
Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup - pclark
I've been coding away on my startup for a few months, the end is nearly in sight (for the beta at least) -- my product is a product similar to Techmeme and other news aggregators, but focussing on news recommendation of quality, not speed (ala Newspapers)<p>Where would you advertise? Would you sponsor a relevant blog, or advertise via Google Adwords / the deck etc?<p>Or would you put that $1k towards "impressing" blogs and marketing tools?
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axod
You could always look for an abandoned website in a similar sector to yours,
that has traffic. Then buy it. There's some great bargains to be had out
there.

The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time
had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000
visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then
just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a
good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.

A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.

~~~
gvwoods
Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?

~~~
axod
One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. <http://dir.yahoo.com/>

It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of
traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.

Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners
and seeing if any bite.

~~~
rrhyne
sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog
or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche.
Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?

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patio11
Gah, you're about a week early for me to show you my article answering this
question. Here's the short version.

$1,000 will buy you about one feature worth of magazine quality pillar content
plus effort to launch the content (by contacting relevant blogs, news
organizations, etc). The ROI on evergreen content over the long term is
stupendous -- it brings in links like crazy (which translates into direct SEO
benefits), brings in traffic for forever, and is just stupidly cost effective.

Here's a (cheaper) bit of evergreen content which is Pretty Darn Useful for my
niche: <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm> . I think
that probably took, with its sister page, 2.5 hours to put together, so call
that $250. (I have since become _vastly_ more efficient at pumping out the
content. You can hear more about that in a week when the article is done.)

Those two pages have, at last count, something like 100 backlinks, including
from some fairly high authority pages ("Would you mind if we included your
resource in this year's copy of the [American state] reading curricula?"
_swoon_ ). Buying links on that scale would cost me thousands of dollars _per
month_ (I do not recommend buying links).

That page alone had 30,000 visitors in 2008 alone. Buying 30,000 visitors,
_all of whom wanted something very close to what I sell_ , would cost me about
$1,800 via AdWords.

Direct revenue as a result of it was only about $1,000 in 2008. (I say "only"
because it is one of the most poorly monetized pages on my site. I tried to
strike a balance between monetization and linkability, mostly aimed at
linkability since that was published before anyone had heard of me.)

So yeah, with $1,000, I'd suggest writing (or commissioning) some pillar
content aimed straight at the people who you want to convince to give you
money/influence.

~~~
apollo
100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?

~~~
fallentimes
Google isn't very good for displaying backlinks. Try yahoo site explorer.
Quarkbase (for buzz) & websitegrader are also excellent.

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iamelgringo
So, you have $1k for marketing your current site. That's actually a ton of
money.

Here's a couple of ways to stretch $1k marketing budget:

* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task.

* Write a letter to English/Business departments at the three closest colleges. Tell them you have a 3 month marketing internship. It's unpaid, but interns will receive a $200 a month stipend. Have them write blog posts, blog comments, submit to bookmarking sites, write press releases, etc... If college kids are your demographic, be sure to give your interns swag.

* Get a bunch of users at once from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Set up a job called, "evaluate my new news service", and pay $0.02 a hit. 10000 hits x $0.02 = $200 Ask them to write their impressions in a comments form on your HIT description. Give them an option to submit their email address if they want to be updated about future changes to your site.

* User Amazon's Mechanical Turk service command line tools to script a recurring HIT. You can ask 100 people a day to look at your site, register, comment, etc... 100 hits a day x $0.02 = $2 a day.

* Adwords, but depending on your site, your keywords, you're probably looking at $0.05-.50 a hit.

* Depending on your site, you could hold a competition and submit it to whatever forums and BBS's you'd like to. The winner gets a brand new $200 iPod.

* Buy swag and hand it out to your targeted demographic. Or, give it to your first passionate users. People love free stuff, and you might be able to get some word of mouth/buzz from passionate users that just got a t-shirt from your site. Cost of a custom T-shirts in small batches: $10-15 a piece. Custom stickers in batches of 1000: $75. <http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/>

~~~
lpgauth
"* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet
marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their
thing. Or, you can pay them by the task."

Could you explain what their "thing" is?

~~~
il
Their "thing" will be spamming blogs and forums with your links, which, unless
done skilfully, will create severe negative backlash and get your site banned
from Google. Alternatively, their "thing" will be showing your site as a
popunder on spam domains and botnet computers, giving you worthless traffic
that only drains your bandwidth. Don't risk it.

~~~
rms
The better thing they can do is to email all of the websites that link to your
competitors and ask those websites for a link. But you can do that yourself.

~~~
iamelgringo
Why do it yourself when you can pay someone $2-5 a hour to do it while you
work on building new features on your site?

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swombat
Keep that $1k to feed yourself. Start a blog, talk about your product, get
yourself dugg, slashdotted, reddited, HN'ed, etc... That will bring much more
than $1k of attention to your product.

Importantly, without being sleazy about it, always be happy, willing,
enthusiastic to talk about your product. You may feel a little bit of shame at
the beginning, but it will go away. After all, you're telling people about
your product because it will make their life better right?

To start at the beginning: why haven't you mentioned your product name in this
post? How about an "Ask HN: Review my news aggregator"? Seems like a missed
opportunity already.

