
I have a social website. How do I market it online effectively? - eric1209
My main experience is programming and I've finished a website that provides a fun way for people to read the news, vote and discuss the issues, and connect with other people with similar interests.<p>Could you share some of the effective ways to market it online to get more people to know about it? How to build buzz. How to get press coverage...
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ericb
I got decent traffic from <http://www.KillerStartups.com> for my quick and
dirty free-stuff pligg project: <http://freenormous.com>

Pimping your stuff in forum posts and sigs like I'm doing above (hopefully
tastefully) works. I would suggest you need to get over being shy about it and
your first post should have had the URL. Also, track down anyone who blogs
about your area (social news sites/poll sites) and contact them to let them
announce you and or start commenting intelligently on their blogs.

Google will start bringing digg-like sites traffic based on your unique
keyword combos after a while. I would post to some free directories to boost
pagerank (but not paid links or directories) to help this happen sooner. There
are also free forums for link announcements. These won't bring you much
traffic directly, but google still is awarding some rank for the links and you
will probably start placing for off-beat combos. I was getting google traffic
for "huffing purel" for a while after a friend made a comment joking about
that.

Google Analytics is a great tool. I suggest adwords to get some starter
traffic. Be warned, my users were so lazy ( less than 1% post and almost none
vote) that I started populating it using scrapers. They will lurk though and
read your content. So if you get bored talking to yourself, try and build
traffic fast. Avoid Adbrite if you do this--the traffic is worthless.

Anyhow, those are my tips...

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eric1209
Very helpful. Thank you.

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utnick
Here is one thing you could do ( inspired by that youtube video marketer guy
on techcrunch )

1\. Nobody wants to join an empty social site. Either do it yourself or pay
some people in 3rd world countries to have multiple accounts on your site and
make it look popular. Each story should have hundreds of votes and there
should be 10s if not hundreds of comments, its better if there is heated
debate or discussion going on in the comments

2\. Once it has the appearance of being popular, Time to make it popular.

-You could pretend to be a ron paul supporter and point out to other ron paul supporters that ron paul is getting the bad end of one your questions, and then 1000s of ron paul supporters would rush to your site to correct it.

-You could make a facebook app for it.

-You could do traditional advertising on other news or news related blogs.

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eric1209
I didn't see from this angle before. Thanks for the detailed comments.

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myoung8
Why are people still building Digg clones?

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webwright
Are we really believing that Digg is the unsurpassable pinnacle of social
news?

Before Google came along, the search space looked pretty mature with plenty of
entrenched players.

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breily
I would think its not that Digg is the pinnacle that these sites can be, but
that social news sites are not usually defined by their features-even if a new
social news site makes tons of improvements over the digg/reddit model, it
simply won't have the user base that digg does. No one wants to use a social
news site that no one else uses. Whereas with search, it doesn't really matter
that no one else uses it because search isn't about other people.

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Kaizyn
Who is your target audience? If you don't know who they are, then your startup
already has a problem... Once identified, can you think of any bloggers or
other people that audience is inclined to listen to? If so, why not try
contacting those individuals personally and ask them to take a look at your
site and tell you what they think. Sending out a form email in this sort of
outreach would be plain stupid and your response from them would be near
nothing as you would deserve.

If you take the time to study these folks, you'll do much better. And if
you're unable to convince them that your site's worth their while to use, then
it probably isn't going to be a hit with your target group. Compared to any of
the mass media approaches, this will cost less and work better.

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eric1209
This is a great suggestion. Thanks for sharing.

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mattthazhmon
Just signed up on your site and I like the mixing together of news and polls.

we've just launched a free service <http://www.freemyfriends.com> that lets
your users find their friends who are already members of your site without
violating your user's privacy. We're looking for new startups to see if they
are interested in using this service.

We're working on making the website look prettier, but we wanted to get it out
to gauge market demand.

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dannyd
check out these articles, it should give you some ideas to get started. How
can we build buzz:
<http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/24/smbusiness/build_buzz.fsb/>

4 ways to market your business online:
[http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/04/magazines/fsb/online.marketi...](http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/04/magazines/fsb/online.marketing.fsb/index.htm?tagname=fsbURG)

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bct
I've no advice, but be careful who you market it to; your first x users have a
huge effect on the culture of the site.

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eric1209
Thank you for all your comments here. I'm a programmer and new to the
marketing domain. All your comments are very helpful and give me some ideas of
the dos and donts.

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diggster
You can try submitting to Mashable and Techcrunch for press coverage.

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berlinbrown
you can try mine too. No flash, no ads and no trendy faded backgrounds. Just
data. All opensource under a creative common doc license, half a million urls
for download also.

<http://botspiritcompany.com/botlist/>

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mudge
And while your at it, try mine too: no flash, no ads, and not a single image:
<http://newsconomy.com/>

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joeguilmette
whats the url? that sounds like a great place.

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eric1209
<http://www.gatherama.com>

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joeguilmette
wow good work

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eric1209
Thanks for your encouraging words.

