Re:Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
by mattmaroon on Monday January 05, 2009 @05:40AM
(#420253)
Impressing blogs is free. Labor intensive, but not something you can really buy.
$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and just work for the traffic.
If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.
I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.
$1k is too little to really net you much of anything. I'd hang on to it and just work for the traffic.
If you absolutely must spend it though, I'd try to optimize. Start off with a small amount of ads in various places, see what converts best. Throw $50 each at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace any other self-serve ad network that might just work for you. You can probably get a good idea for just 20% of the overall budget where the other 80% would be most effective.
I'd try to target as much as possible. With a bigger ad budget, you have to get more popular keywords just to spend it, but with $1,000 you could pick obscure, highly-focused keywords relevant to your audience. For instance with my fantasy sports startup we aimed at second rate NFL players who nobody but a fantasy sports player or stats junkie (the two being nearly synonymous) would ever Google. It would have been impossible for us to spend more than $100 a day that way, because there's just not enough volume, but it's pretty efficient.