a day if I was depending entirely on ppc advertising. In other words, I'm getting about $1,350/month worth of advertising for free just by using SEO. I say free, but in reality its a lot of time and hard work.