I run a free classifieds site for my small town and am trying to figure out how to get traffic to it and get it going. My idea is a referral contest. Offer a $100 Walmart gift card to the person who refers the most people. When someone registers there is a box where they can type the email of whoever referred them. Whoever refers the most wins. Also each person much post at least one legitimate ad(it's free). The logistics of making sure it wasn't one person opening up a lot of accounts would just be checking the IP addresses, then it'd be a simple matter of tallying up all the referrals. I'd probably run this for about a month. I'd post it in the contest section here and offer it to DPers but it's just a local classifieds site geared towards local residents in this small city. Anyone think it'll work? $100 enough? Thanks, Tim
Thats a great idea. I've tried something similar on my site and had a bit of success. $100 should be plenty. Any less and people dont get excited about it and any more is probably just a waste of your money.
thanks for the feedback, it's encouraging to hear that it worked out alright for you. i'm hoping this will be a self perpetuating way of getting it out there, i've been unsuccesful so far with other ideas.
Hmm How big is your town? Even with all the people in your town doing this you still might not have that many people.... If your in the us advertise in the pennysaver or something... good luck Jason
the city itself is a little cluster of a little over 20,000 people. the county is spread out a bit more and is around 100,000. i've thought about putting an ad in the local classifieds for this, after all those are the people that'll be using them anyways(im assuming thats what pennysavers is). thats a good idea ill probably do it in the near future. my only question is will the editor of the local paper let me put an ad in their classifieds about another classifieds site? i dont imagine it'd be a problem it's worth a try.