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What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

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Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#31

Post by agentbleu »

webwright wrote: post #29
agentbleu wrote: post #13

Your all living in dreamland. No one is going to really give a toss about an article here or there, in whatever blog or whatever advert they see. The point is: The internet works a specific way. People who are 'in need' can find that on the net by 'search'. These are the only people that are worth targeting because they are the only ones who give a shit about what your selling/offering. The point is very simple. If y…

Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first): Google, Apple, Craigslist, Ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube... I could probably think of more, but you get the jist. SEO is important to a lot of businesses (especially ecommerce and UGC plays), but not worth early focus for a lot of others.

so when i search google for a red widget i never see ebay listings? are you f kidding? MS was before the net, as was apple, so count them out as they are manufactures not websites, google came up with the best search (given my argument is that the net is all about search) algo and thus gained success, so they dont count. Myspace made its way through the fog with SPAM, youtube got big because they tapped into myspace offering the best music video service, and lost 1 million a month in the process (im still not even sure if they have actually made any profit and I seriously doubt it), social networks have poor quality traffic, albeit alot of it, which costs them a fortune in data centers and makes no cash, Can I safely say the only social network to be in profit is linkedin.

"but not worth early focus for a lot of others" Total crap.

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#32

Post by derefr »

andrewparker wrote: post #19
kyro wrote: post #2

$0.00 Techcrunch, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, news.yc, etc. are all extremely effective places to create buzz for no cost.

Unless you're building the next social news site or a bittorrent client, this is the wrong initial audience for your product. You want to find people that are actually in your target demographic, not the fickle digerati that try 10 new web services a day but never stick around at any of them. You want your initial customer base to be your target demographic because their initial feedback will help shape future iterat…

I never really thought of the "digerati" as actual users for the product; they're more like "carriers" for a (memetic) disease--they'll talk about it to their non-technical friends, set up their own stuff using it as a platform, and so on.

(Not that I have any idea how the religious book market works, but) if you want to sell Bibles, do you go door-to-door, or do you just go to churches and try to get the preachers to use you as their source? The tech crowd are the preachers to the regular joe user--they're the ones interviewed for tech color pieces in the news, they're the ones deciding what software to install in your schools, libraries, workplaces, and government buildings; they're the ones who set your router filtering policies. If the students in a school can goof off on Facebook but not Myspace, guess which one the school's network will live on?

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#33

Post by webwright »

agentbleu wrote: post #31
webwright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first): Google, Apple, Craigslist, Ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube... I could probably think of more, but you get the jist. SEO is important to a lot of businesses (especially ecommerce and UGC plays), but not worth early focus for a lot of others.

so when i search google for a red widget i never see ebay listings? are you f kidding? MS was before the net, as was apple, so count them out as they are manufactures not websites, google came up with the best search (given my argument is that the net is all about search) algo and thus gained success, so they dont count. Myspace made its way through the fog with SPAM, youtube got big because they tapped into myspace…

"Total Crap"? Normally I don't respond to people who can't manage to be polite, but I'm going to make an exception. Here's the quote you should re-read:

"Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first)". Note the "at first". Ebay is certainly focused on SEO right now.

The point is that you can get great without SEO-- and companies often do. And the (unspoken) point was that for some companies, search isn't how their products are found.

Low cost distribution is key for startups, but SEO isn't the only way to get that, and often it's a really inefficient way.

If you were starting salesforce.com today, would you hire an SEO specialist among your first 5 hires? Your first 20? How about 37 signals? What percentage of their traffic do you think comes from generalized search (beyond search for their brand name(s)). How about Slide and RockYou? iLike? Do you think SEO should be an early priority for a widget company?

FWIW, I ran a web consultancy for 7 years with a lot of focus on SEO. I'm a big believer in the value of SEO for many types of businesses... Just not all.

