Personally I would experiment with different sources and different types of adds. The main thing to do is find out if the adds are working.

If you are advertising online there is always the big two - Google(Adwords) and Yahoo(Overture). I would also have a look at some online comics. The two bigest ones focusing on gaming are: * http://www.pvponline.com/ * http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic

There are about 50 other comics that focus on gaming. Each one focuses on different types of gamers. So if you can try different comics.

The most important thing is to make sure you know how well your campain is going. If you haven't set up a marketing funnel I would probably try to setup on of those first: * http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understandin... * http://brianwong.com/blog/funnel-visualization-with-google-a...

If you have a revenue model you can even justify spending more money on advertising. Even if you are just trying to BUY market share it is worth know where you will get the most bang for your buck.

Nathaniel Brown - http://www.adinobro.com/

Thanks Nathaniel, we use analytics a lot and have some ad:hoc ways of getting some stats, but haven't properly setup the goal/funnel view... we should.

The main idea is that if you use goals and then segment your marketing dollars into say 10 lots of $200. You can then run 10 different tests. You might run campain A on site 2 for a month then change to campain B on site 2. Different campains might work differently on different sites. The main thing is keep testing. For the first 3 months you might waste a bit of money but by the 3rd month you should be able to allocate at least half of your money to areas that work based on the tracking you've setup and then keep spending at least a little bit trying new sites. If you don't have at least some for testing new sites you will eventually start to saturate your market. Keep a log of sites that were ok because you might want to go back to them with a new campain targeting their users later on.

It seems to me you have to focus on your demographic and spend some time figuring out their top websites, then figure out ways to partner with them. It sounds obvious but if you spend the money on getting Digg frontpaged or an ad on Penny-Arcade the customers presumably won't actually stick, since they're not your target audience.

Can you set up a myspace page? Add Facebook integration, a Facebook fan page, etc? Advertise on Livejournal? Celebrities is a good one as someone else mentioned, also fashion and style sites - with the death of print, could you even afford to advertise in Cosmo or the teenage equivalents? As well as casual gaming sites and possibly MMO sites, as plenty of women play MMOs and look for other distractions as well.

To be honest although I'm a twentysomething girl I'm somewhat atypical and don't really know what sites my 'demographic' visit - but you need to find that out. Maybe look at some of your competitors too, there are a ton of casual games out there.

If you've got 10k users already maybe you can incentivise them to recruit a friend with some of the marketing budget as well. Free months/extras etc.

yes, we'll introduce the "refer a friend" + "import your contact list" in a couple weeks

While there are always exceptions, I'm guessing most startups that are around the 10k user mark have plenty of free low hanging fruit left in terms of improving a user's experience or getting more traffic in general. Whatever you end up doing, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck with a more optimized flow.

Personally (and without knowing more about what you guys are doing), I'd spend the $2k exploring different avenues to get a better idea of what kinds of things do and do not work. It's hard to know what may or may not work sometimes without trying it, at least a little bit. Seemingly similar startups may have very different levels of success with things like untargeted Google Adwords, targeted Google adwords, other methods of product placement, etc., and while you can't always get conclusive evidence from $2k, it's a start.

Yes, we have plenty to improve in improving the flow and newbie experience

Always wondering about what priority should be new features we need for stickiness vs improving the first time experience

Honestly? first time experience if you want to grow your userbase.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

For example, there are many arguments to why WOW is a dominating force in the MMO market and one of them is with the "first 5 minutes" concept. It hooks players early and from there tries to keep the experience fairly pleasant through the first X levels of play.

There are many other MMO's out there and the first 5 minutes can be frustrating. These games usually don't do as well.

EDIT - Having thought quickly about another benefit of stickiness vs first impression, this is another argument I came up with that is pro-first impression.

I think that if you had to choose between the two, that first impression is better for the network effects that it can create.

Think about your browsing behaviour and how you pass content along to your friends.

When you find something new and interesting, do you send it to your friends (via IM/email/facebook/twitter) straight away or do you wait a couple of days before you send it?

Good point

Develop linkworthy content which is unique to your site.

It doesn't even need to be on your site - there is a certain digg user (I forget his username) that always does a bait & switch with content.

Basically he sets up microsites that look well designed (it's usually a very simple single page design) and have relatively funny content aimed at the Digg community.

He then submits that content to Digg, pushes it, waits for it to frontpage and then changes the page to have a "sponsored by" or similar message at the footer or header, but so it looks like it's part of the actual original design.

He does this often (perhaps twice a month?) and the cost is very minimal to him, but sends several 10's of thousands of users to his main site and each of these microsites provides Google juice for his main site.

He has also managed to pickup additional traffic from bloggers looking for content via Digg.

Since your main target is teen-20something females, I'd probably start thinking up comedic microsites related to various celebrities? They always seem to be a fairly easy to hit target.

Thats a good suggestion, thanks! ps - got any links to the digg examples?

Ok after some searching I found an example. The guy who used to do this is named Matt Inman and this is one example.

http://mingle2.com/dating/phases

You can also see some of the other microsites towards the footer of that page. They all usually changed after they frontpaged to promote his dating site. Classic bait and switch.

Inman is a great marketer and has all sorts of interesting tactics for driving traffic to his dating site. He's also the former CTO of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org).

Here's a recent interview with him about marketing: http://blog.mixergy.com/real-marketing/

Thanks for recommending my site Gibbon.

The Inman interview you linked to is full of techniques for marketing that doesn't cost money, but it does cost time.

My suggestion is to pick just one of his techniques and focusing on that (quizzes, shocking content, for example).

thanks guys!

