I started a social news site devoted to cute cat/dog pictures and videos earlier this year. I worked pretty hard on it for a couple of months, only to realize, that I couldn't stand looking at cute shit every day for months on end. So, I took the site down. I got 700 uniques in 3 months, and had 5000 page views.
I learned a few things along the way. I got quite a few initial users off of Mechanical Turk. I submitted a request asking for users to test my application out. I paid them a nickel a piece to have users visit my site, click through a couple of links and post a comment on something cute. I ended up paying around $1 a day, and I got some great feedback from them. It was also fairly low pressure for me, too. I didn't have to worry about things breaking and losing users. The Turkers expected things to break, because I was asking them to test the site out. I recommend trying spending $5 to 10 on the Turk. It's really hard to go wrong.
I also tried advertising using adwords. That was a mixed bag. Initially I got a decend click through rate on my ads because the Westminster Dog show was going on, and people were interested in seeing pictures of cute dogs and cats. So, I got a bunch of decent traffic from that for around $0.10 to 0.20 a visit. But, as I continued advertising on adwords, I started noticing a pretty big bounce rate. So, I cut back on adsense and focused on other channels.
I also spent quite a bit of time emailing bloggers who had cute blogs. I got some traffic from them.
I also spent quite a bit of time posting good comments on other people's blogs. I actually got a couple of clicks a day from people clicking through my signature link on icanhazcheezburger.com.
Probably my ROI was from a comment that I posted on a cute pig video on the LA Times website. I got several good referrals a week for two months off of that single comment.
So, I just put up http://newsley.com which is a business/economic social news site. Right now, I'm just talking to friends and family and getting feedback from them, so I can make changes to the app accordingly. My next step is going to get some feedback from Mechanical Turk. It's a cheap and easy way to elicit good feedback from users.
This time around, I'm going to work with twitter a lot more. A friend of mine developed some decent twitter bot software that categorizes twitter users by value to me and handles the following/unfollowing bit while avoiding spamming people. I think that if you can find twitter users that are interested in your niche, they could probably help out a lot.
I don't really know if I'm going to user adwords or not. It ended up being pretty expensive. My customer acquisition cost using adwords was about $1-2.
I'll still post comments on news stories and articles. I can sleep at night as long as I'm not spamming the comments thread, and I feel like I'm adding something to the discussion. Finally, I'm probably going to go out and press the flesh quite a bit more on this one. I'll probably do a lot more meat space networking for this site.
My friend built it and sold it this past spring. He didn't have a name for it. But, at one point, I think he was managing around 40-50 twitter accounts and had close to 75k followers.
Comments
I started a social news site devoted to cute cat/dog pictures and videos earlier this year. I worked pretty hard on it for a couple of months, only to realize, that I couldn't stand looking at cute shit every day for months on end. So, I took the site down. I got 700 uniques in 3 months, and had 5000 page views.
I learned a few things along the way. I got quite a few initial users off of Mechanical Turk. I submitted a request asking for users to test my application out. I paid them a nickel a piece to have users visit my site, click through a couple of links and post a comment on something cute. I ended up paying around $1 a day, and I got some great feedback from them. It was also fairly low pressure for me, too. I didn't have to worry about things breaking and losing users. The Turkers expected things to break, because I was asking them to test the site out. I recommend trying spending $5 to 10 on the Turk. It's really hard to go wrong.
I also tried advertising using adwords. That was a mixed bag. Initially I got a decend click through rate on my ads because the Westminster Dog show was going on, and people were interested in seeing pictures of cute dogs and cats. So, I got a bunch of decent traffic from that for around $0.10 to 0.20 a visit. But, as I continued advertising on adwords, I started noticing a pretty big bounce rate. So, I cut back on adsense and focused on other channels.
I also spent quite a bit of time emailing bloggers who had cute blogs. I got some traffic from them.
I also spent quite a bit of time posting good comments on other people's blogs. I actually got a couple of clicks a day from people clicking through my signature link on icanhazcheezburger.com.
Probably my ROI was from a comment that I posted on a cute pig video on the LA Times website. I got several good referrals a week for two months off of that single comment.
So, I just put up http://newsley.com which is a business/economic social news site. Right now, I'm just talking to friends and family and getting feedback from them, so I can make changes to the app accordingly. My next step is going to get some feedback from Mechanical Turk. It's a cheap and easy way to elicit good feedback from users.
This time around, I'm going to work with twitter a lot more. A friend of mine developed some decent twitter bot software that categorizes twitter users by value to me and handles the following/unfollowing bit while avoiding spamming people. I think that if you can find twitter users that are interested in your niche, they could probably help out a lot.
I don't really know if I'm going to user adwords or not. It ended up being pretty expensive. My customer acquisition cost using adwords was about $1-2.
I'll still post comments on news stories and articles. I can sleep at night as long as I'm not spamming the comments thread, and I feel like I'm adding something to the discussion. Finally, I'm probably going to go out and press the flesh quite a bit more on this one. I'll probably do a lot more meat space networking for this site.
Hi,
That's a great insight from a person who already tried the things. Can you please tell me the name of the twitter app.
My friend built it and sold it this past spring. He didn't have a name for it. But, at one point, I think he was managing around 40-50 twitter accounts and had close to 75k followers.