Ways to get 100 potential customers for $5 a day | Hacker News Reader

Ways to get 100 potential customers for $5 a day

gabrielweinberg.com

It only took about a month and change to get to 100 folks a day coming in from organic SEO, and that was when I was young and much less savvy about it. It is really, really achievable if folks are looking for what you have. All you need is solid meat-and-potatoes onpage optimization (title tags, effective keyword use, all that jazz), minimal linkbuilding (ask friends to link to you from their blogs or do Peldi's thing), and (the one I frequently find missing on new software sites) sufficient content to get search hits for. You don't want to try for SEO using the typical five-pages-with-150-words-max that most folks use as their starter site.

This is a compelling reason to put your site up prior to launching, by the way. Heck, put it up before you even have a product coded. (My next one is up already and getting a wee little trickle of traffic with just a few paragraphs and a link to a Wufoo form for folks who want to join the beta after I, you know, get around to writing it.)

Congratulations for the fantastic work you've done. You're really an inspiration to many of us. If I may ask you a question: How would you manage SEO if you were testing several product ideas at the same time and needed the 100 clicks/day for each one of them? Is content the main thing? Thanks :)

I would install Wordpress MU and make every site a blog (structurally speaking) so that the overhead of adding content didn't crush me. I'd also think about hiring freelancers to thicken the sites out with articles about the problem domain and customers.

At 100 visitors a day, yeah, content and onpage factors will largely suffice. You're going to eventually need links to build the sites up, though.

http://www.fiverr.com/ is also an option

How do you get a 100 clicks for $5 on there daily?

You've got folks who'll offer to tweet the content of your choice to 10,000 followers for 5 bucks, or put something in front of their 5,000 friends on facebook. That kind of thing.

You get what you pay for, but it might be worth five bucks to give it a shot. My biggest concern with a strategy like this is you might be seen as a spammer even though you're not the one directly doing the spamming.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but anyone who supposedly has 10,000 followers on twitter and is willing to say ANYTHING to them for $5 may not have the best followers.

One of the comments to the blog post mentioned that if you have good word of mouth you don't need to worry about these strategies. I don't think this is true, of course there have been notable exceptions but in general unless you have reached the household name status of Microsoft, Apple, Google ect there is always an untapped market out there of people that would gladly be customers of your product if only they knew about it.

Even with the big companies still not everyone knows that about all their products that they may be interested in.

It's true though. I had never seen a google ad until they started pushing chrome, and google was pretty small when I did hear about it.

Word of mouth is pretty powerful. Seen an ad for twitter or facebook that caused you to sign up with them? Ubuntu? PayPal? Ebay?

They're not as exceptional as you'd think.

there is a big difference between potential customers and actual customers. And the network matters a lot.

Search Engine CPC programs have the most bang for the buck here. Sure you pay a lot for clicks, but those clicks are much more likely to convert.

Social media cpc programs are much cheaper...but the quality of traffic is crap too. Sure you spend 10 times less for clicks, but they are also 20 times less effective.

Personally I find search engine cpc traffic to be useful if you are selling a product that people are searching for. And social media cpc traffic if you are promoting a product that people don't know exists(so they don't search for it).

Social media cpc programs are much cheaper

Except when they're not. weeps I was paying 60 cent CPCs on Facebook when I pay about 4 - 6 cent CPCs on AdWords... and conversion rates were nothing to write home about, unless it was to vent. (AdWords: 18% conversion to trial. Facebook: < 2% conversion.)

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