My marketing ideas... please comment

[AdrianApe]

I've been wanting to do this for a very long time now and finally purchased the software. I'll still be messing around with it and tweaking it for another month or so before I pour money into marketing, but here is my idea to get it off the ground.

I live in a small city, Adrian, in southeast Michigan. My site's name(should be up in a day or two) is AdrianApe.com. I racked and racked my brain for marketing ideas and thought of the normal things like door hangers, flyers, bumper stickers, and maybe ads on the radio. All things I'm still considering and will probably do. My biggest marketing idea is this. To order a gorilla suit, the one I want costs about 130-150 dollars and make a sign like you see protestors have. I'll simply write AdrianApe.com on the sign and run around town with it doing various antics. I'll go down main street and downtown and so forth waving my sign around and acting like a gorilla. It sounds foolish, but I know if I saw a gorilla waving a sign around with a URL on it I would be curious enough to look, where as if I saw a detailed advertisement about a classifieds site I'd be interested but could easily forget about it. So basically I'd like to draw people in by word of mouth and intrigue. Is this a dumb idea do you think?

My idea for getting it to be a popular high traffic site is the normal classifieds be free, like craigslist. So people can get on and sell their used car or their vintage suit for absolutely free. Then it being a high traffic site businesses should hopefully be interested in advertising on it, so I could have a business listing section, banners, job postings, and whatnot. So all the business related stuff would be paid, but at low rates. Maybe 10 dollars a month for a listing on there and 5 dollars per job listing, I'm not positive yet.

I'm new to the classifieds business and figured I would post this and see people's thoughts on it. I would sure appreciate some comments and suggestions. Thanks everyone.

Tim

[Chaslie]

Well I love the Gorilla idea - think it's great. Well done. Perhaps the Gorilla might want to hand out some fridge magnets or bumper stickers!

I take it you will be carrying the Gorilla theme through to the site.

[AdrianApe]

Thanks for the feedback.

That's a good idea with the bumperstickers. I think what I might do is order maybe 500 or 1000 depending how much they cost and hand them out with a little note explaining that every so often the gorilla will drive around in his car and wave people down that have the bumpersticker on their car and give them 20 bucks. Then for credibility post those people's names on the website or something I don't know.

I'm planning on using the gorilla theme on the website but probably not much further than the logo. I concocted a logo my self but am by no means a graphic designer, so I'll probably just pay the 30 to 50 bucks to get one profesionally done online somewhere. I'll attach the logo in case anyone wants to comment.

[Chaslie]

All excellent stuff including the logo.

[SkGold]

Your marketing ideas are good for small town. Same as Chaslie, I like your Gorilla idea. However don�t forget about Internet Marketing and SEO. The best clients for online business are online. Try to find what people are looking for, I mean what keywords they searching, then create and optimize your site around these keywords.

[Mike-N-Tosh]

The Gorilla suit is an excellent idea. I would highly recommend having some type of hand out whether it is the bumber stickers, flyers or whatever. People generally will forget within a day or two especially when it comes to remembering an url for a site.

My site is also for a small town. I have down Bulletin Board flyers with tear offs that include the url and our name. I also created what I call counter flyers which are essentially a postcard size flyer (4 per letter size page) as I have found that local businesses didn't have much issue with me putting them on their counters.

We also have a university here and I'm looking at getting two of the popular pizza places to exchange online display ads on the site for including my counter flyer with their pizza deliveries. Most of the deliveries go to the campus.

-Mike

[juven14]

Originally Posted by AdrianApe

Thanks for the feedback.

That's a good idea with the bumperstickers. I think what I might do is order maybe 500 or 1000 depending how much they cost and hand them out with a little note explaining that every so often the gorilla will drive around in his car and wave people down that have the bumpersticker on their car and give them 20 bucks. Then for credibility post those people's names on the website or something I don't know.

I'm planning on using the gorilla theme on the website but probably not much further than the logo. I concocted a logo my self but am by no means a graphic designer, so I'll probably just pay the 30 to 50 bucks to get one profesionally done online somewhere. I'll attach the logo in case anyone wants to comment.

That is one of the best ideas I've heard in a while. I'd go for it. I had a logo designed a few years back with The Logo Company, they were true professionals, offered fair prices, and had quality I was completely satisfied with. I couldn't choose between 2 of the 5 they offered so I got both. http://thelogocompany.net/

[AdrianApe]

Thanks for the tips and comments everyone. I've got the site up and running now and only have a bit more tweaking to do(famous last words) but will be a little while before I'm ready to pour some money into marketing it. Until then I'll be stuck handing out cheap flyers and trying to network through myspace.

Tim