

Getting traction for your startup – how we did it. - shafqat
http://blog.newscred.com/?p=268

======
benologist
An interesting approach but it sounds like it really boiled down to the
backlinks you got as a result of the TC article ... and having an existing (if
not extensive) relationship with Arrington. While that's definitely valid it's
a combination that's out of reach for most startups.

I would have to say for me personally word of mouth outranks SEO enormously at
this (early) point in my startup. To me SEO is about getting every joe typing
whatever into Google, word of mouth is securing a lot fewer but a lot more
notable users.

Only one significant blog (and only significant to casual game devs) has
written anything about me in the month since I posted here asking how guys
launch startups. And in terms of link creation ... just scraper blogs stealing
that guys content really. But word of mouth has led to some of the biggest
names in the industry using my service now.

~~~
shafqat
Backlinks were huge, but I had absolutely NO relationship whatsoever with
Arrington, Jason or anyone else in Silcon Valley. I link to post that explains
how we got on TC. It's all perseverance and creativity.

But I agree, that word of mouth and passionate users are absolutely essential.
You can still get backlinks from these 'notable users' - they have blogs
right?

If you have a product with a viral coefficient approaching 1, you'll be all
set. But for the rest of us, backlinks and organic traffic give us a steady
base of users to test, iterate and get feedback from.

------
jeff18
That sounds like pretty decent advice. I have one nitpick though, which is the
advice to leave blog comments everywhere and to relentlessly tell all of your
friends about your startup.

That surely cannot hurt, but the return on investment of posting comments on a
site is minute. I mean, I am addicted to commenting on HN and other sites
daily and it is a lot of fun, but the notion that this is actually a good use
of time for my startup is wishful thinking.

I would never expect to get a single customer from this. I think getting an
article on TechCrunch is of debatable value... but the traffic you'd get from
a comment underneath an article from people checking out your profile link is
miniscule.

Regarding telling your friends -- again, it doesn't hurt, but it is thinking
really small and is not sustainable. That might be a good strategy for winning
a minor student council election, but the ROI is going to be utterly
negligible. Basically, you could spend a week phoning everyone you know and
convince them to check out your site. If you're lucky, this would roughly
equal the amount of traffic you would get by having a moderately influential
person spend 30 seconds writing a tweet about you.

~~~
iamelgringo
I disagree, especially about posting comments. When I was running my social
"cute" site, I hired my niece to post comments on icanhazcheezburger, and to
have cuuute.com in the sig (the site is dead now). I routinely got 2-5 clicks
a day from people clicking through her sig.

And, pretty routinely, every time I post a link to my economic social news
site, <http://newsley.com>. I get around 70 clicks. Frankly, the people that
come to Newsley from HN give me the best feedback and are my best users. In
fact, a large portion of my first 1000 visitors came from HN. I get a lot of
bounces, but i also pick up a couple of regular users every time. Granted, the
demographic that I'm looking for actually intersects with HN's demographic
somewhat.

I can also vouch for leaving links in the body of comments. As long as your
link is on topic to the blog post, I really don't have any problem at all
dropping a link in a blog comment. I think it can often add to the discussion.

~~~
jeff18
2-5 clicks per day? That would take over a year before you even generated a
single CPM!

------
shafqat
I know a lot of this is obvious to some, but I gotten feedback that it's
helpful so I thought I'd share with the community.

Bottom line - SEO is your friend when you're looking to build a large,
sustainable audience.

~~~
patio11
Preach it brother!

SEO scales ridiculously out of proportion with time invested, does not
typically require dedicated upkeep outside of continuing to execute on the
business, can be done without large ongoing payments of money, largely does
not depend on pleasing gatekeepers (a task which almost always distracts you
from executing on the business), etc, etc.

~~~
pmjoyce
The OP seemed to credit the number and quality of the backlinks gained as
opposed to a SEO strategy per se.

I understand that SEO is vitally important, but for getting high quality
backlinks (which in turn generate a more back links) you'll always have to go
though, and please, gatekeepers.

