Hello everyone. I'm in the beginning stages of creating a social network site (community), but I have a question conerning the promotion and advertisement of it. On launch day, would it be a good idea to unload some cash into Adwords and Overture? Or, do you recommend starting slow and gradually advertise more with those programs? What has worked for you? Any strong recommendations? Thanks.

Originally Posted by Jason

Hello everyone. I'm in the beginning stages of creating a social network site (community), but I have a question conerning the promotion and advertisement of it. On launch day, would it be a good idea to unload some cash into Adwords and Overture? Or, do you recommend starting slow and gradually advertise more with those programs? What has worked for you? Any strong recommendations? Thanks.

Is there any angle to your site? Something that sets it apart from myspace, friendster, etc?

Honestly, not really. I will have more options/things to do for users. Even though the teen/adult social network field is very saturated, it's always been a dream of mine to create one. I'm not looking to ever reach the level of myspace or friendster, but just to at least have my own social network with active users having fun with what I've created.

It depends what your niche is really. From the sounds of it, its another teenager/ young adult sn site? But there's a lot more to know about it than that... Is it a local site, focussing on a certain area, a national site, focussing on a country or an international site? Is there anything that you want all your members to have in common? A common interest/ hobby, such as football, are they all into rock music?

These kind of things enable you to make decisions about the typee of advertising to do. Eg, a local community, try flyers, adverts in papers etc.
A sports community, advertise on the bigger, well known sports forums, posting in the forums with your site in your sig etc.

Without knowing more about the site, there is only a limited amount we can tell you

Originally Posted by Jason

Honestly, not really. I will have more options/things to do for users. Even though the teen/adult social network field is very saturated, it's always been a dream of mine to create one. I'm not looking to ever reach the level of myspace or friendster, but just to at least have my own social network with active users having fun with what I've created.

You might want to start it off with you and your friends, and make it almost exclusive to them. Use it all of the time to contact them and make the content for that small group of people so rich that it attracts friends of your friends. The site has to have something that sets it apart from the big three (myspace, friendster, and facebook), and one of those things can be the content of the site (profiles, blogs, whatever).