What's are some good strategies to attract customers to a new website?
When startups launch a new web site or application, and initially have no customers, what is the best way to attract customers to the site? SEO? Adwords? Word of mouth?
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seriously? what kind of website? is this a social website that requires activity for people to stay? are you looking to convert them into paying customers? get their sign up details? monetize them with display adverts? give us a clue. – Pclark 14 years ago
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It's hard to answer without details about your site. What market, what product, what type of customer? – Jason 14 years ago
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This is a [set of techniques](http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios) that worked for me. Hope this helps! – Peldi Guilizzoni 14 years ago
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I agree its a bit of a vague question, my apologies. – Alex Black 14 years ago
4 Answers
First determine the goals for your website. What is the purpose of your website?
- To convert visitors to customers?
- To build brand awareness?
- To gather market feedback?
- Something else?
Once you've established your goals, it will be much easier to determine the strategy for engaging and attracting visitors. It will also determine the metrics to use to judge whether your strategies are effective.
Once you know your strategy, it's just a matter of picking the most cost-effective way of implementing it.
For example, we wanted to build brand awareness and reach out to thought leaders within our market segment. We found the cheapest, most effective way to do that was to start a blog, participate in discussions on several prominent forums and websites, and post relevant links and comments to Twitter.
Running broad PPC advertising and compiling the queries from referrer links may help your organic strategy. Here's what I did, which happened by accident.
I bid on some generic phrases in AdWords for our niche to get the ball rolling on SEM.
Meanwhile, I SEO'ed our site for the ideal phrase "target stands." Even after several months of tweaking, our site wasn't even showing up in the top 100 organic results. However, something interesting was happening on the SEM side.
I compiled a huge list of queries from the AdWords referrer links. I was surprised to find that there were tons of unique groups of queries that no keyword tool ever suggested, not even Google's. One of those popular queries was "target stands for shooting." It is kind of long, but it is used almost as much as "target stands," probably because of Google's auto suggest feature.
Long story short, I quickly optimized the homepage for the newly discovered phrase, "target stands for shooting." Within 4 days, the GoogleBot indexed the new homepage and now shows up in the #3 spot in the organic results!
I'd say keep SEO, Ads aside for a few months. For best returns, you'll need to spread the message personally for the first few months.
You'll need to prepare a list of emails/contacts you know, then add to it the people who are closely associated with your industry/vertical. Larger the list the better, 500+ will be nice. Reach out to them, ask for their suggestions, beg them to link to your website from their blogs/websites etc. etc.
Once you are done with it, you'll have a much better chance at various other forms of promotions. And yeah this period will help you know - how to acquire more and more customers...
We launched our site 4 months back, and we get 75% of our traffic from Google.
How will Google find you? Have content on your site which will come up in search engines. For the same keywords there could be so many variants and you do know what people are typing for.
I do not have advertising budget and I am not that well connected. So it is all Google.
