Generating Web Traffic for Startup Founders
Generating organic traffic isn’t overly difficult, but it takes time, and there aren’t any silver bullets. It’s a process that pays dividends over time as you work toward imprinting your brand into the minds of your target market. This way, when you have a product to sell, there is already a group of people likely to try it. I’ve done this with a few of my startups, and it has proven to be an incredibly effective way to drive traffic to a website and build brand awareness. Follow these steps, and you’ll be in a great position to launch a product to fanfare.
Build a following
When it comes to social media, you need to treat your personal accounts and business accounts as the amplifiers. When I start a new startup, I always create business accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If you have a B2C company, Instagram is also a great account to have.
Create accounts everywhere that your audience is likely to visit. The more, the better. By using multiple social media sites, you get better exposure across your market. Once you have everything set up, it’s important to post content every day or 2 for each account. It doesn’t need to be your own original content, just relevant. I usually spend 1–2 hours a week finding interesting articles about topics that my target market cares about.
After posting content on the company account, share it from your private account. I think it’s worth noting that you should also be posting extra non-company posts to your personal account. Use the extra posts to show off your interests and interact with people. Doing this regularly and consistently will help you build a social media audience interested in your company when you launch. To make managing this process easier, you can use services like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Share your expertise
Nothing creates credibility faster in the eyes of others than writing down your opinions. People love reading blogs discussing their favorite topics. By blogging about something that your market cares about, you can start to build an audience that considers your company an expert source of information. The key is to make sure the content is relevant to your company's problem and be interesting to the user. Don’t get discouraged if you aren’t an expert on the topic. In the beginning, articles may take longer to write. Over time you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the topics, and articles won’t take so long. In the meantime, you’ll be gaining invaluable expertise while researching for your posts. This will help when you talk to potential users.
The power of communities
There are amazing communities out there like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Meetups. The key to not being shunned by a community is providing value and following the community's rules. On Reddit, for example, they might not approve of self-promoting posts, whereas Product Hunt is all about it. The key is making sure you know the rules of the communities you participate in.
PageRank isn’t dead yet
Even though Google is moving away from the PageRank algorithm that started their journey, they still rely on page ranking. There are also a ton of places that you can list your startups, like angel.co or f6s.com. By creating links to your site on these other sites, Google will pick up those connections, and you’ll get a boost in where your site ends up among their search results. I don’t suggest paying for services that claim to offer beta users or whatnot. In my experience, these services don’t really deliver on their promises, and the link alone isn’t worth the cost.
Targeting your competitors
I know some people may not agree with me, but paying for ads isn’t always bad. You shouldn’t be spending thousands a month on ads when you are still looking for product-market fit, but spending some money on ads in the early days can help get your brand out there. I don’t suggest putting all of your eggs into one type of ad.
Running a generic ad on Google/Facebook/Instagram can be expensive, and in my experience, it doesn’t lead to great conversions in the early days. So you don’t want to spend a ton, but you do want to make sure that your ad shows up alongside your competitors. Don’t play the same game as the bigger competition and compete over the same keywords. Instead, do something different. One tactic that I particularly like is paying for your competitors' names as keywords. Many people will search for a company name when looking for alternatives, so by bidding on the names of your competitors, you’ll get your ad showing up when potential users search for them.
Another option is display ads. With display ads, you get a greater reach per dollar since the cost per click of a display ad is usually less than a dollar. While you are waiting for those clicks, your ad is still being shown to many people, which also helps raise the top-of-mind awareness you want to build with potential users.
Give it time
If you‘re diligent about building your brand, you can do it in small chunks of time over the course of months. In my experience, there isn’t an alternative to this process. You can’t just spend a month before launch building a brand and expect people to care when that day comes. Get started early, and you’ll be able to build slowly without distracting too much from the immediate needs of your startup. I don’t usually spend more than 4 hours a week managing this process. Usually, within months, I’ll hear people telling me that they have heard of my insignificant startup somewhere recently.
