I have a web site (http://www.themovietracker.com) that I launched a few weeks back. I've had previous sites and generally you start out forcing your friends to join and then you slowly work out to other methods (ads, fan pages, etc.) but usually devolves into soliciting random people to check it out. This generally leads to someone accusing you of spamming.<p>How do you kick off your site, without spamming, and with no real marketing/advertising budget? Please help!
I think it all comes down to being useful.<p>- Join conversations about movies (on blogs, forums, review sites, social networks), but contribute to those conversations, don't just advertise your site. It won't help you, it will just annoy everyone.<p>- Start a contest and give away small prizes for the best weekly/daily review or movie list.<p>- Work on your SEO: friendly urls, movie categories, better descriptions, titles etc. It won't get you too far, but it might help a little.<p>- Make a monthly/weekly list of recommended blog posts on movies, they will be notified you linked to them.<p>- Search on twitter for people asking for movie recommendations and interact with them.
I was just reading up on that today. Here's a link that gives you more links to useful articles: <a href="http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/" rel="nofollow">http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-ad...</a><p>The standout advice for me seems to be<p>* show how useful your service is (as Geea says too)<p>* make it easy to be written about - prepare a press kit<p>* be genuine, cultivate relationships, and don't be a wh*ring spammer<p>Please drop back and let us know what works for you.