3 tactics I used to get 5,000 visitors to my startup in the first month.

So you’ve launched a startup. The ‘hard work’ has apparently been done, and you have what you think, is an amazing site. Now what? Sit back and simply wait for people to find your amazing creation? Wishful thinking! It’s like you’ve thrown this amazing party at the world’s greatest venue… but no one's turned up yet. Chances are you’ll have a tech co-founder who might think along the lines of mine…

‘I prefer to go with the age old concept that if you have a good product it should sell itself. So my thinking around this was that hopefully we shouldn’t need much PR or marketing at all. Especially in this modern world where everyone is connected. I know you’re shaking your head at my naive views.’

If only getting visitors were this easy! Even the BEST ideas need to start somewhere. Airbnb, Uber, and Snapchat weren’t overnight successes, and your startup won’t be either. Truth is, you’ll need to grind and hustle for EVERY… LAST.... CLICK. Early on, it’s not marketing - it’s on-line begging. It’s the easiest thing for someone to click on their mouse button, but it’s the hardest thing in the world to get them to click on and visit YOUR site.

And so your marketing budget is set at the grand sum of $0 - where to start? The most logical place, regardless of what your startup is, is with your personal network. But a lot of these people won’t be even close to your target demographic. Never the less, it will get you some initial traffic, and make you feel great about life. It will feel fantastic to get that initial hit, but once day two hits and you’ve told all your friends... what next?

The below are 3 practical and free ways that helped our startup MuzeRoom reach 5,000 unique visitors in our first 4 weeks after launch. They are not necessarily scaleable - but rather ways in which I was able to get things moving in the right direction quickly. As your traffic grows, you of course alter your approach to marketing.

1. Blog, but DON'T SELL Your Startup!

You are quite obviously reading a blog post. The most important thing about this blog post is that it’s not about my startup MuzeRoom specifically. It is designed first and foremost to give the reader value. If as a result of that I get hits back to my site, then fantastic. If not, that’s OK too. What you’ll find though is that the more value you give, the more interested people will be in what you are doing.

As well as giving value, write about something of human interest - a personal story that people can relate to. Here are some examples from blogs I’ve written so far:

1. If Not Now, When? How I decided when to quit my job to focus on MuzeRoom [GOOD]
2. 9 Things I’ve learnt in the 30 days since launching my first startup Practical advice for other founders at a similar stage [GREAT]
3. MuzeRoom Gets You Closer to Music News How great MuzeRoom is at staying in touch with music news. [BAD].

People won’t react to shameless promotion, because we simply have enough marketing in our lives. So concentrate on giving value at every corner, and you’ll be on the right track.

I use the blogging platform Medium, which was developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. It’s literally like a longer form Twitter, and each post can have up to three tags (similar to hashtags). By choosing these carefully you can get a little organic reach - I saw up to 15% on my best post, so make sure you choose your tags wisely. You get access to really useful stats on Medium, and like any social platform of course you can grow your followers.

I won’t go too deep on how to win on Medium, because there are other articles that will do that much better than I can - How to win on Medium and Going Viral on Medium.

There is untold value relating to how you roll out your blog posts too. It’s not all in the writing - it’s not simply ‘write and they will come’. As soon as I publish a blog post on Medium, I promote the link via the following means:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Hacker News on Y Combinator
Private entrepreneurship groups on Facebook (join some, but make sure you participate in discussion and are an active member of the group before promoting your blog link).
Email all of my Medium followers I know personally to ask them to recommend (ie like) my post immediately.

I then give the blog post a good 7 days to bed in, and then repost natively (i.e. not the link to Medium, but the actual post in FULL) on:

LinkedIn + 7 days
Reddit + 14 days

You’ll notice that I already promoted the Medium link via LinkedIn. 7 days later what I do is then publish the content as an original piece on LinkedIn, which gives you additional reach. By doing this, my overall reads went up by 25.8%. Of course LinkedIn are going to give you more organic reach on a native post than they are on a link to a Medium blog post. More on how to approach Reddit later.

