0 to 500,000 uniques a month in 6 months!

How would you do it if you had a budget of $5,000/month for the first 6 months? ($30,000 total)

The idea is to get a steady 500,000 uniques or more a month by the 6th month and going forward. No advertising budget after the 6th month. So you need traffic that will stick.

And in this case, it should be easy to get returning traffic as this is going to be for an online games website.

The problem is reaching a large enough and targeted audience with my limited budget and time frame.

How would YOU do it?

I will pay $25 via paypal to the poster who I think offers the best suggestions (at my sole discretion) by 01 Nov 2006.

 

Hmm. I would purchase qaulity unique hits off of ebay. like a million for less then $50. 30,000 divided by 50 is 600. So thatd be 600,000,000 visitors to your website, and if a qaurter of them like the site and return. Well thats good.

 

That was funny
How many bots and proxysites will love his site?

 

I think I would call Alex from the famous MillionDollarHomePage.com !!

 

Advertise on Yahoo and MSN

 

Hire a copywriter first. Then use all viral marketing techniques.

 

Before further suggesting anything, may we know what is your target Niche?

 

dont mess with ebay advertising,

my advice, unique content over and over

a massive directory submission by a number of people

eg 500 x directory submissions by a number of people who offer high quality submissions done by hand

banner advertising on quality website that are similar to yours

link exchnages with high quality sites maby even purchasing quality links on high pr sites for montly periods.

do this process month after month keep updating and keep expaning the site and you will see the hits climb

 

I definately agree with those saying unique content writers. 100%

 

Hire a sky writer.

 

- Buy long-term links on high traffic websites. Traffic from game sites is usually very cheap
- The online games market is very crowded, so don't bother focusing on search engine positioning
- Develop a few games for your site. Not the 1000th Tetris or Pacman clone, but hire a creative Flash developer to create something original
- Hire a copywriter to write press releases, ads etc.
- Have your unique content submitted to forums, weblogs, linkdumps and social communities such as digg, myspace etc.

 

Only need to spend on two things - quality content and linkbait.
Get top quality content so that you keep getting dugg or /. - you'll definitely reach the uniques you want in just a couple of months. now, your content should be compelling enough so that you can retain those numbers too

 

500k unique visitors ... not visits and not 17k uniques per day either ... 500k unique visitors per month in 2 months with a $10k investment and these visitors are going to return month after month without additional ad spending???

You're hired! Anyone that believes they can come close to delivering this then send me a PM and let's get you going on a performance-based fee.

Personally, I think it's next to impossible to build to 500k uniques per month with a $5k/month budget even if you were willing to continue to spend the $5k indefinitely. Getting people to your site for $.01/visitor (without tricking them) would make you an Internet Marketing GOD ... and I should know because I'm a self-proclaimed demigod

Recurring 500k uniques in 6 months with a total spend of $30k for all your content and advertising just isn't realistic... I think 50k uniques is a more realistic high target number and IMO you should be trying to make a sticky site and base your measurement on uniques/day. 10-20k uniques per day with that budget and entertainment based "content" should be doable but the investment for fresh content will never go away.

 

Good point, and incase it wasn't apparent even though this is the marketing forum, the $5k/month is an advertising/marketing only budget.

Content will be licensed from a third party provider!

 

Well, the approach depends on the entire budget ... if you have $30k for up-front content/development, plus $5k/month for advertising, plus you have $5k per month for content on-going ... well, that's a very different scenario and higher numbers would be possible.

 

We actually had a site go from 0 too 25,000+ visitors/day wiithin one month.

 

And you were able to do it so they return month after month without having to continue with an advertising budget? What was the total build and spend budget? If it's not a file sharing type service and you want to sell the idea, send me a PM.

I have seen new sites in link networks able to get that kind of pop with a little advertising ... but never seen one that could keep the returning visitors after they leave the network.

 

I have successfully done this for 2 sites in the past. But the metrics were different. Only $500/month advertising budget and the target was 100,000 uniques a month.

Sadly, one of those sites no longer upholds these stats due to a sudden market shift due to unforeseen competition. All thanks to Google.

 

For a free online game website I would have to suggest getting most of your traffic for free from myspace.com. So you would create a myspace site eg. myspace.com/yourgamesite and create an attractive looking page and hire some one to post on other people myspace pages as friends for the six months and you should have hundreds of thousands of friends in your myspace account that will all visit your website and play your games. Plus this way it is a lot cheaper then 5k a month and you get a ton of targeted traffic to your website. Then add a mailing list sign up to your game website or myspace page to keep promoting the new games as you add them and new features of your website. You should also put a add to favorites script on the site for a high conversion return traffic rate. These easy to use and almost free techniques should generate you a ton of gamer traffic that will stick for years to come. Because everybody knows myspace is not going anywhere any time soon.

 

Can competition really hurt your traffic? I mean the internet is huge...