Newbie advice on marketing a new site

My background is in web programming and design for other people. I never worried much about the marketing except for SEO. But I've decided to become a little more free from hourly wages and start a few projects of my own.

snowcommunity.com offers free classifeds, a business directory, articles, photos and forums for a ski and snowboard town in New Zealand. Basically I hope to have two types of people visiting the site...locals that will hopefully become regualrs to the site and tourists planning on visiting. I know how to get the tourists there via search engines and links. What I really need to concentrate on is getting the locals to put up classifieds and post to the forums. Here's my best guesses on how go about this:

1) make a poster and offer advertising space for very cheap or free to promenint shops in town willing to display my poster in their shop.
2) encourage businesses to join the directory, and therefor go to the site and sign up
3) put ads in the local papers (i'd like tips on how to ensure effective ads)
4) Tell all my friends and ask them to pass it on to everyone they know
5) Get as many links as possible to my site from local businesses and other local websites.
6) SEO my way to good keyword rankings

Things I don't think will help me much:
1) buying bulk trafffic
2) adwords
3) depending on search engines to direct the locals to me

If this all works out for this website I plan on launching sites for a couple other ski/snowboard towns in the area and back home in Canada as well. Once I have a good traffic base I plan on putting up adsense to booster profits.

Please advise me if my marketing strategy is not good. I'd like to hear some suggestions on how to approachthis situation from people with experience!

Thanks a million for even reading this and any suggestions would be appreciated...

Chris

 

You also ought to look around at places that are "social anchors" for your community. Your strategies all sound good for getting businesses in, but you might not get many people to come post at your forums, etc. with just those ideas. For that part, I would look at things like churches, schools, universities - places where people congregate and that are likely to have bulletin boards or something that you can stick up a flier on. The other thing you might try is to figure out what local clubs or groups are around that might want to use your forum as an online meeting place. Flip through the Yellow Pages and the Classifieds, look at other fliers in public places, or whatever - if you give the president of the rotary club or whatever new zealand's equivalent is a call, they might be happy to have a place for their members to get on if they aren't that tech savvy.

 

You can try studiotraffic to get some free traffic.

 

For the local businesses you can also consider soliciting in person. Prepare yourself with some documentation and just walk in. I built a distribution system that way. It's not an easy path but worth considering.

 

Studiotraffic might bring you traffic but I don't think you will get conversions. When you put your site up in studiotraffic, it will appear as part of a "slideshow". This slideshow method is how studiotraffic get people to view your site. Problem is, the slideshow will run even when you minimize the browser and since a studiotraffic subscriber needs only to have a certain viewing count to gain their benefits, viewing websites on the slideshow is completely optional.

 

don't neccessarily rule adwords out. You can target to specific geographical locations, and if using negative matches can make sure your ad is only shown to the correct potential customers.

I'd say it's worth setting up a small adwords campaign if you don't already have one.

Offline things worth trying include car stickers, poss local radio advertising. We've also tried a plane with a banner attached. This was a very-low cost option. Not particularly targetted traffic, but a good way to reach a lot of people quickly and easily. I was surprised how cheap this was to do.