Hi guys - need some help here - to start with well we’ve been working on a user centric website for people related to aviation. It has a contact directory plus events gallery as well as a classifieds section. The idea is that people sign up post their contact details - their details get included in the contacts directory - its clearly mentioned that whatever details they wish to display would be publicly available. Once signed up users have a nice little profile and can post advertisements as well as events listings and also simple blog posts which would display on their profile page.
The issue we’re facing is twofold.
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To get users on the website or actually the aim is that we're targeting profesionnals in the aviation industry to come forward and post their details and in due course populate the directory. The thing is that how do we target these people - currently we have a huge database of users we would like to see join our website. The thing is that initially well there aren't very many users on the website to begin with so when people do come to visit theres well no one home literally. We were thinking on prepopulating the profiles ourselves and then sending mass emails to all the contacts telling them that 'Hey we have your details and created for you a nice profile on this website - click here to login and take ownership of your profile' but wonder if theres any legal issue involved. So instead we used a back door approach and started bulk emailing all the contacts...well it worked but only with a success ratio of 0.01 percent as in we succeeded to get like 80 peopel to sign up after emailing to around 120 000 contacts. Need help on site promotion. -
Money making - the thing is that how do we set up our website to be a money making entity. Like what should we do and how do we do it. I mean we initially built a similar site with subscription fees - the result was well...we ended up with zero users paying...didn't work too well at all...
What do we do here - I’m kinda stuck. Our website isn’t actually a social networking website in that sense of the word but at the same time its supposed to be a self filling website as in the users are the resource… get my drift… what do we do!!!
Oh and the twist is that as I said that we want to get professionals to sign up and leave their professional contact details on the site - we already have a humongous list of individuals we want on the website… the question is that … how do we get them to sign up… we don’t want to create dummy accounts and use pseudonyms or so…
Basically we built an open directory of aviation professionals. We aim for people who are in the aviation industry ranging from serious professionals to hobbyists to sign up and create their own publically viewable profile. The idea is that we aim to build a user base, a directory where anyone can lookup and at the same time have a site which the users can benefit from. Like we built a simple classifieds section as well as an events section. Whoever signs up is encouraged to create a company which he/she belongs to and thus whoever works for or belongs to that company gets to sign up and join the company and thus add to the profile information.
Right now the thing is that we have a list of professionals - mighty long list - we need to promote our website to them. We do have one kinda brute force policy is that users who come and post profiles that are totally not related to aviation even remotely are removed - we’re trying to make sure we only have a certain niche following but getting people to join is a bit harder than I assumed. We’re not out to make a facebook like social networking website as the niche we target aren’t people who are out to freely socialise - just business contacts.
The aim is to get visitors and professionals to sign up. With time we aim to add loads of features such as aviation related reference tools and gadgets. What strategy should we follow here - we’re currently using mass emailing and have gotten a small degree of success although the success ratio is quite limited…
The ironic part is that our users are themselves in turn our resource as the site primarily aims to be a hub where you should be able to get all details of professionals in the aviation industry. I need to know how to draw them to our site.
Plus another factor is in promoting the classifieds and events sections. To start with there isn’t much information at all in there to be honest we literally started off with an empty website except for us. How do you promote a website which relies 100 percent upon user participation for content…how do we start…