April 10th, 2008 by admin | 2 Comments »
This post is a part of the series of posts about my experience in growing mywalkin to a more than 1,00,000 unique users a month website. I had previously talked about the strategies that we used to increase the traffic and the importance of retaining the users to the growth of a website. However all these startegies are useful only when you have a minimum level of traffic to start with. Ofcourse if you have a good advertisement budget then you can get this initial user base. Rest everything else will depend upon the strngth of your offering.
However we did not have an advertisement budget. So we had to get a little more innovative. Here are some tricks that you can use to get those users.
Tell your contacts: This is something very obvious. If you are starting something new then you can always try to convince your freinds to spread the word. However my experince is that telling them directly is not the most effective way. Rather put the url as a signature on your emails. Add it to your status message and your orkut profile. Your freinds will get curious, try it out and if they like it then they will definitely talk to you about it. Now if you ask them to help you spread the word, they will be more willing.
Classified sites: If your site is about some topic, that are covered by classifieds, then go ahead and put up a link about your website on the classifieds. click.in, kijiji and sulekha were some of the classified sites, that we had used to get traffic to mywalkin initially. One advantage of this method is most of these pages rank quite high on google and hence pass on significant link-juice to your site.
Forums: Identify active forums in your area and start participating in the discussions. Most of the forums allow you to put your url in the signature. Moreover whenever approporiate, you may place link to one of your webpages for a more detailed answer. Caution: Hold your temptation to spam. My experience says building a solid reputation by meaningful participation pays off much better in the long run, than spamming.
Comments and trackbacks: If you read some blogs then leave your comments with your blog url. I get more than 50 users a day from my comments on techcrunch alone. The trick is to again say something that people will appreciate and not just spam.
Target the long tail: This is one topic that needs to be dealt with in a completely separate post.
The diffcult methods of getting traffic
The methods above were fairly easier methods to get some initial traffic. There are couple of other methods that will get you a much higher traffic but they require a lot more effort.
Get others to link to you Identify people who are complementary to you. If we take mywalkin as the example then any site talking about interview preparation, resume preparations, fresher jobs etc were complementary websites. The advantage of exchanging links with such sites is you have a common userbase but you are not competitors. Hence such people will be more likely to link to you. Though you will need to convince them as to why they should link to you.
Site about sites check webyantra.net to understand what I am talking about. These are sites that talk about other websites. If you can convince at least one of these to link to you, then you can easily solve the entire problem of getting initial users.
Email This
