Hey Guys,

I'm having a tad of trouble trying to think of places to advertise my Freelancers forum. I'm ready to pay for some advertising depending on where it will be and what the quality will be like. Do any of you have any ideas?

At the moment, I'd like to keep ad costs low as the forums don't generate any profit at this moment in time. Probably $20 /month or $40 on impressions is my limit at this moment in time.

Any help is appreciated

Nothing to be surprised with, but a $20 budget won't take you anywhere. A $200 will have some effect.

I would, however, try to squeeze out the most value I can out of the $20 budget and spend it on well-located text-links on not crowded with ads freelance/webmaster web sites.

Try looking for a freelance marketplace (your target audience #1) - not all marketplaces offer forums for their members. Something like ScriptLance or DevLance, although it may cost you more. OR look for directories and webmaster-related web sites.

Good luck,

Hey Artashes,

Thanks for the tips. I know it sounds cheap only having a small amount to work with. I'm being careful with my money lately and it's tearing me to pieces

I just wanted to add that it dosent sound cheap - I think its refreshing to know that there are people out there who are actually good with managing money (sorry, I know a hosting provider that had to take out a $5k loan to pay their hosting bills all because of bad expendatures). At least you shouldn't ever have to worry about being in that type of troube....

That's actually a comfort to me, thanks for the thought Stephen

Hi,

You can try for some online auctions sites or some directories getting commissions for the business generated from them! So it makes your expense meaningful with out risk too.

I hope this will help you!

Gary I think I understand your post. Are you proposing a link exchange of some sort. Where I can benefit from commissions spawned from the sales that I generate?

Well, there are also tons of Free For All Link Lists, Lesser Search Engines, General Directories, Product Directories, Service Directories, etc...

And of course there are all of the companies that will charge you to submit your site to all of these (and some charge quite a bit, depending on number of site submitted to and frequency of re-submissions). To be honest, results that you get from this can vary greatly and are usually best for local or smaller businesses, moderate for forums, and lesser for online bussiness like hosting providers.

Although our company has a service like this as well, its not something that we mention on our site due to the possibility of poor results/moderate cost.

To be honest, I wouldn't really recomned submission services as a good place to start either...

However, what may be worth your time is looking for specific "Free/Open" forums/link/directory sites that specificaly relate to your Forum's topic...

Also, you might want to think about submitting your URL to things like dmoz.org ( http://www.dmoz.org/add.html ).

I hope thats sort of helpful....