Local Marketing

Local Marketing
Written by DanatMCF on
document.write(localTime('Feb 1, 2008 20:16 GMT'))
Feb-2-08 3:16am/1/2008 20:16 GMT
From: mycityfaces.blogspot.com
It's been a couple of weeks since we have had the site up and we finally got our first 10 profiles! I new the first 10 would be hard and it should be smooth sailing form here. Right? Not a chance, this is like watching the grass grow, just not under our feet! Vince and I today got out and did some good old fashion networking, we took stacks of our promotion cards and hit the streets.We parked in shopping centers and each took different directions, we went into places like Hair Salons, Nail Salons, Insurance Agents, Karate places, Personal Trainers, everywhere we felt MyCityFaces.com would be perfect for. Everyone was very nice, no one told us to leave or threw anything at us. Again everyone that listened loved the idea and said how they were looking for something like that to get their employees to advertise on, to self promote, to help out. After 10 shopping centers, 500 promo cards gone and a couple of blisters later, Vince and I were feeling pretty good about things. We thought we would get hundreds of sign ups, we felt we did pretty good, better than the common 2% return. We got about 15-17 sign ups from that, unfortunately no where near what people led us to believe from the enthusiasm we received.We are now up to 35 or so sign ups on the Scottsdale page, we still only have only 1 or 2 on the other pages, which are Denver, Las Vegas, Orange County, New York, San Diego, and Dallas. I think I am going to put up a few examples on the other cities to help kick start the signings. Again no one wants to be first.Since things are going a little slower than we wanted we may run a banner ad on a site that started a few months ago and is growing at a great rate. Since it is new it should be relatively inexpensive to advertise on. It doesn't have the best content but it hits our demographic perfectly and it is expanding to other markets just like we are. The site is called TheDirty.com and it shows photos of regular people out on the town and the site owner comments on the pics. It is local oriented just like us and is expanding, check out our banner it is at the bottom of each page. We are going to try it out for 6 months and see how it goes.As far as other paid advertising goes, since we are on a budget we will see how TheDirty.com goes. I am going to hit the internet hard, nothing like viral marketing and most of it is free. I am putting MyCityFaces.com on everything I can find, tech forums, social forums, blog sites, just trying to get a few people to go to the site and tell others.Dan@MCF