Internet Marketing Tycoon

**imported_Switch** · 11-05-2006, 04:36 PM

Hey,
We are litereally a few weeks away from launching our new portal. We are working on a student portal, with content written by us, and other students. The finishing touches are being added to the template, making it look as pretty as possible, and checking functionality. We have been working on content for over a month now, with close to 30 articles targetted at the student population, and after release there will be regular updates with news relating to students and of course, new articles (hopefully some submitted by new members).

The site aims to be more than just a profile site, but a place that students go for information about being a student. With news relating to top up fees and lecturer pay disputes etc. We hope to combine a news site with social networking, with the added aspect that users can not only create a profile, add friends, blog etc, but also submit their own content to the site - music and film reviews, life stories etc etc etc

We have a few stragies in place for marketing, but there are mainly revolved around the our local university. Putting up posters and talking to local students. However, we want the site to be more national, as it is not intended to be just a local site. But we don't have many ideas for getting it accross the country. We will be focussing locally for the time being, trying to build up a user base first so that we can start on viral marketing from within, but from there we will want to use the local base to launch the site to the country.

The site isn't live yet, but for a feel of our style, you can visit the "Coming soon" page at http://www.thestudenthouse.co.uk

Basically, we are students, we don't have a very large budget for advertising and we would like to get your suggestions on how to go about marketing the site to the national student community.

Thanks for any help you can give.

**ghoti** · 11-05-2006, 04:55 PM

Your target audience probably has a lot of users of other social networking sites like bebo, myspace, facebook, etc. So try to get those people to be ambassadors for your site, and create "badges" that link back from their pages on other social networking sites to your portal.

You can see one form of this at nextpimp.com... at http://www.nextpimp.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20619 for example, you'll see the "NextPimp Member" badge in a few different styles and with each one is a "Get Web Code" link that is intended to show people how to put that badge on their Myspace page. You do need something useful that will make the users proud to show their membership badge elsewhere, though.

Anyway, you could try something like that for word-of-mouth marketing.

**imported_Switch** · 11-08-2006, 08:25 AM

The badge idea is great, and I can tie it in well with the theme of my site, using student id "badges" that show a few details of the user and give them html to place where ever they want.

I'l start coding it straight away, should be a simple case of taking the username and x-details from the database, displaying it on screen, then taking the html to give to the user. Interesting little project there. (If only facebook allowed users to input custom html...)

Thanks for the great idea, any others would be more than welcome!