Getting your site noticed and building a strong user base is by far the hardest part of launching a new site. It takes a lot of hard work to come up with a great idea, design it, build it, test it, and launch it but if you can’t get the word out people wont use it. A lot of people think “If you build it they will come” because their idea is so good all how could it not be a success. That my friends is called hubris. This is the reason great sites like del.icio.us or digg will go after venture money even after they’ve been around for a while. It’s not about the money, they normally wont get any funding until they have a close to finished product, it’s about connections and relationships and legitimacy the investment brings. When you get funded the firm has thoroughly vetted you and puts it’s resources, connections and knowledge at your disposal. I know it’s unfair right! I thought the internet was a level playing field!
But I digress :) we had none of that when we launched junkdepot three months ago. No one knows us, we dont’t have many connections, in fact we only had a couple hundred dollars to spend on marketing, but we manage to drum up thousands of visits and hundreds of users. It was a lot of work for everyone and we learned a lot from the process. So here is our list of ways to get traffic to your new site:
1. Keep the site simple. You only have 1 chance to grab a users attention make sure you front page is concise and calls a user to action.
2. Use web 2.0 community to its fullest. This is by far the most effective way to get traffic for free. Use tools like del.icio.us, digg, reddit, and netscape to gain exposure, if your site is half decent it might be picked by a couple of big blogs. Submit yourself directly to blogs you think would be interested in writing about you. Also post on forums specifically the techcrunch forums.
3. Use API’s from other sites. We chose to integrate a number of useful web api’s into junkdepot, like rapleaf, by doing this we were fortunate to be linked on the rapleaf partner page. Which drives a lot of hits to us. Also, we play nice with sites like google base, edgeio and vast which sends us a ton of users every day. Not to mention you can list youself on directories like the programmable web.
4. You must have content. You can have the greatest site in the world but if you don’t have content users won’t see the value in your site. Since our site is for selling junk we were able to post all the junk we had lying around. We also added listings from other sites when we didn’t have anything to show.
5. Use stumbleupon ads! This is probably the best kept secret on the web right now, but I’ll tell you anyway… Stumble upon lets sites pay for stumbles! Not only is it cheap (5 cents per stumble) you can specify the target interests and demographic you are looking for. This worked way better than our google adword s campain which cost us over 30 cents per hit. It also shows you how many users hit thumbs up or down on your site! This is really a great thing, and I hope they keep is fixed at 5 cents per stumble even though eBay recently bought them.
6. Start a site blog. We started the junkdepot blog to promote new features and interesting items. It takes work to keep it fresh but as users subscribe to it they are reminded to use your site!
7. Build smaller but useful sites to get residual hits… We were so happy with Rule 1, we decided to try an experiment. What would happen if we came up with a easy to implement site that web savvy users would think was cool and sponsor it by junkdepot, with a link in the footer. Well that’s exactly what mostat.us is. Mobile access to google analytics from your phone is something we wanted after we launched junkdepot. We built it in a weekend and promoted it in the same manner as jundepot. Guess what, it worked. we even got featured on mobilecrunch.com!
Hope you found this useful. If you have other stories or strategies let us know!
-Jake
jake lessons, marketing, startup
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