Growing Traffic from 1k to 35 in one month - A Zero-budget Marketing Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Growing Traffic from 1k to 35 in one month - A Zero-budget Marketing Experiment

citrify.com

38 pointszyang15 comments

There is virtually no content in this post. It basically reads "hey guys, we had 1k visitors in month X and then grew to 35k visitors in month Y by trying to reduce friction and reaching out to a ton of small bloggers."

What does it mean to reduce friction? They minified their Flash app from 1 MB to 0.45 MB and don't require user accounts.

They minified their Flash app from 1 MB to 0.45 MB and don't require user accounts

The main selling points of their premium version are user support and access to a desktop version. If they have 'reduced friction' for their online version, the need for support should be negligent and the downloadable version less attractive. As freemium models go, I think thy need to differentiate better.

if the app takes too long to load, it's a friction. if you ask the user to sign up before using the software, it's a friction. if you ask the user to wait for a photo to upload before edit, it's a friction.

little frictions add up.

our goal was to build a viral application and our approach was to have far less friction than our competitors. it worked because our top traffic source was direct traffic.

when you bring up the word "viral", the knee jerk reaction was to integrate with twitter. the reality is that asking permission to someone's twitter feed actually add a lot friction. that's the point we are trying to bring across.

as for the bloggers, if you read the article, you would see that we didn't reach out to bloggers and journalists. we simply reduced the friction for bloggers to covers us by providing a dedicated press faq page along with all the collaterals, and a free premium license.

I would suggest software businesses think less in terms of "traffic" and more in terms of qualified prospects. "Traffic" harkens to the Bad Old Days of selling eyeballs to visitors, but if you're selling software eyeballs don't make you money. You can goose "traffic" by appealing to the desires of StumbleUpon visitors (7.5k in a month: that and $4 will buy you a cup of coffee), but that can lead you to pessimizing for the business.

For example, and I'm about to say something heretical: forcing people to give email addresses prior to use seems to be a bit of a win for me. It filters out anyone who is insufficiently skilled with computers to type an email address, for one thing, and for another the opt-in permission many of my users give is empirically worth its weight in gold.

I also have anonymous "guest" signups. They convert about as well as trial users from mainland China and they cause a disproportionate amount of my support headaches. I've got an A/B test in the works to see if nixing them entirely hurts total returns or not -- I'm guessing no. In that case, I'll happily nix them, and if those users bounce rather than use my software -- "Oh well".

Haha! I'm just learning about this. I got 1k or so from StumbleUpon in the last 2 days which has led to nothing on twitter, nothing on delicious. And my pages/visit and 'avg time on site' has dropped off. Stumblers really have low attention spans and, in the context of the web, that's saying something.

I'm sort of in the middle of this with my much-more-niche fun-side-project site http://www.b-rhymes.com (while we're whoring). It's an algorithmic rhyming dictionary.

It's post metafilter spike. Twitter chain reaction has died. Not sure what to do next.

I've been wondering how to approach bloggers, as in the article, to try to get them to cover it. More difficult, I think, is finding people in the right niches.

I kind of feel like this stuff just happens, and I have no control.

Post or tweet some novel or amusing combos you've found. Even something like 'flexible' and 'indelible' from your FAQ might be of interest to some.

Two to three times a day, tweet two words and ask followers to submit the best use of them as a rhyming couplet within 140 characters. RT the best efforts or put them on your blog. Phrase your responses so that the best submitters are likely to boastfully RT your flattering award to their friends.

Have a comp for the worst attempted rhyme out there in mainstream music. Or the most inventive.

I'm sure there are other similar things you could try.

Actually the metafilterers kind of did just that: http://www.metafilter.com/89217/BRhymes

The problem is I'm just a geek with an algorithm that's kind of fun, definitely not a rapper poet.

I like the twitter idea though. Definitely worth a try.

That's fine, but you can either stay as just a geek with an algorithm (no excuses! ;)) and wonder if the site will ever get attention, or find a co-conspirator or push out of your usual territory. I reckon the latter is simplest (especially since there's hardly revenue to split with a partner) and picking two interesting words a day and plugging them on Twitter with an example of what you expect is pretty easy.

Another idea: Have a topical lyric competition on your blog. Each day of the week is a different format - couplet, limerick or whatever. And each time, the topic is something new that's in the news - natural disasters, celebrities, movie launches, etc. Get friends involved and seed it until the regulars start to suggest news and other ideas.

Plus, try some viral stuff that people might spread around. Tweet, "You'll never guess what 'earthquake' almost rhymes with! http://www.b-rhymes.com/rhyme/word/earthquake " Who the hell wouldn't click that to find out?! :)

Hmm... I'm picturing internet earthquake memes... :P

This is going to sound funny, but I was taking the obvious geek approach with this, which is... make it into an iPhone app! http://www.b-rhymes.com/iphone/

How predictable am I? haha. I can see though that I'm probably going to need some community if it's ever going to stick.

Anyway, thanks for the input!

i expected a lot more. this is a google analytics screenshot and some obvious "reduce friction" speak. I want Mixergy level details. What specific hook did you guys have? Who DID you contact? Why were there SO many direct visits (print/broadcast pr)? Guide us through day 1 through 30. hell make it a four part post, ill come back to your site four times.

Jason, I trust your judgement. If you want me to interview Zee, email me and I'll invite him to an interview.

I agree that there's little content here - but the key thing for me was that there is no signup process. I think the biggest single roadblock to a lot of startups is introducing a signup screen before they can start using the product.

Obviously some startups have to have a signup screen by the nature of what they do but a large number don't need one. If you're product is good enough then people will use it, hell even if it isn't good enough then people will still use it but never again. As soon as you put a signup screen in front of people using the product they will likely not signup and therefore not use the product.

I have the luxery to be more in a niche market with my Picto Selector. I doubt sites like stumbleupon will do me good. Also avoiding friction is done: - it's free - the download is self containing

Because of it's nature (a hobby project) i also have no budget to spend.

But some friction is left: - a big download (40MB because of the 5000 pictures that are included) - Windows only (the downside of selfcontained)

I'm interested to see what you are going to do the next months to keep this level of visitors.

The best referrals have been autism bloggers so far. For the rest it's mouth to mouth

...and what if the really clever part is that they used Citrify to edit the Google Analytics screen-shots so show a 34k visitor increase so they could publish that post...so that we would visit their site - THAT would be a clever marketing trick ;-)

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