Archive for category Marketing

I knew this day was coming.  Here I was working on the site for the past year and a half, sitting in my little office, doing my thing, knowing I was creating a fabulous site.  But now I face the challenge at every startup faces… how to get traffic to the site.

It’s funny, I posted a press release with PR Web.  In their little YouTube video they say “You’ve created the world’s first solar toaster!  And now you want to tell the world about it.”  Yeah that’s pretty much it.  This of course isn’t a solar toaster, but it is something that’s unique, and something that I want the world to know about.  So I sent out a press release, and it did bring a lot of links back to the site.  For that it was worth it.  I also had a write up on a fairly popular blog for recruiters and that brought me some traffic.  I set up a Facebook group and a LinkedIn group.  I have over 10,000 connections on LinkedIn and I contacted 5000 of them.  I’m working on getting ahold of the other 5000.  There’s definitely been some traffic to the site.  Just not enough, yet.

I know it’s a matter of time before people will discover the site and it will spread word-of-mouth.  What I’ve learned from past experience is that really “you get out of it what you put into it”.  If I were to just buy some $100 job board script it would never go anywhere.  But when you take your own ideas and breakdown what’s already out there, and then take that and build something completely new eventually people will see it.

Years ago I started a website called ABClance.com.  It was a freelance site based on scriptlance.com.  Back then, they were selling their script for $100.  So I bought it.  And I took a template from templatemonster.com integrated the two, and voilà I had a brand-new site.  I actually had about 10,000 people signed up for it at the time that I shut it down.  The problem was that it was nothing unique about.  Sure people signed up but the only way that I ever made any money was if somebody posted a project and I made 5% of the project.  Very few legitimate projects were posted.  Most of them were complete garbage.  I also had people that were trying to launder money through the site.  It became a nightmare in short.  In retrospect, had the site been focused on the specific niche it might have done okay.  For example, graphic design jobs.  Although there are plenty of freelance sites just for that.  But also I was using a script that hundreds of other people were using.  And there was really nothing unique about.

However, this site, even though there are a lot of similarities to other sites, is a completely unique creature.  And the fact that I gave so much personal attention to the design and the functionality and programming means that eventually it will become apparent to people how special and unique this site is.  It’s just a matter of time.

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