New business help!

[tkammyus]

Hi everyone,

Starting a new business, UK internet based and need help with marketing.
Any ideeas? Do you think internet marketing really works?
How effectiv advertising is?

Appreciate your answers.
Thank you for your time
Camelia

[fisicx]

What's the business?
Who are your target customers?
What is your marketing budget?
How much market testing have you done?
What is your USP?

[tkammyus]

Hi and thank you for a fast reply

Is a penny auction site everything starts at £0.01 and price increases by 1p with every bid.
Bids cost between 0.70 and 1.10 depending on the package bought

Market target anyone above 18 yrs old
Budget for marketing abt £2000

I also have another freight exchange website and I have a small 4000 customers there and will use that as a start.
What is USP

Thank you
Camelia

[Kazia]

Lots of ways such as email marketing, SEO, blog posting and forum posting.

[fisicx]

Bit confused, if an item is on sale for 1 penny and the bid costs 70p where is the incentive?

You are really going to struggle to get this off the ground. Niot because it is a poor idea but simply because there are already hundreds of auction sites. The £2000 isn't going to last you very long, as an online business your main advertising is likely to be PPC (adwords, banners and so on). For the site to be successful you are going to need hundreds if not thousands of visitors per day, this means you could easily use up your marketing budget in a week. You could try promoting the site through articles, forums and so on but these are notoriously poor at converting unless you are prepared to spend a lot of your spare time writing and publishing.

Maybe it is a great idea but I don't beleive it's going to make you much money for a long time and it's very unlikely that your will cover your costs for at least a year or two.

[tkammyus]

Offering Free bids with subscription, friends reccomandation, feedback posted, so can end up getting items for very very cheap
Thinking of starting with email marketing first, use a professional company to do it and see how it goes...
I am not planning to be next ebay, but if it pays the bills would be great..
Going live the end of the month, will keep you posted
Thank you

[tkammyus]

The items start from 1 penny and hopefully won t end at 1 p...lol

[bhtex71]

Try email marketing and list building, it may take a while to build up a list but it can pay you dividens later on.

[bradleyt]

Internet marketing does indeed work but you need to get people outside of the Internet to find you. So you can begin to advertise by using your business cards and use the normal avenues for marketing.

[jingwen]

You need have a detail plan before you do the business,just like EWD said.