How did sites like fmylife, textsfromlastnight get big

Really?

Ok, show their pages in FaceBook and Twitter.

 

While you might be correct that they advertise Perry, a lot of it is viral. Another example is the People of Wal Mart site. Look how many times people show those pictures on their social networks and then hundreds or thousands of their friends see it and head to the site to see more. Then those people link it to their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace page and hundreds or thousands more see it and it just snowballs.

It is possible that they got that big without a huge advertising budget. The trick is to just have something that a lot of people think are funny or interesting and WANT to keep coming back to and showing their friends.

 

it's none of the above,
they are big because they are owned by big media players, blog networks, with big buggets,
so they can just plug-in their site into a big blog network(s), and the traffic pours in, as in 300K in first month according to compete

 

Yeah, j1218, one has to do his homework to see how a site got to be so big (close to or over 1,000,000 monthly visitors).

Fmylife, for example, has that kind of traffic. Much of it is indeed from Twitter. Although 10% is way too high, let's just say that 10% do indeed goes to their site on a daily basis. That's around 10,000. Multiply that times 30 days, that's close to a quarter of a million hits a month.

But, here's the thing...they had a hell of a lot of traffic before dabbling in Twitter.

They did heavy marketing to get the book going, and to get visitors to their site. THEN word of mouth took over.

Hell, even Craig Newmark started out with advertising.

Getting free advertising is what probably worked for him. Hell, the media, like Dateline, still does segments on him.

Gotta love free advertising. Lucky prick.

And I am also talking about having that kind of traffic on a consistent basis.

No mattter what, you still have to do avdvertising to keep that big of a fire going and going and going.

Markus, of PlentyOfFish knows this all too well.

I do agree with ya, though, J1218, to a point. Fmylife has a lot of followers, as a good example.

Not the sites that was mentioned.

And back in '05, IGN bought Askmen from 3 college guys. Since then the number of visitors has dropped by over 1,000,000 monthly viewers.

 

You could try anekdotz.com, a free service for anyone to create a user generated short-story community and host it for free on Google App Engine. Check out the "Directory". Example ->dontjudgemejudger.com

 

I'm sure he got his site on the top of digg. There are many bloggers who have written about the site giving him publicity.