Hi there, A friend of mine and myself have started the site http://www.HowManyHits.com which we are using to see how many hits a website with absolutely no paid advertising can generate. We are trying to find a few people who would like to write an article on the project for their blogs or article sites and are available for interviews or to answer questions. As a brief history we just started on Dec 18th and have received 25,250 hits so far. These have of course all been geenrated via word of mouth, mostly through our Facebook group.
I'm afraid that I'm a bit confused here... you said here and "there" that you are going by "word of mouth" but you have posted links and requests for visitations to (obviously) two high traffic areas, and you are creating links in these areas to this site, so ... what is the "word of mouth" bit? Seems to me that you are doing basic advertising utilizing community tactics, .... in other words, what everyone else in the Internet Marketing game is doing. I'm not trying to be critical, I simply must be missing something... Are you filtering out the links from your Internet posts? What is the criteria for "Word of Mouth".. just not using paid-for advertising? Guess I'm just not getting the experiment. I've never paid for advertising on my web sites... ever... I have a rule, google pays me, I don't pay them.
Hi glenn and thanks for your comments, I guess I have been mis conveying the idea behind the project. But you are correct, we are allowing ourselves to gain hits in any possible way that does not cost us any money. Somewhat for personal interest to see just how many we can get, and also to show people that you do not need a massive advertising budget to get traffic. Hope that clears it up.
Okay, well that sounds more inline with what I see going on. And... sure I'll write something up and link to you from my blog area. This is rather a pet-peeve area of mine anyway, though I'm uncertain why I feel so passionate about it... what do I care that people spend thousands to get what they can get for hundreds (time is money as they say and you only have so much time). But I do care. I guess what really bugs me are the companies how spread the hype that if you aren't spending thousands on SEO and advertising you can't make squat on the web.. all that aside. Google never advertises, nor Slashdot, or many other very-high-traffic web sites. Craig's List for example... its all done by word of mouth and interest building.. basically .. make the best site and people start showing up. Google doesn't advertise even new features, so many features are not known about by common users. But your experiment here is a bit tweaked from the get go, and not really inline with the true question. I don't really care how many hits I can get in a day... what I care about is how many paying hits I can get in a day, whether that pay is coming from ads, purchase or some other source; or that pay is in the form of money or some other gratification, my hit count is meaningless if the traffic is not achieving a goal. My traffic is also meaningless if it does not promote more traffic from sources that I have nothing to do with. If I have to continually promote in order to achieve traffic, if the ratio of visits is always based on my efforts, then my web site is doomed. This is not to say that a web site ever gets to the point where promotion and effort are not necessary on a regular basis; what I am saying is if it does not generate effort, promotion and interest from other visitors then I'm just spinning my wheels. So if you want something on there that I would consider relevant to the experiment you should post returning visitors as well as total hit counts. Just for your own experiment log, not sure you want to post it or anything, I would keep close records on where you post links to the site and how many times you place reinforcements posts in those areas. An example is this thread; how many times do you post to keep the interest maintained. Otherwise its just a game of traffic, and traffic is again, meaningless without effectiveness. Its just a number.