~~~
mattmaroon
Submitting yourself to digg, slashdot, and reddit will most likely get you
about $0.12 worth of publicity. Can't hurt to try, but 999 out of 1,000
startups get 3 click throughs total that way. HN is much better.

The rest I agree with.

~~~
swombat
Depends how and what you submit.

I can reasonably easily get a few thousand hits out of a combination of these
sites, even with a very young blog. Much more with an older blog. All you have
to do is write something insightful, bite-size, funny, well written,
appealing, with a great headline, and get your friends to upvote you. That
works on Reddit. There's no guarantee for any particular article to make it,
but over a period of a couple of months any decent writer should be able to
make it.

(I'm speaking from experience btw)

~~~
mattmaroon
While I believe that you can do this, most people wouldn't have the slightest
clue how. Also, my understanding is that it's highly unlikely someone new to
Digg or Reddit will get a submission promoted far. Is that not true?

~~~
swombat
You'll definitely have to work on it to make it happen - i.e. become active on
those sites. However, I only have 288 karma points on reddit and I can get a
reasonable success rate when I submit stuff there. The longer your account has
existed and the more active it is, though, the better, of course.

Digg is a pain in the ass in that respect. The volumes of "diggs" required to
even make a blip are so huge that you'll only make it there if either you've
totally gamed it (like that guy who posted that article about it recently), or
if you've made it through somewhere else and you're dugg as a side effect. I
stopped bothering with it because I kept hearing that the quality of the
traffic is also very low anyway (very high bounce rates).

Reddit and HN, however, are relatively easy to promote to, and if you get
really picked up very well on reddit (which should happen with 1 article every
few months if you're good and write reasonably often), it'll spread to other
places too. Articles that succeed only on HN don't seem to spread around too
much, however.

The best place so far, though, was Slashdot. Get yourself slashdotted (on
their main page), and you can expect 100k+ hits from it, and many links from
blogs, and probably you'll get reddited, delicious'ed, dugg, etc, soon after.
Be sure that your server is ready to handle it... It's a complete lottery - an
actual editor has to decide whether to push your article - but if you win it,
it's worth it - so submit there when you have good slashdot content, it's free
and might bring you untold amounts of geeky traffic!

Bear in mind also that none of these methods guarantee anything - not even
traffic, and definitely no guarantee that people will stick around. But
they're not overly hard to achieve if you're a decent writer and have
something reasonably interesting to say (those are the hard bits, really).

~~~
mattmaroon
I didn't realize Slashdot still had that kind of traffic. Good to know. You're
right about HN users. They don't tend to Digg or Reddit you much. But they do
stick pretty well if your product is in the category, so they're worth quite a
bit on their own.

Definitely I would recommend just running a blog on Wordpress.com or TypePad
or blogspot. Some service that can withstand the heat of any big press
releases. Just in case. You can spend a few bucks to make it look like a
subdomain of your main site anyway. Blogging can net you some organic search
traffic too.

------
mattmaroon
Impressing blogs is free. Labor intensive, but not something you can really
buy.

$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and
just work for the traffic.

If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a
small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each
at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might
just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the
overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.

I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to
get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick
obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with
my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a
fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would
ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a
day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty
efficient.

------
sutro
Announce that sometime within the first 10 days of its launch your service
will float one fake news story or headline amid the stream of real news. The
first reader to email you identifying the fake wins the coveted $1K "User
Editor at Large" award. In addition to the money give the winner a temporary
featured column on your site. If the contest generates interest, repeat it as
often as you can afford to -- perhaps quarterly? Good luck!

~~~
rrhyne
Sorry, but I can't see that idea equating to links, quality targeted traffic,
or interest in his service, only interest in 1000 dollars.

~~~
gojomo
It's novel enough it might get some secondary reporting. That it also raises
ethical issues -- a news quality site giving out fake news?! -- also helps, by
creating potential controversy/arguments/discussion threads.

------
rrival
How's your logo? StartupSchwag.com will put you on a sticker (for free) and
distribute those stickers to its subscribers (also free). People take pics
that wind up on flickr, talk about what's in the bag on their blogs, etc. Good
times had by all.

------
Tichy
If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.

~~~
fallentimes
Can you please elaborate/share some stories?

~~~
Tichy
I only know that some specialists recommended it as a bargain at a barcamp a
while ago. Your site get's thrown into the stumble stream, so people actually
stumble upon your site, they don't have to click on an ad first to get to your
site.

Apart from advertising, StumbleUpon also tends to bring a lot of visitors,
more than the average digg I think.

------
mikeyur
Don't advertise.

Be enthusiastic about your product. Have a twitter account? Talk about your
product. Start a company/project blog and pimp that content as much as
possible.