What's your site? A link or name would help us understand your product better. It's always easier to give advice when we see the product rather than blind.

Are the websites/games free or paid?

If it's free and you're really after eyeballs, you might considering utilizing methods that give you a higher reach. I'd think about websites with a low CPM/PPC rate that reach your demographic. I'd also consider spending that money on developing a good FaceBook integration.

If you games are paid, I'd consider spending a little more on PPC/CPM rates to get a high quality audience.

Free for now, introducing paid options starting later this month. Yes, we'll do Facebook app/connect to get our viral growth rate up, planned for next month.

Any suggestion how to find the sites targeting particular demographics and their rates? Sorry if that sounds like a noob question, we haven't done any advertising before and are not in the US (although most of our new users are)

One idea might be to utilize Google Adwords (network sites) to find sites by demographic and then

* use Adwords to advertise there,

* go direct to the sites and see if you can score better deals,

* use various websites like Alexa to find websites just like those sites so you can go direct and talk about sponsorships

* use a combination of the above

I've already replied to this thread but I thought I would add another anecdote about using ads. This is just my personal experience, but I think can underline that you really need to be creative.

Personally, I think online ads are mostly a waste of money unless you get a good, measurable conversion from those ads.

Using Adsense for mostly branding or signing up free users is, in my opinion, the wrong approach since everyone is doing it. It ends up a war of attrition with who has the bigger budget, with the only winner being Google.

That's not to say you can't do very interesting things with online ads from a branding perspective. I've used online ads to great effect to create notoriety, the ad units themselves didn't increase traffic, it was the word of mouth associated with what I was doing with them.

Last year when I was spearheading the campaign to get Rick Astley the Best Act Ever award at MTV's Europe Music Awards, a bit of a rivalry occurred between the Tokio Hotel fans and the Rick Astley fans - I used this to my advantage.

Essentially, I leveraged Google's Adsense to plaster simple flashing (annoying) "Vote 4 Rick" ads all over other fansites around october 20th when the site's traffic was flat.

Post's below contain screenshots that blog readers were sending in of ads in action.

http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/20/please-stand-by/

http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/23/this-oozes-irony/

All up, I think the ad spend over a 10 day period was about $20 .. it was around that, I don't remember it costing me too much.

You can see the traffic increase to the site as people became interested again with what was occurring and telling their friends of the pranks that were happening.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...

In one case, I managed to embed a rickrolling flash ad in a certain Tokio Hotel Fansite, belonging to a critic of our efforts. She got so angry that she actually disabled advertising for her site so that I couldn't get ads in there.

http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/26/unappreciated-gift/

I also started targeting certain fansites directly, specifically one fan fiction site because they used Project Wonderful and the Ad unit was relatively cheap.

This is the message that the admin of that fansite sent to me via project wonderful. I found it to be highly amusing and this is the first time that I have made this public. I literally had every ad spot on their site filled with a flashing "Vote 4 Rick" ad which cost me the minimum $5 for project Wonderful and lasted about 4 days.

  Hello Mark Lancaster,

  Darcy Gilmore has sent you a new message! The message is:

  ---------------------
  Subject: Your Ad on our TH Site

  I love that you're advertising on our site, it's ingenious! Keep up
  the hilarious work, it's making all of our douchebag members foam at
  the mouth, and nothing pleases me more than that.

So, I guess the overall message is get creative. Create Purple Cows. Nothing beats word of mouth dollar for dollar.

Thanks, froo, we did a little test of a couple of viral things (tag a friend / youtube etc) but to be honest they didn't really do so much, maybe because the content was cute but wasn't funny/shocking/bizarre enough...the hard part is to come up with a creative idea

I think really the best thing you can do is listen to your users, keep your fingers on the pulse of your site and then act accordingly.

In my case, I didn't create the rivalry, I simply listened to what the readers were saying and the discussion happening on other sites and reacted accordingly.

It's much easier to ride a wave than it is to create that wave.

Sidenote: There were a few negative effects of my antics, but I turned those lemons into lemonade. The people in the IRC channel at the time got a real kick out of what I was doing.

It ended up in the sites comments being spammed a little by Tokio Hotel fans in a short couple hour window, which luckily I noticed it as it was happening.

I actually found much joy when I noticed this occurring in realtime and redirected those particular people to a rickroll on YouTube using a 301 redirect for those specific IP's in the .htaccess file.

Actually the best use of this tactic (specific IP redirects) was to a certain Tokio Hotel fan/critic named Claire (admin of a TH fansite) who left a very nasty comment on the site. I simply set up a redirect for her IP to a subdomain on the site and a page I set up specifically for her in minutes.

http://hacked.bestactever.com/

She was very upset thinking I had somehow "hacked" her computer and had emailed me with all sorts of threats and many four letter words.

The site's users got a huge kick out of that. It was childish yes, but that's what the site required at the time. Stupid childish antics. It added to the site's notoriety and was free - word spread around about the antics and traffic increased as a result.

if you are in the casual gaming space, I'm guessing you are doing flash games. Spend that money to hire some people to develop games for you. Almost any game will spread like wildfire all across every single game aggregator, and will drive a ton of traffic your way

And if you are going to ask questions, you shouldn't hide your startup name on here, you'll get higher quality help, if people know exactly what you are doing.

I'm no expert on marketing, but I think I'd check out StumbleUpon paid ads:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

Having used stumbleupon ads I'd have to say that the quality sucks. YMMV but for our main site and our news site StumbleUpon didn't add anything for us.