Fastest way to more visitors

[DanHorvat]

This isn't purley related to SEO (though SEO is likely to be a part of this) but is a more general question on what to do with a brand new site, the goal being a healthy visitor base in less than a month.

So, if you start a new site, what steps do you take to make it stand out immediately? Creative ideas and no link building, please.

[JackTenSuited]

depends on the budget?

[DanHorvat]

To make it more difficult, let's set the budget at ~500 € and the target number of daily visitors 1000.

[chaumi]

You say a healthy visitor base.

But there's a big difference between 'visitors' and 'worthwhile visitors'

Do you just mean volume...or volume that has an interest in the site and will interact with it in some way (read, click through to internal pages, click on an ad, sign up for something)

[Sherlock]

crazy task

if i knew this i would be billionaire

parameters have to be adjusted

[pokerbanter]

To make it more difficult, let's set the budget at ~500 € and the target number of daily visitors 1000.

Spend your days at an internet café and offer users 50c each to visit the address.

[TheGooner]

Write timely, enticing and attractive content - and tweet about it.

You have to be smart of course - it needs to be "of the moment", actually informative and interesting.
This won't be a poker site review, or a selling article, it's likely to be news item or popular event item.

If it's in a subject area that you personally follow then you can write it yourself - and you can have you 500 euros back!

[DanHorvat]

Let's assume the site is of high quality and people are genuinely interested in the content and will be coming back and recommending the site to their friends. The issue here is how to let people know about that content, the rest will take care of itself.

I'll take the Twitter advice.

[ddm]

social seeding wins here.

here's what I do on one of my poker sites:

1- identify and develop suitable personas to target (Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience) and http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Ar.../dp/0672326140 for more background on personas)
2- create a good landing page on my poker website. [in the case of 'poker' maybe a freeroll, a poker league, a free no deposit bankroll deal]. Step 1 is essential as a first step in order to optimise your page copy and calls to action appropriately (If we don't truly know our user, how can we sell to them?)
3- search fb for groups which address the specific interests / goals of the target personas. (eg freeroll hunters, poker communities, university poker clubs)
4- join each group , post a link to your landing page, as well as a short textual CTA (show them the value, earn the click)


it's possible to post to 100 groups in about 12 minutes manually.

before we knee-jerk and say "hey this is just social spam" . it is only spam if you are not offering something unique, and truly of value, and it's only spam if you post in un-targeted groups.

Benefits with this technique

- Zero Cost!
- Zero barrier to entry
- Instant Results
- Trust + Free Likes

Free page likes > free trust benefits

The additional benefit from sharing your page link in multiple FB groups is that your page gets a "like" for each group you share it in (yes - this is silly as the link is shared by the same 'entity' - you, but that's how Facebook does it...)
So after posting to 110 groups in 12 mins, your page has 110 likes already.

Trust => more conversions :
Say Site A has a great product page with 3 likes, Site B has an equivalently good product page with 100 likes. Which one is likely to convert more? site B I daresay.

other notes:
- adding a suitable image to your FB post will increase CTR phenomenally as opposed to just posting a text-link and description)

Some food for thought perhaps.
Many roads to mecca in this multichannel digital world we live in.=)

[ddm]

and tweet about it.

Hmm. this assumes that you have targeted followers Paul no? .. seems a bit slow and passive to me.
A "new site" won't easily gain traction regardless of content quality in my experience.
I think FB groups > Twitter for getting more eyeballe

[DanHorvat]

Cool, thanks for sharing.

[TheGooner]

Hmm. this assumes that you have targeted followers Paul no? .. seems a bit slow and passive to me.
A "new site" won't easily gain traction regardless of content quality in my experience.

With twitter you don't need followers to get reaction as long as you are targeting an active hashtag and have a catchy angle. That's why I mentioned that it's a specific timely article to hook into that scene - rather than normal affiliate fare.

What you are aiming for is to get the clicks that turns into twitter followers and also generates clicks to the article - and that they'll appreciate the rest of the site too. If it's good enough then you'll get retweets which will hit those peoples followers too.

