Marketing tips for deals website

[MB]

Any tips/suggestions for promoting a deals platform website similar to SlickDeals in the US / HotUKDeals in the UK?

I've just finished developing a site and now looking to launch and will need to go about finding users and traffic.

My plan currently is to do a launch competition where I give a cash prize to X of the first X new user signups who share a deal with the community.

 

[cm]

I know this is gonna make me sound like a dick. Why are you launching a site with no marketing plan in mind?

You need a massive ad spend, or at the very least a well thought out (and actually workable) series of link building campaigns.

 

[MB]

Not a dick, fair question and happy to answer.

I've dabbled in websites/domains over the years and I built this as a hobby to learn how to program a full stack website. Pretty happy with the end result. I've really enjoyed the process, so if it doesnt work out, it's not the end of the world and I will only have lost the time spent (which I enjoyed) and a bit of money that I can afford to lose.

Will be trying to bootstrap this now that it's ready, again as a bit of a hobby.

Certainly don't have a 'massive' ad budget, but am happy to throw some money at it. I have some ideas which I am pursuing, but just looking for ways to maximise the impact of my ad spend. Was intrigued to see if this thread generated any additional ideas I hadn't thought of.

 

[rb5]

I've thought about a site like this a lot, I used to be a very active on HUKD as a merchant and spent a good amount of money through deals.

How I would personally do something like this is using a price comparison site (or building your own internally from affiliate data) and then finding deals in certain niches. Be consistent in that niche and join various facebook groups on that topic, hopefully you'll start getting reoccurring visitors from that route, if not you should still be getting commissions from the visitors seeing the deal.

Repeat this process until you have users who are also posting at the same time as you and it becomes organic.

Personally I don't see you needing any ad spend, in my affiliate days on Facebook we were able to drive several thousand clicks in a day for links to eBay just posting in individual groups.

 

[MB]

Thanks for the tips. The only challenge I have with FB is that it seems most FB groups no longer allow self promotion links. I will revisit this avenue though.

 

[ben]

Personally, I would go all in on TikTok shop type stuff. Look at Temu.

 

[MB]

Personally, I would go all in on TikTok shop type stuff. Look at Temu.

As in post links to the deals on TikTok/Temu? I'm aware that users of TikTok promote the TikTok shop via their short videos but not aware of opportunities to monetise outside the platform.

 

[ben]

As in post links to the deals on TikTok/Temu? I'm aware that users of TikTok promote the TikTok shop via their short videos but not aware of opportunities to monetise outside the platform.

I’m not fully clued up myself, but I think TikTok is really cheap right now for ads, you need to buy coins through their platform though and avoid buying them on the app on say iPhone, because they charge fees because of Apple App Store.

But create a TikTok, explore the ad manager, start pumping out ads. The key here is to create ads that look native. Spend enough time on TikTok and you’ll start to see what I mean.

That weir chicken plucker thing you linked would do great on there. You could order one in, do a video on it, make it funny. It goes viral, people wanna know wtf it is, what it does. Use rubber chickens that squeak etc.