Well folks, I've decided to take the plunge: I'm launching a social buying site (for the uninitiated, that's like Groupon or LivingSocial) and dumping every penny of my savings and income into it. Call me crazy, but I have a gut feeling it's gonna work, and my gut feelings tend to be right on the money. I'm aware of the ups and downs of the business so please don't try to dissuade me: it's a done deal so just please wish me luck. So how would you spend $5k/mo to market a new social buying site? That's the rough starting budget I've decided on, and I have 2 goals for it: 1) build a huge email list, and 2) sell a lot of deals / coupons. Please take a few minutes out of your busy day to look over my list below and help out with any answers or advice you might know. Your help literally means the world to me and my family. Thank you in advance. Here is the list, in no particular order. What % of my budget should I allocate to each item? Items marked free are those I plan on doing myself or getting a friend, family member or someone who owes me money to do free of charge. UPDATED: 6/4/2011 TENTATIVELY ALLOCATED: $660/mo (13%) REMAINING: $4,340/mo (87%) 1. SEO ($300/mo?). A small but reputable European SEO firm agreed to do 750 article links + 100 social bookmark links + 250 press releases + 750 blog links + 400 pligg links for $300/mo, which seems like a good deal. Unless someone feels this list is missing something? 2. AdWords ($?/mo). An obvious choice - I'm going to max out my bids and pray for as much traffic as I can get. I have no idea as of now if it'll be $200/mo or $2000/mo worth. Any advice here - can I estimate this more accurately? 3. SOCIAL MEDIA ADS ($?/mo). Same as above - I think that Facebook and Twitter ads are probably a must, right? Same as AdWords, I have no idea how much traffic they're capable of sending. 4. WEBSITE ADS ($?/mo). So far, I've decided to try buying adspace on deal aggregator sites (like YipIt) and deal forums. I'm going to ask them for quotes this weekend, so once again - no idea what the cost is yet, or what % of my budget to allocate to this? 5. EMAIL SOLO ADS ($360/mo?). I'm very seriously considering using the $180 service from optinlistmarketing.com to email 2 million of their opt-in users. Plus they have a special on now that gets you 2 emails for that price. So for $360/mo ($180 x 2) I can send 4 emails (say 1/wk) to 2 million people. Is this the best plan as far as email marketing goes? 6. AFFILIATE PROGRAM ($?/mo). I know this will be a key part of our success, but am only now learning about setting up a program by reading through clickbank.com. We will have software built into our site from day 1 to track affiliates. Can someone please give me some tips on attracting a ton of affiliates? And how many % should I allocate here? 7. FORUMS ($0/mo). I have a family member with lots of spare time who can do this for hours every day until hell freezes over. The idea is to flood every local and every deal-oriented forum with non-intrusive, constructive and helpful posts. Any more advice here? 8. NEWS MEDIA ($0/mo). The same bored family member will spend the other half of their day researching every reporter from every news outlet under the sun, coming up with ideas to interest each in our company, and proceeding to contact them. Any special wisdom here that I need to know about? 9. BUYING TRAFFIC ($?/mo). Haven't looked into this at all yet - is it a good idea and if so, how do I do it properly and how many % do I allocate? 10. BUYING FACEBOOK / TWITTER FOLLOWERS ($?/mo). I'm going to hire some people from these and other forums to do this. I don't know how if I'll get good ROI on this, but the last thing I want is a Facebook page with 150 fans - there's no faster way to scare off potential clients. I want to get into the tens of thousands ASAP so that we look popular. Any idea how many % to spend here? 11. YOUTUBE / TWITTER CELEBS ($?/mo). I think it'd be worth giving this a shot: basically paying YouTube celebs to plug our site. Maybe give em affiliate accounts and let them earn commission? What do you guys think? 12. GIVEAWAYS ($?/mo). How about attracting people with giveaways, like a free iPhone4 every month to a random subscriber or something? Is that worth the money, and how much should I spend on it? That's all for now folks, these are all the ideas, in various stages of development, that I have right now. Please help a fellow underdog and pitch in with some useful advice, and suggest more ways of making the site popular if you know of some! Thanks very much in advance guys!
I think banner advertising is a great way of building your brand. Buy ads on high traffic sites that are in your demographic. Sites such as puxee.com might be useful for this. I would steer clear of buying traffic at this stage and put that money into more rewarding areas such as adwords.
Buying traffic is stupid.. It's normally either bots, or traffic that is just sent through. It's a huge waste of your money =) It doesn't convert at all and I believe it's again Adsense TOS
I think all of your ideas are good, except for buying traffic. You only get people who are not interested or bots :S
Why not also build mini links for your social buying site, buy some ads from blogger and buy loads of article with specific keywords.
Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth. Find some experts to create you a viral video or find something to create buzz about that's related to your target market. You can find people on fiverr that would do just about anything.