
Github's brilliant organic traffic acquisition strategy - marcamillion
http://marcgayle.com/githubs-brilliant-organic-traffic-acquisition
======
codeslush
I'm not sure if I agree with the assertion here. Pure speculation, but I
HIGHLY doubt this was their strategy when offering free accounts. I think the
primary strategy was to get people to use the product, fall in love with it,
then subscribe when in need of a private repo. Naturally, people will want to
use the tool(s) they're already comfortable using.

Having a kick-butt site, easy to use, and executing like mad-men ---that's
what got them so popular and as a result of being so popular and so highly
valued, they get SEO in return.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until someone from Github says
different! :-)

StackOverflow / EE / etc... - maybe a different story. Why? I don't know -
just my feeling! And my feelings are valuable! lol

~~~
marcamillion
I hear you codeslush, and again...that's how it seems on the surface. Maybe
that's how they started off, but I suspect that they are now living off of the
fruits of an organic traffic generating machine - that was perhaps
inadvertently created.

Either way, it's an interesting lesson for other web services/webapps to
learn.

~~~
codeslush
Understood - but the lesson to learn, in my opinion, is different. You don't
get that organic traffic if you don't have traction and value. So the real
lesson to learn is how did they get that traction? It most certainly wasn't
from content that wasn't yet created. I can imagine it was difficult for them
to get users to commit their code at first - especially when a thousand other
code-hosting sites already had significant traction.

Your theory holds true for ANY content driven website - from blogs where
community provides free content via comments and other sorts of feedback to
almost any other valuable website where you've created value and people link
to you.

It's a wonderful result of what happens when you create value. That's my
lesson. I've never created anything of "consumer" value so I could be
completely wrong!

------
marcamillion
Might seem obvious to some people, but wasn't obvious to me :)

------
Swizec
While I'm certain most people around here understand that free accounts are an
awesome marketing strategy, I don't think this strategy is all that obvious.

Now that I think about it some more, the really interesting thing is that many
of the most popular sites use a similar strategy (StackOverflow comes to
mind).

Can this be called SEO? Can't it because it isn't evil?

~~~
marcamillion
That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a
free account is simply a loss leader.

But it never occurred to me, to treat it like an 'SEO'/marketing line item on
the budget.

This is fundamentally a different approach and potentially VERY lucrative.

You are absolutely right about SO. When they posted that 80% of their traffic
comes from Google, that's when it occurred to me and I then decided to look at
Github and see if it is true.

Low and behold, when you search for obscure programming terms, Github comes up
on the first SERP for many of those terms in the long tail.

So it is user-generated organic SEO content (like Digg.com) but much more
targeted to their market.

Brilliant!

