Hey Kirupians,
I just started posting again after a multi-month hiatus, but it feels good to be back.
I posted this in question in the Showcase/Critique forum, but I think the thread name was slightly misleading. I’ve made a few new sites since I last posted here, but there’s one in particular I need some advice on, Zollege.com, which is a free online flyer board for college students. It’s a user generated content (UGC) site, which often is a catch-22 when first starting (nobody wants to visit a dead forum, for example).
My question is, how do you all promote your sites and get them popular for specific audiences?
I should mention that I’ve promoted sites successfully in the past and generated large traffic volumes through the traditional avenues, like gathering links, pleasing the users and search engines, etc. I haven’t ever started a UGC site though. Zollege is even more different than the rest, because its audience is much more narrow (University students, and more specifically, Florida students, and even more specifically, students at the University of Central Florida, (UCF)).
The things I’ve tried so far include:[LIST=1]
[]Getting my friends to use it and leveraging every social advantage I can find. Some small wins there, but nothing outstanding.
[]Posting a variety of flyers around UCF campus (fighting fire with fire). Hard to track ROI, but I suspect it’s close to pointless.
[]Posting a flyer to Facebook’s UCF board (again, fighting fire with fire). Easy to track ROI, but the return is very low (maybe 8 visitors for every 40,000 impressions).
[]Sending messages to Facebook users that post flyers on the Facebook board and telling them about Zollege and the fact that it’s free. About 1 out of 3 users at least try it, but there’s a small number of flyers on the Facebook board in the first place.
[*]Sending emails to possibly interested school/student organizations, such as the UCF student government organization. No response.[/LIST]The site has only been up a month, so it’s still in its infancy. Visitor-to-member conversions aside, do you have any ideas about how I can get more UCF people to visit the site in the first place? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Thanks!
NOTE: My host seems to be having some issues at the moment, but seeing the site isn’t imperative to this post really.
