One of the essential strategies we’re following in our start-up year is reinvestment of revenue into marketing. Given that we’re not raising VC money (yet), we’re going to be bootstrapping by plowing virtually all of the revenue generated by our sites into driving more traffic to the sites. Our monetization model generates revenues from day one but those revenues are dependent initially on growing traffic exponentially. Once we’ve built our base of users we’ll have recurring revenue (yeah baby!) from those users, an essential element of our automated business model.
So how do we plan to allocate that marketing spend? Well, both of us are online marketing professionals so there’s a natural tilt in that direction. If you capture attention while someone is already on the web then you are far more likely to get them to your site. So the vast majority of our efforts are aimed at people who are surfing, searching and creating on the web. That means Pay Per Click for searchers, organic SEO for searchers, low keyword bidding on publisher sites for brand awareness (lots of impressions at low cost- this won’t last forever), PR for bloggers, Facebookers and MySpaceCadets and viral video.
At the agency where I work (soon plan to change that to ‘used to work’), we generally recommend a media allocation that is 70/20/10: 70% of the budget on tried and true, safe buys (for us, PPC and SEO), 20% for newer more experimental stuff and 10% for off the wall WTF stuff. I believe that keeping your dollars distributed this way keeps your marketing fresh and keeps you up to speed with the incredible array of marketing technologies being developed these days. Our 10% will go to viral video first because we happen to have a great subject for creating entertaining videos (teaser) and we can do it on the cheap, relatively. Producing the videos is going to be entertaining to say the least and I will be blogging on that, with clips.