Hey Guys, When I recently checked alexa graphs from the more popular websites like myspace, youtube, facebook, etc. I found out that nearly all of them began with a daily reach of 0,5-1%. Which marketing methods did they make use of in order to start a website/ make it popular so quickly and what kind of budget do you need to have to do something like that?
What all of these sites have is: - interactivity - innovation They're unique and the visitors can interact in the sites, which makes it highly addictive. As you can notice, these sites also don't use mass advertising in other sites for promotion.
Most of these social networking sites grew by using word of mouth or in marketing terms 'viral marketing'. Hotmail grew really quickly because they would have a link in each of the emails that users sent. So whenever someone sent an email, they would be advertising Hotmail's free service to their colleagues. Sites like Facebook and Myspace grew fast because they're built on the basis of having friends. So it's natural for people to advertise the site to their friends. These sites have a feature which allows a user to easily import their friend's email addresses in one instance, making it easy for them to make the referral. The good thing about viral marketing is that it's free and it grows exponentially once the ball gets rolling. You may have expenses in the beginning for software and creative design and/or advertising to get it started. Of course, like all things, the more money you put in the less work you have to do yourself and the faster you will generate the traffic. If you're offering a free seo tool that is truly useful, you could just make posts in forums and have other webmasters link to your site. That would make it viral also.
Out of all the things the above poster mentioned, it was the importing of your contact list and inviting all your real life friends via email that got them going. certainly if you were making a social networking site of some sort or already own one, you must have this feature.
spend your time brainstorming a new idea/site, then implement it. The promoting will almost take care of itself with a bit of love from you..otherwise, your free image hosting site, or someone elses myspace resource site, etc etc will take a boatload of effort to compete with all the other 1000's of copy sites. Sure its hard to think up something new...but once you do, traffic will come your way my friend.
These sites did heavy promotion to get started. It's not just having a good idea, it's also getting people to try it out and getting your name out there. Read about the hard work it took, and the social sites backing myspace here: http://bradgreenspan.com/?p=21
I am pretty sure they did alot of prior research and had the manpower to make use of different marketing channels.
They have the great ideas. They have the money to build and promote them. It's not that hard you just need some serious budget.
actually am working on such an idea.yesterday i spent almost 6 hours making a "requirement Analysis" for the new site.hope fully it will get coded soon with full functionality.i hope this new idea will "click". wish me luck guys...