Marketing Q&A

[decanus]

I am wanting to find out just how people are marketing their sites. This topic is for finding out all the best ways to market your site.

I am currently sending over 500+ emails a day with an indepth explanation of my site. Explaining how it works and what the benefits of using my site are. I have 3 main categories, For Sale, Business Directory and Property Portal.

The ways I am advertising my site:

£50 per month on advertising through Facebook
I have created my own FaceBay group of Facebook with 500+ members and growing
Taking an hour or two out of everyday mass emailing clients through Gumtree (which is working really well)
Finding companies on through other business directories and emailing them
Word of mouth
1000+ Flyers to hand out after christmas telling people to sell their unwanted presents through my site
Everytime a user adds a listing i Tweet the item then post it on my FaceBay Group
Google + Share the listing

It is alot of work but I assume that once i have over 2000 users then i wont have to do so much advertising as the users will share their own listings and hopefully it will spread socially.

I would love to know what other users are doing to increase visitors and users to their sites.

[decanus]

Really? No one wants to share?

[painperdu]

I own a domain/web hosting site and I include advertising for both on the same postcard that I snail mail to new business owners -my osclass site is a local service ads listings for small services/businesses.

I've just started so I really haven't done much advertising yet. I plan to use Facebook a lot. I think the hardest part is branding and getting people to remember your site when they need to list something or search for something they need.

Something I noticed that sites like Twitter and Facebook did a lot of when they were just starting out was to write articles on ways to use their sites. For example, "10 Ways to Profit from Twitter". They would post these seemingly helpful articles on other social sites. I'll be doing something similar to this.

BTW, I've started a subreddit about guerilla marketing for small businesses:  http://www.reddit.com/r/gmarketing/