Email every single blog that covers what your product is about or have
influential writers who would like your product. Simply introduce your product
in the email and don't ask for a post, link or anything. Ask them for their
opinion.

This is the best marketing.

It's extremely time consuming but I have much more time than I have money, not
sure about yourself. You could outsource this but personal emails from the
owner/developer will get you further.

------
psyklic
The most surprising thing here is the number of posts that say "don't spend
the money -- don't advertise." I think that this clearly shows that many
people on here are techies rather than businessmen ...

~~~
axod
I don't think that's true. If you just spend $1000 blindly on advertising,
you'll get pretty much nothing back. It's not enough to make a difference.
It's better to either spend it creatively, for example as I posted, buying old
domains that still have traffic, or just keeping it, and using the far more
valuable and scalable "word of mouth".

------
andrewljohnson
I dunno about the thousand bucks, but one thing you should do is get in touch
with Bacon's Mediasource. For a couple thousand bucks a year, they will let
you subscribe and make media lists (lists of contact information of
reporters). But just get them to let you trial it for a week, make your media
list, and start making phone calls.

No thousand dollar ad campaign will be as effective as calling reporters (for
free).

------
profgubler
A lot of great ideas on here. Since you are the only one here who really knows
your product, you are the one that would have to choose. I work for an ad
agency. We are very much into asking questions. Our goal is to interrogate the
product or service before we recommend anything. Once you do a soft release to
us at hacker news and we know more about the product, you will start to see
even better responses to your question about where to spend your thousand
dollars.

One word of advice though, find out how you can quickly and easily explain
your product to your target market. When you target market understands your
product after tagline or sentence, they can easily explain it to their
friends. This will help you in all marketing efforts, but particularly on
small budgets.

The startups that users understand are going to do better than the ones that
users need to spend forever explaining to their friends.

------
timf
This is not related _directly_ to marketing but I have seen a lot people
recommend usertesting.com

And one thing I was thinking about doing in this vein is to go to local
coffeeshops and offer people coffee or $5 etc. to sign up and try your website
while you watch and take notes etc. You know, just say "hey do you have 15
minutes, I'll trade you ___"

Has anyone had good or bad experiences with that? It might even get those
people to sign up / stick around for good.

If you don't get people interested, you at least get usability feedback.
(obviously if you don't need that feedback simultaneously with marketing, then
this would be an unreasonable amount of time and money to spend)

------
jyothi
Google adwords for a news aggregator kind of product is mostly going to go in
vain.

Advertising on relevant blog would get you a better reach.

Beyond that a well chalked out email marketing and as others mentioned heavy
social media penetration would work for this.

Additionally adding some kind of a virality into your product to increase word
of mouth, some interesting ways where people would find it useful or intuitive
to forward it to friend would work.

Finally, a very aggressive seeding from your own team - send it to all
friends, repeatedly request them (if they would and if no, why not) send it to
their first circle.

~~~
alain94040
You can use adwords on the partner network (not search traffic, but targeting
other sites) and pay a very low CPC ($0.05). Google will eventually spend it
for you and you'll get quite a few visitors from it. Not super-high quality,
but may get you started.

<http://FairSoftware.net>: where geeks are their own boss

------
Tichy
I think I wouldn't advertise, but maybe buy something useful with the 1000$.
For example, pay somebody to write a press release, or pay a web designer to
improve the looks of the site or create a cool new logo.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I've got to say that sending out a press release if you only have $1000 is
just not the best use of funds IMO. Press releases have their place but is it
really what you spend your first $1000 on? No way.

Adwords seems the most logical choice. I'd spend $20 and buy Perry Marshall's
Adwords book and learn how to do split testing. With a $1000, you shuld be
able to generate enough impressions to figure out what keywords work, what
your competitors are doing in Adwords, and have a handle on what your landing
pages are doing. Once you have that then you can more ably spend the next
$1000.

Here's that Perry Marshall book: [http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-
AdWords-Million/...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-
Million/dp/1599180308/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231155345&sr=8-1)

~~~
Tichy
I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I
should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment:
either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there
are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from
selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog
about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example.

Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth -
like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might
increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my
site. A google ad does not increase page rank.

Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it
is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile
application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords
cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app
(a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break
even point.

As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. Actually one can make them
for free, but with my app back then I just felt it might be good to pay
someone who is more skilled at writing to do it.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I think that whether it's a one-time opportunity or not depends on whether you
capture that email. If not, then yes - it's a one-time oppty. But if you
capture the email, you have many chances to get in front of them - on your
terms as well.

And I never thought anyone meant to spend all $1000 on a press release :)

------
shafqat
Sounds like there is some overlap with my startup, NewsCred. Have you taken a
look? Get in touch if you want some tips.. will be happy to help.

~~~
fallentimes
In an advertising sense or?

~~~
shafqat
In that we also aggregate news and are focused on quality (hence the name
"cred-ibility"). But that is just our consumer facing side and not our revenue
generating biz model.

