Marketing a New Site
Written by Khalid Al-Khames on June 16, 2008 – 8:36 pm
Marketing a product or service can be particularly difficult, especially if you have stiff, established competition. Introducing my latest site, www.BarVacancy.com
Bar Vacancy is a free classifieds site specifically geared towards the licensed trade. Bar Vacancy allows you to post free bar jobs and will make money through people paying for “featured ads” and banner adverts.
The site rivals Gumtree, BarZone and every other site because it is FREE! Gumtree charge £25 per ad and BarZone £34.
I need your help…
Marketing such a service may sound easy. People often say “Oh that’s a good idea and because it’s free everyone will probably use it” - In theory yes, if a vendor was handing out a product you’d check it out before paying for it elsehwere.
The problem is getting the message out.
I let Adwords run for a few hours, targetting keywords for employers only so I could get some more jobs posted on the site e.g. “bar staff required“. £14 later at a cost of £0.40 per click, I got nothing. Understandably campaigns like this take time and I can’t expect immediate results, but just how far do you go before you try something else?
I’ve been looking at magazine specifically for the licensed trade, such as bar owner magazines and websites. For a good quarter page magazine ad I am looking at £1400 and there are no decent websites I have found so far.
I was thinking of doing down the route of business cards but they would only cover my city and would involve a lot of legwork. Flyers and mailshots is another idea and I have an e-mail campaign ready to go but I need more ideas.
What do you think I should do?
Thanks, and good luck with your persuits,
Khalid.
Tags: bar jobs, bar vacancy, classifieds, free, marketing, new site
Posted in Business, Monetization, News, Projects |
June 18th, 2008 at 7:53 am
Hi Khalid,
Sorry for not commenting for so long. I just haven’t had much time to devote to blog reading lately. I think BarVacancy is a good idea. Although, I should warn you that this is very tough nut to crack. You will realize this once you begin promoting it. The main problem will be sort of a catch 22. It’s hard to gain readers when there are no ads. It’s hard gain ads when there are no readers. Now I don’t want to discourage you at all, but if you want a site like this to become successful then it may take a few years. I know this because I’ve had several years of experience with sites that require users to post ads. I’ve seen plenty of my competitors come and go after long struggles and a site like this is for the long term. Otherwise the alternative is pump it up with a short term burst of labor and intensive marketing then flip it.
I think you have a good start by focusing on a particular niche in the jobs market. I’ve found this to be the best approach. If there is some way to make your listings stand out from competitors, I would do that as well. You may have to resort to posting your own ads on competing sites like craigslist for longer than you would like. I would just encourage you to offer more to your users as far as the size of ads and ease of use and other things like that. Try to make the site unique and stand out in a good way. I realize that’s all boilerplate advice and probably not worth much so I’ll bring it to an end. Just know that it takes an incredible amount of labor to make a site like this work.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Hey Khalid. Great idea. I would suggest maybe advertising on your competitors sites (Gumtree, BarZone) about another site that allows visitors to post for free etc - If you think of it from a user’s perspective, if they go to Gumtree or BarZone or anywhere and they’re scrolling through all the vacancies and adverts, but they don’t find anything else - where are they going to look?? Would it be a good idea to pay a one-off price during a busy employment time (lots of students will be looking for summer jobs now, or lots of people will be looking for jobs in September, when the students have left vacancies to go back to study), and try and reach out that way?
And also as Marc said, it may take several years. It might be an idea to start posting flyers or handing business cards to areas of your city. Maybe handing directly to pubs and bars instead of just posting. At the end of the day, if you can get 1 user from your scheme, then that is one more than when you started, and these things have a snowball effect and just keep getting bigger!
Good luck anyway.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Hi guys, thanks for the comments, really helpful and nice to hear from you both again.
I realise this project will take some time, the catch 22 does apply but I have a few friends in the industry that I can use to post ads and will continue to do so even if they don’t get any replies because they are helping me and I am cutting their expenditure.
Keep the comments coming folks,
Khalid.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Collect email addresses of bars & Offer them free stuff to buil their trust.
Did it with all my sites and it worked each time.
Keep the good work