Also FWIW, I'm currently running a business that is growing 7-9% per week for the last 16 weeks (that's 3000%+ annual) with no marketing and negligible SEO (virtually all organic search is for a brand name search). We've got some interesting SEO plans, but I maintain that it's a bad thing to focus on for us right now.

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#34

Post by gscott »

bluelu wrote: post #16
quellhorst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done this? What were the results?

I once paid a guy to write articles and submit them to these article sites. There were a few visitors coming from those sites at the beginning, but it didn't help much. (This has also been 2 years ago, things might have changed)

This helps with inbound links and PageRank as well as some visitors.

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#35

Post by agentbleu »

webwright wrote: post #33
agentbleu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so when i search google for a red widget i never see ebay listings? are you f kidding? MS was before the net, as was apple, so count them out as they are manufactures not websites, google came up with the best search (given my argument is that the net is all about search) algo and thus gained success, so they dont count. Myspace made its way through the fog with SPAM, youtube got big because they tapped into myspace…

"Total Crap"? Normally I don't respond to people who can't manage to be polite, but I'm going to make an exception. Here's the quote you should re-read: "Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first)". Note the "at first". Ebay is certainly focused on SEO right now. The point is that you can get great without SEO-- and companies often do. And the (unspoken) point was that for some compa…

This response is at least an argument! Sorry to sound impolite, but bad advice/decisions costs money. Your main point is that there is another way. OK of course I accept that, but your examples are pretty lousy mind, these are not mum and pup stores, (like the free car ads site the author of this question is promoting).

I insist, even if you have a viral web app/widget, to not focus on SEO from day 1 is missing the whole point of the net and will cost you bucket loads in the long run at best.

FWIW I would be very interested to hear of the app / widget that you are enjoying the 8% weekly growth. Mine is myplaylist which is also enjoying high viral growth.

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#36

Post by webwright »

agentbleu wrote: post #35
webwright wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Total Crap"? Normally I don't respond to people who can't manage to be polite, but I'm going to make an exception. Here's the quote you should re-read: "Here are a few examples of companies that didn't follow this path (at first)". Note the "at first". Ebay is certainly focused on SEO right now. The point is that you can get great without SEO-- and companies often do. And the (unspoken) point was that for some compa…

This response is at least an argument! Sorry to sound impolite, but bad advice/decisions costs money. Your main point is that there is another way. OK of course I accept that, but your examples are pretty lousy mind, these are not mum and pup stores, (like the free car ads site the author of this question is promoting). I insist, even if you have a viral web app/widget, to not focus on SEO from day 1 is missing the w…

RescueTime.com is my current startup (YCO8). Previous startup (which sold in 2006) was an SEO play, so I've done it both ways.

Again, the point I was making (with 10 years of professional SEO experience under my belt) was that for some companies, search isn't how their products are found... If that's the case, an early focus on SEO (the time consuming part-- not the "low hanging fruit") is distracting from more effective distribution channels.

The degree to which you focus on SEO should be proportional to how much your customers are searching for what you offer (you should also roll into the equation the KEI/competitiveness of the target keywords).

There are plenty of businesses whose target customers do NOT USE GOOGLE as a tool find the product. 37Signals is a great mom-and-pop example. Building the next great search engine is another example (people wouldn't search for "search engine"). There are countless others. In addition, any business that's diving into mature verticals where Google is claiming the "2nd click" (weather, images, etc) ought to seriously consider eschewing SEO as an early strategy in favor of other distribution efforts.

Re: What is the minimum budget to promote a site?

#37

Post by abhishekdesai »

STHayden wrote: post #3

I know of a couple places you can get listed for free and get decent traffic for early startups. The Museum of Modern Betas always good for a couple hundred visitors. http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/ Killer Startups is an ass ugly site but can send some traffic. http://www.killerstartups.com/ Simple Spark has not sent me a ton of traffic but they have a nice looking site and will hopefully gain more of an audience.…

add http://spicypage.com to this list
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