That's actually really good advice. If you do use the press and other media be prepared for a let-down, all that stuff is only a momentary impulse, and unless you are extremely sticky you are not going to get much out of it.
Satisfied, returning users is the only way to really grow a business, it's easy to see why:
Even if everybody in the world came by tomorrow but nobody got stuck you'd be looking at 0 traffic on Friday next week, but if instead of that you'd have 1000 new users each day of which 10% got stuck you'd have at least 2,000 visitors per day by Friday next week.
Now 2,000 visitors per day doesn't sound like it is much but depending on the product you might already be in the 'black' at that level. And if not, wait 90 days...
In practice it is a lot harder to get people to come again to your site than it is to get random individuals to come just once.
I remember coming across google the first time and instantly changing my homepage from 'altavista' to 'google'.
That's all it took, it simply worked and worked so much better that there would have been no reason to draw out the switching process.
How exactly do you plan on getting 1,000 new visitors every day, without a big media blitz for them to start hearing about your site? Sure you could buy ads, but you'll probably end up spending a thousand bucks per day just to get that 1,000 users.
And if you want 1,000 new people per day organically, you pretty much need 200-300K users for them to tell their friends about you.
A big media launch will put you on the map, sure only a tiny portion of users will stick around, but those few will give you that starting base to jump off from.
I don't see why that 10% stickiness you talk about, wouldn't also work during a launch. Sure you'll probably get a lot more lookie loos, but surely you'll reach a wider audience.
I'm actually doing a "launch" tomorrow, Hopefully I'll get some coverage, and if it's nothing but lookie loos, I can always go to doing the X users per day thing.
As for 1,000 people per day costing you a thousand bucks, you're doing something wrong there. 30K per month gets you at least half a million uniques per month in a competitive market, but you'll have to do your own 'buys', not go through a middle man.
A big media launch will get you most likely about 10 to 15,000 users and you'll drop to about 100 or so after one week. You don't have to believe me of course, but I've been there and done that several times now, the pattern for me so far has been fairly consistent.
People that come from a newsfeed are usually not actively looking for what you are offering just moderately curious.
The time you get them to 'stick' is when they are really in need of what you have to offer.
awesome, thanks! it's http://styleguidance.com :) I've had very good response from the alpha for it, and everyone seems to love it.
I'm going by the rate of return on ads I've seen in the past. Sure you get a ton of clicks, but only a tiny portion actually registers. Way below that 10% you've talked about.
No I trust you, I had a launch similar like that with another site. Had 60K the first two days. 20K on day 3. Then it slowly dwindled down to 1000 users a day. Those seem pretty loyal, but the problem was that it was a content site, that was generated entirely by me, and it wasn't worth focusing all my energy on something that brought in 2-3 bucks a day.
Ok, one link is up, let's see if you can 'catch' some of these visitors, will do another one on a different site.
The text I gave the link is: "If you (or your significant other) want to look your best"
If you want a different text let me know.
Ads are imho a waste of money unless you have a direct track between click and sale and you can measure very accurately which dollars spent give you how much worth of income.
Agree fully on the ads, the only reason I spent any money, was because I had some facebook and adwords credits. And since I'm not even running any ads now(don't want to scare off users), there is no X in ads = X new subscriptions.
Oh btw, I have the url fixer plugin for firefox, and it "fixed" your site to www.com, happened like 3 times before I realized what was going on, you should email that developer and tell him to whitelist your exact url. If that works, you'll get a ton of extra traffic.
Actually I just checked out and www.com appears to be a domain squatter(although he sells www.com email addresses, but there is no site), maybe you could even convince him to change www.com to ww.com
I tried buying the domain of that guy years ago, he's not selling.
[envy]
It is probably the best ROI anybody ever made. I wouldn't be selling if I were in his shoes either, he gets 150K uniques daily on that domain without lifting a finger.
[/envy]
It can't be -that- great. It's all junk traffic, so the CPMs probably suck. My friend owns netflicks.com which redirects to Netflix with a referral link and makes a bit more than www.com probably does.
Sorry for not being more clear. If you had to go and buy that kind of traffic you'd end up paying $1500 per day, that is its value.
You can probably sell it for some multiple of that because 1ct per click is ridiculously low.
So we're talking about at least half a million dollars per year here and probably substantially more, 100% pure profit, near 0 expenses.
Here is a sample of the data of such a site:
http://ww.com/adsense.png , these pages have three adsense tags on them, two with pretty good conversion, one a lot less (but still 3x better than the 'overal average' of all adsense tags that I run.
21,500 euros is roughly 30,000 dollars, 3 million impressions is also roughly 3 million uniques on sites like this, so figure dividide by 20 to get to 150K uniques, which is just about 1500 dollars per day.
And that's just adsense, you can bet that people that live of this stuff tend to put a few more tags on those pages.
The CTRs are ridiculously high because the user doesn't have much choice, they can either click an 'ad' or click 'back'.
Not a very honorable business model though, but then again, would you say no to a free $0.5M per year ?
Hey vaksel, styleguidance.com looks like a really good idea. Just this morning on the bus to work, I was thinking how one could use existing technologies to solve more mundane everyday problems. Your website seems to me a perfect example of that.
I actually started this site, because I always have problems deciding what to buy. I think I own like 3 or 4 things, that I bought myself, the rest I had to get a second opinion to makeup my mind
I think there's a difference between a media launch and a product launch. Fraser wrote a short comment about this directly on the blog post: "I'm also a fan of the notion of decoupling the product launch from the marketing launch. Although, I guess the idea of 'never launch, just iterate' takes it one step further."
Satisfied, returning users is the only way to really grow a business, it's easy to see why:
Even if everybody in the world came by tomorrow but nobody got stuck you'd be looking at 0 traffic on Friday next week, but if instead of that you'd have 1000 new users each day of which 10% got stuck you'd have at least 2,000 visitors per day by Friday next week.
Now 2,000 visitors per day doesn't sound like it is much but depending on the product you might already be in the 'black' at that level. And if not, wait 90 days...
In practice it is a lot harder to get people to come again to your site than it is to get random individuals to come just once.
I remember coming across google the first time and instantly changing my homepage from 'altavista' to 'google'.
That's all it took, it simply worked and worked so much better that there would have been no reason to draw out the switching process.