How Should We Promote MC-Market?

[Mick]

G'day,

In our very recent announcement, we stated that we are looking to expand MC-Market through paid advertisements. Until now all of our promotion has been completely organic, but now that we are in a stable position I want to focus on more rapid expansion.

I think that all things considered MC-Market is in a difficult position to promote ourselves. We are too business-ey and have too high of an age requirement to promote ourselves through Minecraft youtube channels, but we are also too Minecraft orientated for a large portion of professional freelancers. The best audience for us to target would be places that Minecraft server owners are active, but the problem with that is that means competing with hosting companies who are prepared to pay far more per click than we'd be able to since their customers lifetime value is significantly higher. One thing I definitely do not want is for us to dilute our community with more users that will not align with our current userbase. I do not want to flood our forum with children who have no interest in buying or selling the products or services that the people on our forum currently provide or promote ourselves in toxic communities.

So yeah, the question I have for you all is how would you promote MC-Market?

In terms of budget, I am unsure of exactly how much I want to spend at the moment but definitely at least a few thousand and depending on how successful we are potentially tens of thousands so I don't think our budget will be an issue for most things.

If any of you have a particular interest in marketing and have prior experience and would like to have a more in-depth conversation, please create a conversation with me.

Thanks everyone, I look forward to hearing what you all have to say

Mick

 

[Orochimaru]

I agree with Asodey and Mraniman 2 both are great ideas.[DOUBLEPOST=1596342278][/DOUBLEPOST]
This is a terrible idea, the oldest anarchy server is a very toxic server with a lot of the users being able to exploit many things. They are also experts at social engineering and things along those lines and they could completely ruin the site.

You clearly do not watch FitMC, get outta here

 

[Orochimaru]

I do watch him actually, I watch every single one of his videos. As someone who has seen and knows about a lot of the things that go on, on that server I think its best to not advertise on there

Yet you still missed the entire joke and took it seriously

 

[FlaringPhoenix]

THE OLDEST ANARCHY SERVER OF MINECRAFT

 

[Polarbears]

AdSense

 

[NoahX]

How about a big ass billboard just think about it?

 

[VactumPlays]

Market us as a Minecraft Dating Market
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[DOUBLEPOST=1596513565][/DOUBLEPOST]

Follow the exact way Fiverr markets themselves.
But just change it by 1% so we arent copying them

​

 

[koshr]

You could make a channel for the marketplace on YouTube and perhaps find someone already in the community to run it. There is plenty of Minecraft content, but not much Minecraft content that focuses on running Minecraft servers and the work that goes into it. I'm sure there is plenty of content to be made on configuring servers, plug-in development, and strategies to advertise servers. It would be a good way to grow organically over time and get people who are genuinely interested in the business end of Minecraft.

I'm sure there are a lot of problems I'm overlooking and this may have already been recommended.

 

[Rhos]

SEO, holy shit invest in SEO. Google "hire minecraft" and MCM doesn't even show up in the first 10 pages. You want to be targeting people who are looking for all the things that MCM is offering, if I'm searching something like "hire minecraft builders" and MCM isn't on the first page then I'm not even going to be aware you exist. Get an SEO expert on board, pay them lots of money, it'll be the best thing you can do for the site.

As an aside, I noticed a few youtubers with videos like "I HIRED A MINECRAFT (X) TO DO (Y)", could be worth targeting that sort of market somehow - say, fully reimburse content creators who use MCM freelancers and plug them in their video.

 

[Landon]

Targeting server-lists would definitely help in growing the Minecraft-side of the forum. Bring in new server owners who are looking to buy and sell.

I think another viable option is to try and target outside of the niche of Minecraft? We have other forums of selling too: social media accounts, currency conversion, etc. I'm not exactly sure where you could grow that, but advertising MC-Market as just a digital marketplace could bring some growth (but then again, hard to do when you're mostly a Minecraft based forum.)

 

[XER0GRAVITY]

Maybe we could sponsor SpigotMC? Tons of server owners are on their forum and It would be smart of us to try and get some of them over here. We could also create Google Ads targeting popular search terms such as "hire minecraft" and tons of other related search terms. I'm sure we could use these to try and pull in some new users.

 

[Dev1]

Here are some ideas I could think of:

• Sponsored banners on Minecraft serverlists.
• Google ads.
• Find discords that offer minecraft marketplaces and get a sponsored message on it.
• Maybe ads on channels of certain youtubers (whose audience is mostly made up of people who pass the age requirement for mc-market, the age requirement can be displayed on the ad - for example, the youtuber will say "just a heads up this market is open for everybody who is 13 years old or older" or something like that).
• chearful.ninja sponsored ads (maybe?).
• Purchase tweets from twitters that have a decent audience, or just tweet more and use the '#market, #minecraft' more often.

these are just some basic ideas I could think of, hope it helps!

Not sure about this, but aren't discord MarketPlaces against Discord's ToS? Other suggestions are good though!

 

[Polarbears]

AdSense!

 

[Ghast]

Maybe we could sponsor SpigotMC? Tons of server owners are on their forum and It would be smart of us to try and get some of them over here. We could also create Google Ads targeting popular search terms such as "hire minecraft" and tons of other related search terms. I'm sure we could use these to try and pull in some new users.

Until the site goes completely whitehat it won’t be happening.

 

[Miles Lu]

yeah i like the idea of buying a shit ton of billboards

 

[Stelios]

Do a Keyword analysis!!!

Find sets of keywords that are both low-competition and will interest server owners.
There's quite a few examples of keywords hosts wouldn't get near. "Minecraft Building teams" for instance. You could even target branded terms, such us "Vauna builds" - Someone looking for Varuna will possibly be interested in any other building team, or even other services on the forum, and NOBODY is gonna bid or SEO for such a keyword other than Varuna.

Not all of them have a lot of traffic, but it's worth making a full list of well-researched keywords. That's the first thing any good SEO or Marketer will do.

Then you can either approach these via means of organic SEO (What I personally like to do) - Which imho the site is lacking quite a bit in a lot of areas right now - or the "easy" but expensive way of Google ads.

An example being me; I'd been looking for Minecraft building teams in the past, before I learnt about MCM. Not once did MCM come up anywhere, despite it being the #1 resource for those things. What did come up was Varuna on YouTube. So I contacted them.
I only learnt about MCM via word of mouth a LOT later.

 

[Rhos]

Do a Keyword analysis!!!

Find sets of keywords that are both low-competition and will interest server owners.
There's quite a few examples of keywords hosts wouldn't get near. "Minecraft Building teams" for instance. You could even target branded terms, such us "Vauna builds" - Someone looking for Varuna will possibly be interested in any other building team, or even other services on the forum, and NOBODY is gonna bid or SEO for such a keyword other than Varuna.

Not all of them have a lot of traffic, but it's worth making a full list of well-researched keywords. That's the first thing any good SEO or Marketer will do.

Then you can either approach these via means of organic SEO (What I personally like to do) - Which imho the site is lacking quite a bit in a lot of areas right now - or the "easy" but expensive way of Google ads.

An example being me; I'd been looking for Minecraft building teams in the past, before I learnt about MCM. Not once did MCM come up anywhere, despite it being the #1 resource for those things. What did come up was Varuna on YouTube. So I contacted them.
I only learnt about MCM via word of mouth a LOT later.

Realistically MCM needs to invest 1-2k into a really good SEO expert. Need to figure out which direction the site is going first, though.