Serious Trouble Promoting Website for Men

From: Jeremy Stetson <oa-only_at_mensimageconsultant.com>
Date: Thu 04 Sep 2003 12:40:48 -0500

Hi, everyone. I represent the mensimageconsultant.com site. Through
following this mailing list, our company has gotten some great pointers,
especially in terms of website design. However, the web traffic is my
personal responsibility, and let's say the number of visitors has been
disappointing.


We firmly believe that our site serves a very useful purpose. We know that
a hidden market exists of men who wish to look better and is growing, as
made clear by surveys about appearance dissatisfaction, the rise in male
cosmetic surgery, the popularity of ratings sites, etc. Unfortunately,
there is a problem in reaching that market.

Word of mouth is unlikely to work.

We've tried tons of keywords and ad lines, but search-engine advertising
apparently attracts too broad a range of people, including women and
college-age males not interested in spending money. It also badly limits
the messages we can aim at potential customers.

The websites (read dating sites and ratings sites) that feature plenty of
men who could benefit from appearance enhancement strangely seem not to
allow advertising of any sort.

Affiliate advertising or advertising indiscriminately through some kind of
campaign is something we think could too easily sully the brand name. (The
company name at the top of a porn site? No, thanks.)

In our case, email campaigns would amount to spam, and spam is just wrong.

We have considered opening a free sister site, but that would be very
time-consuming to operate.

Other, cheaper and possibly more marketable services are in the works.
However, I probably would first need to find for the company a
not-horribly-expensive ecommerce solution that allows multiple shopping
carts per domain, because products would be purchased one at a time and
would have to go to separate 'Thank you'/'Receipt' pages for the actual
submission of image information. (Help, please?)

So far, we have found only one website with the right target market
(post-college males who are 'Net addicts) on which to advertise, but it is
very expensive, and we cannot even afford its most effective,
top-of-the-site ad options.


Before rushing into extremes, what if there is something about our URL?
Are people familiar with 'image consulting'? Do they have a negative view of
it?

What if the website itself is a turn-off? (We're considering having it
evaluated with stinkagefactor.com ) What if very few men want image-related
help or can be convinced that it would benefit them enough to be worth
paying for? Yet they readily fall for p*n*s-enhancement scams?

 

Jeremy
Gentleman's Best Friend Image Consulting Services
mensimageconsultant.com




Received on Thu Sep 04 2003 - 12:40:48 CDT