
You have $200.  How do you drive traffic? - endlessvoid94
You have $200.  You can spend it on whatever you want.  How would you drive traffic most effectively?  Content site OR web application.
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patio11
An anecdote from somebody who is very successful, when presented with a
similar question: "Buy my girlfriend a bracelet for $180, spent $20 on sending
email to my opt-in list." "But what if you didn't have the opt-in list?" "Not
my problem, but if it will eventually be your's, start working on that opt-in
list today."

Stupidly, I forever put off doing that one!

~~~
endlessvoid94
So...I don't actually understand what you mean by "spent $20 on sending email
to my opt-in list".

Do you mean this person owns a list and spent $20 somehow sending email to
this list? How does this relate to the $180 bracelet?

Please excuse my ignorance :-)

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cellis
Something I learned on HN a long, long,long time ago was that if you wanted
really cheap, unfiltered traffic, you could buy quite a bit of it using
Mechanical Turk. As the commenter said "It's pretty amazing what will happen
if you throw up a few nickels". I've only used it once, but it worked.

But with only $200 you want to make sure every dollar -- _every penny_ \--
counts towards getting action. So I would use it on the most targetted ads I
could get. For most fly-by-night web apps that only have a $200 ad budget,
adwords would be the best way to do this.

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stfu
Can you elaborate a bit more on the MT strategies? I have used it in the past
to create survey data the quick way, but ho do you use it for traffic?

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cellis
It's really as easy as creating a HIT(? been a while but I think that's what
they're called) that says "Beta test this website/app/game" for $0.05. You
will probably get a lot of feedback that you didn't expect, even if you don't
ask for it.

You can get more sophisticated if you want, but that's all I did. I ended up
getting around 4000 seed users for a Facebook app I built in '08 this way.

~~~
cannuk
I agree that this can work. However, they are very strict about collecting any
sort of personal data from the MT workers. Thus you may end up not having any
stick from this because you cant ask them for an email. Cellis, how did you
get around this?

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SHOwnsYou
Adwords can provide nearly instant gratification for driving traffic if that's
all you're after.

However, it would be foolish to neglect the free and (arguably) better way to
drive traffic: SEO.

Patio11 has a blog full of information about enhancing your SEO, creating
targeted content, and building your site to generate a lot of traffic without
the need to spend money.

Edit: Start Here - <http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/> I know it seems
like a ton of stuff to read, but it is absolutely worth it.

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tg3
You're going to hate this answer, but it depends.

Reddit has good CPC and engagement rates, so long as you have content or an
application that appeals to that crowd. (See Gabriel Weinberg's post on the
topic).

StumbleUpon has a more mass-market appeal, but relatively high cost-per-view
with low engagement.

Adwords is expensive unless you spend a long time honing in on niche keywords.
Even then it is expensive.

There was a great post on ASmartBear this morning (guest post) about how
effective cold-calling can be. And that's essentially free (not counting your
labor hours).

Pud has a great write-up on this topic: <http://pud.com/post/5239917032/users>

This is something I struggle with too, so I'll be interested to see the other
responses.

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teyc
A friend once told me that to get things done, it is money and time. If you
have no money, then you have to spend time.

The important theme online though is to leverage someone else's audience.

Adwords, SEO are all leveraging Google's audience.

Approaching bloggers in that space is leveraging on those authors' audience.

Finding complementary products and offering them a commission is another way
of leveraging an audience. There were a few interviews on Mixergy where SaaS
makers deliberately integrated Freshbooks or Shopify because it brought them
customers.

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gfavvas
In order to answer the question appropriately, it would help to know what your
objective is. Do you just want to rig your traffic numbers without caring
about who comes to your site and what they do on your site?

If not, then the answer is it depends. It depends on who you're targeting, and
on what action (reading an article? sharing it? signing up for a product or
newsletter?) defines success.

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Joakal
What demographics are you targeting?

Example: Mint has infographics because people who love numbers will love those
pictures. So, they pay the cost of someone designing them.

A social network like MySpace/Facebook wouldn't attempt this because they are
not looking only for an audience that love numbers.

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kayhi
$100 in gas money visiting every customer you can

$100 on a table at your customer's industry event

~~~
vijaymv_in
Probably the best one if you have customers

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shubhendu
Hello! Pls to review Kabutar -a web & iphone app kinda reddit for real world.
www.kabutar.in | <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kabutar!/id477970251?mt=8>
pretty pls :)

