

How do you get traffic? - secgeek

How you get traffic after initial launch? How you market your startup websites?
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JohnN
Well there is a few standard things we did at our startup.

* BUILD SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT - it isn't so obvious what people want though.

1\. Social Bookmarking - Reddit, Digg etc

2\. Add any Feeds to RSS Directories

3\. Keep a blog and update at least 3-4 times a week about your industry area.
We created the first Blog Carnival focusing on Journalism. That made us
friends in journalism community and we got some write ups.

Interview people on your blog.

4\. Network - there are countless events in which to attend here in London so
there must be more in the valley. That being said, they may be crap.

5\. Get mentioned in the Press or on Blogs (best way is to meet the people
face to face first). Random emails seldom work.

6\. Create Facebook Group, get your friends to join. After Google, Facebook is
our number 1 referring site. Get your friends to add your site as one of their
fav sites on their facebook profiles. We've got a lot of traffic from that.

Create Facebook App?

7\. Create a Podcast? But this is a bit of an effort, prob best focus on
blogging.

8\. SEO! work on it from day one!

~~~
marketer
One small suggesion: do STRESS tests before submitting your page to
Digg/Reddit/TC. On the off-chance that it does make the front page, it will
get hammered, and any scalability bugs will instantly bring the site down. It
would be unfortunate to miss all that traffic.

Also, put the company name in your signature whenever you send e-mails, forum
or blog comments, etc..

~~~
tlrobinson
Any recommendations on how to do stress testing?

~~~
nonrecursive
i know apache has some benchmarking tools, and httperf is useful for stress
testing

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mindplunge
See this link: 10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008

<http://searchengineland.com/080108-134105.php>

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webwright
Seems to be entirely word of mouth and blogs-- we don't do any marketing
effort.

For many/most startups, I think the best strategy is one where users generate
users. Viral/widgets, word of mouth, or SEO/UGC.

[http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-...](http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-
bloggers-an.html)

Read that 10 times. ;-)

For a b2b startup, obviously that's not entirely practical...

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marcus
Just as important as getting traffic is converting it and retaining it, track
your conversion statistics along each step of the way, find your major
pitfalls and fix them.

Split users randomly so they see different landing pages for example and track
the changes in conversion.

This will improve your virality as only active users spread the word.

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secgeek
hmm, i have started a news site <http://newskicks.com> but its not receiving
much traffic and spamers are attacking it so i m wondering how to fight with
that as most of my time is goin in deleting the unwanted posts rather then
addin new features :(

~~~
kingnothing
I would definitely add a captcha to cut down on the spam.

Show it for every post to anonymous users, and only once for registration for
users with accounts.

~~~
secgeek
thanks foe the suggestion how the hell i forgot that simple thing!! added now
:)

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shafqat
Blog, blog, blog. We haven't fully launched yet, but we get a tremendous
amount of traffic to our blog. We talk about the insides of our startup
experience, but also a lot about the ideas and movements that we're passionate
about. Don't forget the importance of being earnest!

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Kaizyn
Ask yourself this question: what is it that makes you want to visit another
website? Whatever channels you use to receive information will probably work
for getting the word out to others about YOUR website.

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fleaflicker
Depends on the site. Google AdWords is a good place to start.

If there are small niche sites that your customers may visit, buy banner ads
and post on their forums (but obviously don't spam).

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ALee
PR is also important I think. If you build something people want, then it.s
just about letting ppl know about it. We're in the media industry thugh, so it
may be diff for others.

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techboy
word of mouth can win you if you give people something simple to talk about,
may not necessary be your core competency. SEO is the key, get your site
crawled by Google.

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dawnerd
I've found most of my traffic coming from google on articles I have written in
the past.

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sabat
I've just got a little blog going, mainly for fun and possibly for some minor
supplemental income. We have seen a surprising amount of traffic from
StumbleUpon. I'd recommend you hit that up (along with JohnN's excellent
suggestions). Join it, get some friends on it, and get yourself stumbled up.

~~~
hacker64
SU does send a lot of traffic, but don't let the numbers fool you. SU users
are channel surfing, and usually don't stay for more than 2 seconds. Divide
the number of users you get from SU by 10 to get it's equivalent in Digg
users. And divide that by 10 to get it's equivalent in users coming from a
blog post. If you didn't follow that, here is the simple equation:

1 user refered by your blog = 100 SU users

