Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi Nicole,
You need to answer the question, "why should I advertise with you?" How are you going to build traffic to your "database"? Most start-up sites have a marketing plan for building traffic, that is used to show advertisers all the ways you're going to be driving traffic to see their ad. So step #1: create a plan for driving traffic, that will show advertisers their money spent advertising with you will get them good visibility among prospective customers. As an advertiser, I have limited funds to advertise with, so I want to get the most for those funds. Your first step is to develop a plan that will convince me of the value of an ad on your site.

In agreement with kmarch here is some more to think on.
Who are you affiliated with?
What other sites will be linking to your site?
Are the people linking to your site my potential customers?
How often will my customers see your ad for my product?
What makes your service better than my current one?
These are some of the questions potential customers may ask of you.

So you need to build linkages to other established sites, not necessarily advertising sites either, but sites with a volume of traffic which would allow you to have a large potential viewer base.

What search engines and directories have you listed with? There are free ones and paid ones and as you are starting up look for the free ones first and see how many hits you get through these links in the first week or two. Use that time to research and select a paid service. You have to make yourself visible enough so as to attract the first few customers. From there you can use these as references so as to drive more traffic to your site.

Chicken and egg problem. Without content, you won't have visitors. Without visitors no-one will sign up. That means early adopters have a raw deal - they sign up with few visitors. So the way forward is to build content for free to start with - say free annual packages. Then as you get content and start to build traffic you move your prices up and/or trade people up into silver or gold levels of service.

You don't actually say what the database is, but there are huge numbers of companies who have and are failing at this. The more niche your database the better. This also makes it easier to build very specific content with more value to visitors, together with articles to support the database entries.

A tough audience if you don't mind me saying - very ephemeral as men will move through this stage very quickly and then leave once they feel comfortable, so you're going to be on a continual recruitment cycle to keep site visits up. And why dads and not parents? You may also find that men aren't open even in an online forum to sharing much information with each other - it's not a subject talked about down the pub particularly, or men swapping baby pictures. Mums are a different matter.

That means you've got to start with content. You'd have to have content that can attract the audience first. If the subject was more interactive or the information more valuable, you may just be able to start with a relatively empty site, but in this case there would be a lot of article generation needed.

The content draws the audience. Now you need some reasons to sign up. Sometimes you sign up because someone you know has asked you, sometimes to join something you're interested in, sometimes because it's the only way to get certain information. Ideally the invites and the invitation go together - come to site X to see my Y. Forums may be OK, but it seems that you need about 1000 members to have a forum going actively. Blogs maybe, but it's not a group I'd expect much coo-ing and ahh-ing from. So I'm not sure why this audience would sign up here.

In addition, you want to develop as many cross-links as possible with online and off-line PR. You can use adwords etc, but you may end up simply spending all your ad income on advertising to get people to visit - not very profitable.

Now you have visitors and maybe registered members you have something to promote back to advertisers. The advertisers would want to know why this is a prime audience. It could be that it's the time the family upgrade furniture, change car, look to move house, change vacation habits, financial planning for instance. You can use this insight to direct your content and get a virtuous circle or article and an audience that's interested in your advertisers products.

It may be possible to start with advertisers if you can get them to provide deals for your members (even before you have the members). It could be an area they are interested in, so you may be able to negotiate a member discount scheme before you have members and then make this member discount scheme a reason to sign up. This could be done in parallel with generating the content.

In terms of planning and forecasting a business around this I don't know if you can find out if it's feasible until you try - the market is too niche. It's relatively easy to get started building content on a social networking platform like ours and initial costs should be less than $1-2000 using off-the-shelf systems with the cost or time for content creation itself on top. Once you have some content you can test out potential advertisers - can they give you some deals for members? Would they pay to advertise? Some may be willing to take some trial advertising to see how it goes before you are strong established but this would depend on content quality.

Once you've started spinning the content/advertiser plate from here it's a question of finding out how many visitors you can get and how big you can get the audience, cycling this back through the advertisers and building the site reputation and content.

I don't think it's easy to predict whether it would succeed or fail in this specific case and it would be hard work initially.


Saul