Ask HN: How to spend a marketing budget of $US 2k per month?

Personally I would experiment with different sources and different types of adds. The main thing to do is find out if the adds are working.<p>If you are advertising online there is always the big two - Google(Adwords) and Yahoo(Overture). I would also have a look at some online comics. The two bigest ones focusing on gaming are: * <a href="http://www.pvponline.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pvponline.com/</a> * <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic" rel="nofollow">http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic</a><p>There are about 50 other comics that focus on gaming. Each one focuses on different types of gamers. So if you can try different comics.<p>The most important thing is to make sure you know how well your campain is going. If you haven't set up a marketing funnel I would probably try to setup on of those first: * <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understanding_t.html" rel="nofollow">http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understandin...</a> * <a href="http://brianwong.com/blog/funnel-visualization-with-google-analytics/" rel="nofollow">http://brianwong.com/blog/funnel-visualization-with-google-a...</a><p>If you have a revenue model you can even justify spending more money on advertising. Even if you are just trying to BUY market share it is worth know where you will get the most bang for your buck.<p>Nathaniel Brown - <a href="http://www.adinobro.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adinobro.com/</a>

It seems to me you have to focus on your demographic and spend some time figuring out their top websites, then figure out ways to partner with them. It sounds obvious but if you spend the money on getting Digg frontpaged or an ad on Penny-Arcade the customers presumably won't actually stick, since they're not your target audience.<p>Can you set up a myspace page? Add Facebook integration, a Facebook fan page, etc? Advertise on Livejournal? Celebrities is a good one as someone else mentioned, also fashion and style sites - with the death of print, could you even afford to advertise in Cosmo or the teenage equivalents? As well as casual gaming sites and possibly MMO sites, as plenty of women play MMOs and look for other distractions as well.<p>To be honest although I'm a twentysomething girl I'm somewhat atypical and don't really know what sites my 'demographic' visit - but you need to find that out. Maybe look at some of your competitors too, there are a ton of casual games out there.<p>If you've got 10k users already maybe you can incentivise them to recruit a friend with some of the marketing budget as well. Free months/extras etc.

While there are always exceptions, I'm guessing most startups that are around the 10k user mark have plenty of <i>free</i> low hanging fruit left in terms of improving a user's experience or getting more traffic in general. Whatever you end up doing, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck with a more optimized flow.<p>Personally (and without knowing more about what you guys are doing), I'd spend the $2k exploring different avenues to get a better idea of what kinds of things do and do not work. It's hard to know what may or may not work sometimes without trying it, at least a little bit. Seemingly similar startups may have very different levels of success with things like untargeted Google Adwords, targeted Google adwords, other methods of product placement, etc., and while you can't always get conclusive evidence from $2k, it's a start.

Develop linkworthy content which is unique to your site.

What's your site? A link or name would help us understand your product better. It's always easier to give advice when we see the product rather than blind.

Are the websites/games free or paid?<p>If it's free and you're really after eyeballs, you might considering utilizing methods that give you a higher reach. I'd think about websites with a low CPM/PPC rate that reach your demographic. I'd also consider spending that money on developing a good FaceBook integration.<p>If you games are paid, I'd consider spending a little more on PPC/CPM rates to get a high quality audience.

I've already replied to this thread but I thought I would add another anecdote about using ads. This is just my personal experience, but I think can underline that you really need to be creative.<p>Personally, I think online ads are mostly a waste of money unless you get a good, measurable conversion from those ads.<p>Using Adsense for mostly branding or signing up free users is, in my opinion, the wrong approach since everyone is doing it. It ends up a war of attrition with who has the bigger budget, with the only winner being Google.<p>That's not to say you can't do very interesting things with online ads from a branding perspective. I've used online ads to great effect to create notoriety, the ad units themselves didn't increase traffic, it was the word of mouth associated with what I was doing with them.<p>Last year when I was spearheading the campaign to get Rick Astley the Best Act Ever award at MTV's Europe Music Awards, a bit of a rivalry occurred between the Tokio Hotel fans and the Rick Astley fans - I used this to my advantage.<p>Essentially, I leveraged Google's Adsense to plaster simple flashing (annoying) "Vote 4 Rick" ads all over other fansites around october 20th when the site's traffic was flat.<p>Post's below contain screenshots that blog readers were sending in of ads in action.<p><a href="http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/20/please-stand-by/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/20/please-stand-by/</a><p><a href="http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/23/this-oozes-irony/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/23/this-oozes-irony/</a><p>All up, I think the ad spend over a 10 day period was about $20 .. it was around that, I don't remember it costing me too much.<p>You can see the traffic increase to the site as people became interested again with what was occurring and telling their friends of the pranks that were happening.<p><a href="http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oct1-nov11" rel="nofollow">http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...</a><p>In one case, I managed to embed a rickrolling flash ad in a certain Tokio Hotel Fansite, belonging to a critic of our efforts. She got so angry that she actually disabled advertising for her site so that I couldn't get ads in there.<p><a href="http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/26/unappreciated-gift/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/26/unappreciated-gift/</a><p>I also started targeting certain fansites directly, specifically one fan fiction site because they used Project Wonderful and the Ad unit was relatively cheap.<p>This is the message that the admin of that fansite sent to me via project wonderful. I found it to be highly amusing and this is the first time that I have made this public. I literally had every ad spot on their site filled with a flashing "Vote 4 Rick" ad which cost me the minimum $5 for project Wonderful and lasted about 4 days.<p><pre><code> Hello Mark Lancaster, Darcy Gilmore has sent you a new message! The message is: --------------------- Subject: Your Ad on our TH Site I love that you're advertising on our site, it's ingenious! Keep up the hilarious work, it's making all of our douchebag members foam at the mouth, and nothing pleases me more than that. </code></pre> So, I guess the overall message is get creative. Create Purple Cows. Nothing beats word of mouth dollar for dollar.

if you are in the casual gaming space, I'm guessing you are doing flash games. Spend that money to hire some people to develop games for you. Almost any game will spread like wildfire all across every single game aggregator, and will drive a ton of traffic your way<p>And if you are going to ask questions, you shouldn't hide your startup name on here, you'll get higher quality help, if people know exactly what you are doing.

I'm no expert on marketing, but I think I'd check out StumbleUpon paid ads:<p><a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/" rel="nofollow">http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/</a>