Tips on building buzz and getting traffic for new sites
-
I have an idea for a new "socia"l website. No its not a facebook or anything like that, but I feel it fills a void in a particular niche. The problem I am having is figuring out a marketing plan to get people to sign up. When you're starting a new social website like this its kind of important for it too feel popular and you need users to make it feel popular and useful. Which kind of gets you into a chicken or the egg type scenario. There are a few keywords I intend on doing SEO for, but I don't think pure SEO will make this community popular.
Some ideas I have:
- Creative "tell a friend" strategy that builds incentive to get friends signed up like win an ipad or something like that. I also want to make it easy to tell friends, so you can import contacts from facebook, twitter, and email contacts rather than typing in all those emails by hand.
- Targeting a few blogs related to this niche hoping that they will interview me about the website.
- Advertising on forums and blogs related to my niche.
- Making the site simple, visually appealing and intuitive so users can dive right in without thinking.
- Making a good enough product to where the site can get buzz on active subreddits and hackernews.
I'm a software engineer by nature, so marketing isn't a strong suite of mine, but I'm no rookie to building popular websites either (just been a while). I'd like to get some ideas from the seomoz community on this. Thanks.
-
The best suggestion I can offer beyond your initial thoughts (all strong by the way) is to start in "Beta" mode (or maybe even "Alpha" mode), and make it clear that this is the case so people know it's very early in the life-cycle and thus will have much lower expectations regarding user / usage volume.
And definitely find a way to partner with someone who has very strong marketing skills. Without high quality marketing from someone who's "been there/done that", and you could very well be setting yourself up for a big fail. There's no guarantee they'll help you succeed, or that early adopters will catch the buzz wave, however it's more likely they will.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it feasible to try to compete with an established site with a fresh domain any time soon?
Currently I'm looking at a competitor who owns a site with the following metrics: Domain Authority - 39 /100
Branding | | chrisjimallen
Page Authority - 49 /100
Spam Score: 1 /17
93 Root Domains
2,199 Total Links
Page Social Metrics
Facebook - 431 Shares, 17 Likes I'm thinking it would take 12 months+ to become a viable competitor, but thats a complete guess. What are peoples thoughts on undertaking something like this?0 -
Does anyone has experience with Q&A Sites in terms of SEO value?
I would like to increase mentions to my site and brand. I thought the Q&A sites might be useful here (like Yahoo Answers). Can anyone give me some tips where to go and what to do? I would be very happy about that 🙂
Branding | | MichaelJanik0 -
Tips and advice for startup website launch
Hi guys I'm looking for tips and advice to help prevent a startup website launch from embarrassment or disaster. Couple of examples I have so far are: Test contact and download forms Check website for duplicate content, lorem ipsum and missing content Check page load speed What would be your best advice/tip(s) be? Thanks Anthony @Anthony_Mac85 P.S. Just to be clear, I'm not looking for advice on how to growth hack a startup website launch.
Branding | | Tone_Agency0 -
Tips for promoting the blog section of our eCommerce site
Hi, With the recent Google updates we're thinking that unique content is more important than ever in order to gain high quality, natural links from genuine users. As such we're thinking that our blog (http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/) might be more important than ever. Don't be put off by the lack of Page Authority or Google Page Rank; we've only just moved to this address from the subdomain igloo.refreshcartridges.co.uk. The content is certainly rather niche; an article like http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/how-to-the-reset-purge-counter-on-a-brother-printer-with-a-numerical-pad/ will be helpful to thousands of users who own this particular range of printer but it's debatable as to whether it is sufficiently mainstream to be openly shared and linked to. We ping to sites such as Technorati, produce videos to accompany much of the content (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dxmm4-blN8&list=UUH93Kwax4CcEIAOsXWb6CiA&index=1&feature=plcp for example) and provide easy sharing buttons. I do however think that we could be doing more to actively ‘push’ this content on to potential customers. I'm not naive enough to think that niche articles like this will be enough to get hundreds of links and tens of thousands of reads but printer news, reviews and support is pretty much the only thing we can write about while being relevant to our core business. I would however like to get the best exposure that we can for these articles which is why I’m asking for your advice today. I would really appreciate any ideas you may have as to how else we could gain the best value from these unique articles and videos. I apologise for this being such an open ended question but any and all advice on how to maximise this resource would be appreciated. Many thanks!
Branding | | ChrisHolgate0 -
What are some good ways to market a used car sales site?
I have thought of using craigslist and other classified ads, social media and of course good old SEO. What else can be done to drive traffic to a used car website?
Branding | | MangoMan160 -
Has anyone got any hotel (small) web marketing tips or tricks
I have a client who ranks well for his boutique hotel both in Google search and Google places. The problem now is he needs to fill his rooms next week (type of thing). We are down the Google Adwords route already. But clicks are super expensive (competing against the big hotels). We have also been trying to get his social media rolling and have started a light ad campaign on FB but I can't see clicks translating into our Google analytics account. (so not sold on it but is a lot cheaper than Google adwords) Next on the list is email marketing which we be getting ready for next week to his existing database. And we have been thinking about paid Press Releases but not sure if its worth it. (PRWEB or Prnewswire) One big bonus is he got a number 1 award on Tripadvisor a few months back (which radically spiked hits on site). So, a more long term solution is to approach media directly with a follow up story to the award but that's going to take a bit of time. Anyone had any experience with hotel marketing? Any insights would be great. Thanks
Branding | | ZATIVA20000 -
A new form of competition with self
Today I discovered a new type of ranking competition. I'm still investigating, so I don't know all the details, but I think it's like this. In addition to our online store, we also sell our products via Amazon Merchant. We are the only distributor in the US, so I was surprised to see our products offered at a modest number of other sites, often with very elevated prices (not linking to Amazon, but actually selling our product on their site). I shot the product images and the images are mine. Now Sears is selling our product on Sears.com through one of their merchant sellers. The prices are grossly inflated, and the Sears Google ranking are pushing us out of places we used to be. I'm guessing that if someone actually purchases our product via Sears.com, the order will be forwarded to our Amazon listing for fulfillment, and the reseller will pocket the price difference minus a percentage for Sears. I will follow up with both Amazon and Sears, but regarding the competition with your own Amazon merchant product listings, is this a known problem? Best,
Branding | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
What tools do you use to submit a site to local yellowpages?
Hey all, two part question for you. Do you use any tools to automatically submit websites to local yellowpages (example: http://business.intuit.com/directory/marketing/100_syndication_sites.jsp)? and if so, what one and why? Are there any dangers to doing it this way? It seems that this might save a lot of time and be incredibly helpful to manage your brand profile pages in a centralized location. Also some tools that I am seeing incorporate brand monitoring (which you can do through a variety of tools I know). Anyways, thoughts? comments? tips?
Branding | | prima-2535090
