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Ask HN: What happens after your site is ready for launch? How to get traffic?

• okokokok 11y ago
  In my experience Referral program is the best solution
  • supersan 11y ago
    Do you mean affiliate marketing? Yes, that is true gem, I totally forgot about. My first site made all the money through affiliates promoting it for 50% commission. That is a true gem indeed.
• davismwfl 11y ago
  Honestly you kinda did things backwards from just this little description. Usually you want to gain people's interest and feedback before you build and launch anything. This way you already have cultivated a list of people to help you spread the word. But you can still succeed. You have already mentioned many common ways and there is no magic one. Traffic takes time to build and while there are formulas to developing and retaining traffic it doesn't happen overnight. The crazy stories of a startup getting 10k or 100k visitors in two months from launch are usually skipping a ton of details and somewhat hiding reality. Blogging and guest blogging are two things you didn't mention too. Also my 2 cents Adwords PPC is not a good way to start traffic unless you have a highly targetable audience and you know who needs and wants your product already. Facebook ads are cheaper to experiment but IME do best with consumer type products. Reach out to people that would be clients and offer them a free trial for feedback. Then also incorporate referrals into your solution, they are usually your best source for growth early on.
  • supersan 11y ago
    Ok, fair enough. Let's suppose I did that and I already have a hundred+ signups (which I do) but I want to accelerate the growth.. how do I go about that? Also for the benefit of others, where do you find the people to get feedback (in case my case they were members of another site I built many years ago), but lets assume a total newbie with zero list, how does she start? Yes, guest blogging is another good idea! I find it a bit difficult to contact blog owners but it is indeed on of the top ideas. I will try that. What else is there to do? Thanks for sharing your ideas! :)
    • davismwfl 11y ago
      So if you already have signups, then you should absolutely work with them to add referrals. Send them a free month offer if they give you the email of 5-10 of their friends likely to need your service. Or some variation of that idea. You should absolutely be sending them emails and talking to them regularly as well. Let's say you have 100 active users right now, I'd be calling the top 25 and talking to the people directly and getting their feedback. It doesn't mean you will implement exactly what they ask for, but the fact you picked up the phone and called them to talk and get their input will go a long way towards building loyalty. If the people signed up are the right audience, e.g. they are engaged and using the product, then get some demographics on those people. If you didn't collect it up front, do a survey, or utilize a marketing company to get you data on those contacts (like Acxiom or other many other providers). This will give you a profile of the type of people, or companies if it is a B2B app. Then take that data and do some Facebook or Display ads that are targeted at a similar audience. Also, if you have a free trial of say 14 days, offer to extend it to 30 days if at the time of signup the user gives you 5 emails (names) of people as a referral. Then you can solicit them. If you are starting from scratch with an already built site, then you need to reverse engineer the demographics of who will be your early adopters and go find where they hang out, where they do their research and what is important to them to make a decision etc. Then you setup offers where those people are researching (or playing etc), and you get active in those communities. Also, good time to write some posts on medium and publicize them and start writing some of your own blog posts that you can point people to as well (again promote them places). In the end, this is a numbers game and it is about getting out there and exposing yourself and your product to as specific of a group as you can to find the right fit. Then you keep expanding the types of groups you target. Hopefully that helps a little more. One other comment, Marketing is about doing a series of experiments where failure is guaranteed on a pretty regular basis if you are trying enough. Marketing is never about getting it right once and never looking back, clients are always changing, and you have to chase and find where they are and find a way to get people to reach into their wallet and fork over money to you. Failure in marketing is different then failure in say engineering some life critical piece of equipment, in both cases you will learn from failure, but obviously no one dies if you jack up a few marketing campaigns so the relative cost of learning is low.
• siquick 11y ago
  Would highly recommend you to read `Traction`. Brilliant book covering this exact topic. http://tractionbook.com/ http://tractionbook.com/ `TRACTION: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth Most startups don't fail at building a product. Most startups fail at getting traction. Let us help you get traction using our 3-step framework called Bullseye, guiding you to the right traction channel out of 19.`