Hi, I am about to release a new Social networking / dating site. The site has been designed to a high level and will be a mixture of free and paid for services. I am aiming to get 1000 sign ups in the first month. ill be giving away memberships as prizes through local media and ill be using the typical banner and advertising methods. And have employed an SEO team to promote the site and improve the serp’s What i am interested in is trying to get a viral/gorilla type of marketing campaign that will get me a lot of sign ups. As always funds are tight but i do have a little money to spend on marketing. I was looking to see if anyone has any interesting slants on Marketing methods or new ways of attracting sign ups as marketing is not my strong point. I am also looking at affiliates building etc but I assume no one would really be interested In partnering with me until I get the site up to a decent level. Any insights or opinions would be greatly appreciated
It's not that helpful of advice, but whatever you do has to be unique. People appreciate novel and new things that can catch their attention over all of the hundreds or thousands of other advertisements they see every day and are more likely to remember the things that caught their attention. You should do a little research into what other networking / dating sites did at the launch of their site and what they continue to do today to attract members. This way you can see what is working and what has failed so you can better plan your strategy. Good luck!
Could you give us the name/url of this site you're talking about. I'm assuming it's not the one in your dp signature. It's really hard to give suggestions on viral/gorilla marketing strategies if we have absolutely no idea what the theme or niche of your site is ...other than it's dating and social networking. If it's just another generic dating/social networking site, you might have a tough time. Why? Cause there are already a million of these sites on the net. Fortunately for you, most of these sites rarely get found because the owners no little to nothing about online marketing and SEO. So if you do spend some quality time (and money) on marketing, your will already have an advantage over 80% of these sites. PS. You will hear a lot in here about social media marketing. I'll tell you now that for most people, unless they have a site that is listing out the ingredients for the cure to cancer, this type of marketing is a lot of work for little payoff. I once spent a small fortune on two different companies to do this for me. It was a lot of time, effort and money for very little return. These links are very, very quickly buried beneath a sea of other links, and even though many are supposed to be "do follow" links, you will now notice that the big search engines simply don't count them.
She is right. It's important to differentiate yourself from your competitor.. Ask yourself why people would join and spend time on your site other than a million other dating/social network sites out there. You can try to market the site through twitter and facebook. Write article and blog to get yourself out there. Good luck buddy!
Thanks guys. the site will be mightbefriends.com . I am Spending a lot of time and money targetting SEO and will do a fair bit on publicity in Ireland on the lauch. I know there are lots if them(dating sites) but i will be tying in the entertainment sites into the dating to produce a new social experience. The site is due to go live in 3 weeks just a placeholder there at the moment. I am looking to get about 3k sign ups on month one. and ill be giving 1k free membership upgrades. I dont think ill do down the pay per glick and adsense route as i do not feel they offer VFM however i am tying in a facebook app to the site as well to entice users to sign up, they can also log in using the facebook API