
How to Acquire Users for Free - sachitgupta
http://spencerfry.com/ways-to-acquire-users-for-free
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programminggeek
I'll add another way to acquire users for free, but it takes a lot of work and
isn't "free" in the traditional sense at first per se.

Buy ads. Start with a $100 AdWords coupon that is free and not hard to come
by. Even $25-50 would be enough depending on your market.

Bid on cheap cheap long tail keywords (3-4 word phrases). You won't get a lot
of traffic at first, but that's kind of the point. Get your campaign dialed in
where you are making at least $2 per $1 you spend.

Use that money to grow your advertising profitably over time using the same
method. Work your way up the ladder so to speak.

You can do this on AdWords, Facebook, Microsoft AdCenter, and probably on
AdMob as well. It's not hard at all. It just takes an incredible amount of
patience not to blow all your money in a week.

Remember, the goal is profit, not volume. Grow profitably and volume will come
with time.

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aaronblohowiak
"Get your campaign dialed in where you are making at least $2 per $1 you
spend." -- if you can do that, then you are in the perfect place to take a
loan / favorable investment.

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georgemcbay
If you can reliably get $2 per $1 you spend, why bother with a loan or
investment? You've already won the game.

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jules
If it takes you 50 years to turn $1 into $2, then you have not won. Put your
money in a bank account instead.

If you can do it in a year, you've won. But if you start with $1 then after
one year you have $2, then the next year you have $4, etc. It takes less time
if you take a $1000 loan and turn that into $2000. Of course turning $1000
into $2000 is harder than $1 into $2, so take a loan as big as you can still
double ;)

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Shenglong
I don't know how legitimate this is, but I used an interesting AdWords
strategy to gather users. The normal strategy is to use a minimal bid in a
certain area, and create an attractive ad that gets people to click. However,
this costs money, as you pay based on a per-click basis.

What I wanted to do, was generate a lot of awareness. When people are aware of
your product and see it advertised everywhere, it's more likely they'll check
you out. If they happen to check you out after hearing from a friend, it won't
even be an ad-referral, and it won't cost you a cent. How do you create
awareness without using money?

I have no basis for saying this, and my only proof is a very successful
campaign that I ran doing this. Since I've shut my project down, the trade
secret isn't very useful anymore. I think there's an innate appeal for certain
ads. A lot of ads make it blatantly obvious that they're there, but just
doesn't make you want to click. Not because the product looks bad - but I just
don't want to click some ads. I know a lot of friends also have this feeling,
and a small study I conducted confirmed this.

My strategy was this: Bid minimal amounts after researching bids in certain
areas, and create an ad that shoves its name, and possibly basic idea into an
user's face. However, do not provide any incentive to click - at all. In fact,
make it ugly, but not ugly enough to make your product or service seem bad.
This is tricky, and takes some getting used to. The end result is a very LOW
conversion rate (usually considered as a failure) - which is exactly what we
want. I've gotten a bunch of repeat impressions onto users, without having to
pay for them. If they happen to hear about it from a friend, they're now much
more likely to check it out, because they're familiar with the name.

I've come up with a bunch of strategies like this, and I really wish I wrote
them all down so I could share them. Maybe they're terrible... feel free to
tell me it's a terrible idea. It may not work in all business areas, and I'd
love to get some feedback.

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brianlash
Interesting but the problem with this, at least as far as AdWords is
concerned, is that low CTR means low Quality Score means higher minimum bid
required for the same positioning. So it is costing you more in the long run.

If you're doing a CPM bid on the content network then you're bidding on
impressions anyway, in which case there really isn't a reason to
disincentivize clicks.

~~~
Shenglong
I never actually ran into this problem. Interesting though - I'll definitely
look into it. Thanks for the note

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tomkarlo
One thing they don't talk about if you're buying customers: the delay between
paying for customers and getting paid by them can run you out of business even
if your LTV exceeds your Customer Acquisition Costs. (Conversely, if you can
get paid by your customers before you have to pay for them, you're golden.)
Note that I mean actual cash in hand, not transactions - you have to include
the inevitable delays from whatever payment system you're using. I wrote a bit
about this a while back on my blog: [http://www.karlo.org/2009/04/maximizing-
your-online-business...](http://www.karlo.org/2009/04/maximizing-your-online-
business-part-three-user-acquisition.html)

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pratikpatel
Tracking your source of traffic is definitely one of the more credible and
consistent strategies from this article. Similar methods have been used
successfully for measuring the effectiveness of online ads to determine where
your viewers originate. Understanding the nature and location of discovery of
your app is crucial.

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wazoox
My company's marketing manager spent quite a lot of time figuring out what we
were paying adWords for. He quickly realised that most ads were displayed on
eMule-related forums, and that most clicks we paid for were thrown-away money.
Lesson learnt: track carefully where ads are displayed!

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spencerfry
You can segment AdWords to only display on Google search results. And you
should.

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wazoox
Yep, we realized it. The "Display Network" used to work fine, though. It went
downhill in the recent years.

~~~
spencerfry
I think things were a lot better when AdWords was less expensive back in the
day (say around 2003-2005).

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franze
TINSTAAFL ->
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch)

~~~
msc
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch)