If you nail a sweet spot, something strange starts to happen - people you have never met before start sharing your post like this, this, and this. It’s a great feeling as more people start to become interested in your journey. And of course you get more traffic to your site as a result.

Lesson: Give value through your blogging, write about something of human interest, and make sure you have a roll out plan.

2. Find Your Target Audience on Twitter

A lot of people have written Twitter off as a platform, but nothing beats it for finding and speaking directly with people you’d otherwise not be able to reach. When we launched I wanted hardcore music fans to know we existed, and so I set out to find them on Twitter.

Searching for terms like ‘music geek’, ‘music tech’, and ‘music social media’ were the logical places to start. And sure enough, these returned pure gold - people mention these terms not only in their tweets, but even better in their account bio. Bingo! Thousands of results, all of whom would surely love MuzeRoom - but now what?

Tweet them! As you can see, I have room to include 3-4 music fans per tweet (depending on how many characters their names have). The great thing about how I’ve approached this is that I am calling out music fans for their opinion. It feels great to be singled out as an expert, and the chances of them visiting and responding as a result are much higher than saying ‘HEY VISIT MY SITE ITS GREAT’.

As a result I generated loads of new visitors and feedback like this, this, and even people promoting us like this! I did this 3 times a day most days when we first launched. It might not be scaleable, but it’s a great way to get people to your site as soon as you launch.

Lesson: Find your target market on Twitter, and make them feel special by tweeting them for their opinion.

3. Don’t Sell Yourself on Reddit

Ah Reddit. You either love it, hate it, or are terrified by it. To start with, I fell into the latter category. Truth is, if you get it right you can drive a LOT of traffic in a short space of time. There are LOADS of articles out there on exactly how to tackle and win on Reddit, so this is not intended to be a comprehensive guide.

The main thing to realise with Reddit is you CANNOT promote your site. You need to provide value, and engage in conversation (ya know, just like all modern day digital marketing!). If you engage in shameless self promotion, you’ll get shot down, trolled, or banned from subreddits. I experienced all three before truly understanding how to effectively go about it.

For MuzeRoom, we are constantly looking for new music blogs to aggregate content from. Whilst I am knowledgeable about music, I simply can’t know all genres and blogs in depth without talking to fans. So I talked to them! I identified subreddits dedicated to different genres of music (of which there are MANY), asked their opinion, and engaged in a dialogue.

Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it really FAILED! But for the most part it was a success, and not only did this drive new users to our site, but it gave us really REALLY good feedback as well as blog suggestions.

As I mentioned earlier, I also post my blogs to Reddit 14 days after they first go on Medium. My last post saw HUGE success on the Entrepreneur and Startups subreddits - trending top in both of those at one point. You’ll notice it’s exactly the same post in both subreddits - that’s OK! I spaced them out by a few days, and checked-in with the moderators to ensure they were OK with this approach. This resulted in our biggest ever traffic day - almost 1,000 new unique visitors!

Lesson: Sell your site by not selling your site. Provide value, engage in conversation, and enjoy genuine feedback and fresh new traffic to your site.

DO IT!

5,000 visitors certainly won’t make you rich and famous, but it IS an essential and rewarding first step in your startup journey. It’s AMAZING when you start to see traffic to your site from places you don’t know anyone. OMG I HAVE TRAFFIC FROM EL SALVADOR! I haven’t even BEEN to El Salvador! Likewise on Facebook you start getting likes from people you are not connected to. This is the digital crack that spurs you on. People who aren’t required to tell you how great you are (i.e. your friends) are turning up. And if you’re onto something, they’ll start to tell you how great you are too.

But don’t take the above as a blueprint for how to guarantee yourself 5,000 UV’s when you launch. Make it your own, and tweak it ensure it’s fit for purpose. Experiment, evolve your approach, and most of all, have fun with it!

---

Quick Favour: Please RESTEEM this story to let us know you enjoyed it, and to help us share the word about MuzeRoom :-)

Learn more about MuzeRoom here.