I am working on launching my first site, www.athensbarhopper.com, and was wondering what would be the best way to market it. Here are a few things I was thinking about, as far as marketing/monetization, and was looking for some other ideas/feedback: --We have quite a few homeless people in Athens, so I was thinking of a bumvertising campaign. Make some signs or T-Shirts, and give them to some of them on a busy Friday/Saturday night. This might stir up some controversy, but it's cheap, and any publicity is good publicity, right? --The site has software in it that keeps track of points for all the stuff users do (forum posts, clicking on ads, submitting news & reviews, etc.) So I'm thinking about doing giveaways based on who can rack up the most points over the course of a couple weeks/a month. The only thing I'm worried about here are people spamming and click bombing in an attempt to win, and end up with very high noise-low signal forums. --doing cross promotions with bars/local bands. trading free ad space for doing other stuff, such as having "ABH presents" shows or nights. On that note, what I think would be cool would be if I could get bars to have a night with a deal like "wear an ABH shirt, get $1 off" or something, and be able to have enough members that I could direct enough business to them for it to be worth their while, and it would be something we both could benefit from. However, I feel like this is kind of a catch-22; If I could arrange these kinds of deals, it would be easy to get members, and If I had members, it would be easier to get bars to go along with these deals. what's the best thing to do here? thanks in advance for everybody replies and input, and I look forward to being a member of this site.
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I think that can work, also you may try out to pay your few local cyber cafe with good number of surfer to set your homepage for all their computers.
A: Remove all the ads until you make a small number (at least a couple of thousand) regular site visitors/members. B: Instead of just giving away t-shirts, buy small classified ads in local/community newspapers. C: Start groups on Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Invite users to join it. D: Offer prizes to users who provide most content and show activity on a private level instead of having a contest right away. The goal is to make your early site users feel special not generic.
I would build a couple of other local related sites to link in. Then instead of promoting the site, you should promote a contest like "Athens sexiest bartender" and go around to the bars, take pics, post them, and buy some radio ads about the contest. Drive people to the site to vote, and many of them will come back to use it for other things.
I like the "sexiest bartender" idea, but I would assume radio adspace would be rather expensive. I could always check out the UGA station, but I don't think they get many users. I will probably look into doing print ads soon though. And I already started a facebook group and invited everyone on my friends list. got about 75 unique visitors that way.
How about those tack-boards in the mens room above the urinals... I always read those, it's perfect advertising for a bar website...