Is it passive? Well - certainly compared to your "100 social spam" approach (kidding! ) but if you can get a good angle then a genuine series of retweets does wonders for exposure.

I think FB groups > Twitter for getting more eyeballe

To each their own successes I guess. We promote on both facebook and twitter - and have seen a quicker growth rate and click through rate on Twitter - but facebook is certainly a viable social target.

[DanHorvat]

I'm trying the social spam approach today, and also learning to use hashtags.

So far, on day 0 there were 68 visitors and 150 the next day.

[DanHorvat]

I obviously don't know how to spam, I joined FB groups and posted links but nothing good came out of it.

Twitter is...frenetic. Imagine what it will be like during the World Cup. But Gooner's Guide to Twitter explains everything in four sentences. Kudos!

[chaumi]

I'm a twitter idiot...and wish it could remain so. Always thought it was utter garbage, all of it.

But from this thread it doesn't appear my perception has been right.

So a question...I thought that if you sent a Tweet it only got seen by the people who were already following you. Not so?

[Scampi]

So a question...I thought that if you sent a Tweet it only got seen by the people who were already following you. Not so?

If you send a Tweet then your followers will see it, but if you include a # then everyone who is using or searching for the # will also be able to see it.
For example, if you are watching the X Factor, you could Tweet 'This is the best song I have ever heard in my life, ever. #xfacter' Then everyone who is also watching the feed for X Factor will also be able to see your post.

So to Tweet about the World Cup, you would type your stuff then use a relevent keyword to use as the hash, in this case #worldcup or #england or #worldcup2014 or all three.

'I'm looking forward to watching the #worldcup, hopefully #england will do ok'

Something like that.

[wi-media]

add your website in various web directories. create a facebook page and twitter account and post posts from your website

[Muppet]

before we knee-jerk and say "hey this is just social spam" . it is only spam if you are not offering something unique, and truly of value, and it's only spam if you post in un-targeted groups.

Laughable. Imagine all the email spammers sitting there saying "hey I'm offering something unique and valuable and I got this list of email addresses from a relevant site, so its not spam". Its the same thing only you're spamming Facebook. People don't set up groups of common interests for the purpose of providing a marketing opportunity for you or anyone else. It may bring you great results but don't try to delude yourself and everyone else that what you are doing is not spamming.

[DanHorvat]

I'd like to ask something about Twitter. I had a brilliant tweet with a trendy hashtag but it went largely unnoticed, until one of my followers retweeted it to his 18.000 members.

So although the hashtag was the thing to target at that moment, and it was a very specific one, nothing happened. I'd say you can't really rank well with a hashtag just because you made a tweet, Twitter must be clearing up the garbage in some way, and my tweet went unnoticed because I have only 18 followers. I guess. Or because my account is new. If someone can explain this situation, I'd appreciate it.

By the way, the tweet was:
Living next door to Alice for 24 years? #BlameEverton

You'd expect this to rank in the top 10-20 BlameEverton jokes. But apparently it doesn't work that way. Or people never heard of Smokie.

[ddm]

Laughable. Imagine all the email spammers sitting there saying "hey I'm offering something unique and valuable and I got this list of email addresses from a relevant site, so its not spam". Its the same thing only you're spamming Facebook. People don't set up groups of common interests for the purpose of providing a marketing opportunity for you or anyone else. It may bring you great results but don't try to delude yourself and everyone else that what you are doing is not spamming.

Hmm, so what if we're not actually marketing anything?. is it spam then?

For example, One can engage in quite passive marketing via strategies which include sharing funny pictures / memes / news [from your own brand fb page] to related groups, building your brand visibility in a very non-spammy way [there's no call-to action...]

it's all about execution.

fwiw If the groups which you target object to the content, they can of course "spam" it. This happens less than 0.5 % of the time (in my experience) if you are clever about it. When I do this stuff, I actually get likes and share on my posts - people share and even use my shares as their fb profile pictures etc. .. that's not what happens when you spam a forum for example..

Like [proper] guest blogging vs Spam blogging for a link, it's all about execution. Do it badly, and you're just another spamtard. Do it well and everyone wins.