Nov
12
If you’re a consumer web startup and you’re hoping to build a destination that has millions of eyeballs visiting every day, then you can’t buy traffic. So you have three options:
PR
You do something press-worthy. Then you email all the high profile bloggers and press that you know. You also post your story on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. You get picked up by a few bloggers and get Dugg. You get a ‘nice spike in traffic’ and get all excited and do it again a few weeks later. Here’s the result:
With each spike you had to buy more servers and now you’re stuck paying a hosting bill with zero traffic hoping you can keep replicating those spikes ad-infinitum and somehow make them slightly higher each time.
SEO
You discover that if you structure the 100,000 pages of content that you have correctly and somehow encourage people to deep-link into your website, you can get Google to send you around 10,000 unique visitors every day. Here’s the result:
Very little of the SEO traffic you’re getting is return traffic. You’ve also hit a ceiling in the traffic Google’s going to send you because you only have 100,000 pages. If only you could get another 100,000 and another 100,000 and get up the next next plateau. Maybe you can persuade a few of your users to create some content for you.
VIRAL
You create a product that people market through it’s use. Here’s the result:
“My SEO strategy and my PR efforts have made me plenty successful and I’m growing” you say. Sure, but you’re not in a vacuum and your competitor is going to go viral any day now.
If you want the last graph, don’t call a meeting and figure out how to add a ‘viral strategy’ to your existing product. Instead, start with a blank white-board and figure out how to create a product that people market for you simply by using it. Think of Hotmail, where every email sig was an ad for Hotmail. Think of YouTube where people embed their videos in their own websites.
Just to be clear, a viral product is not one that is so darn cool people want to tell their friends about it. A truly viral product tells a user’s friends about itself through its use.
