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by papa 6401 days ago
In some ways, building the product is the easy part. Getting traction is the really dicey problem.

Check out some of the SEO/SEM sites like seomoz. SEO is very important. Link-building is also important. Look at getting some reciprocal links or at focusing on a specific niche within your site and really trying to develop a core audience around a few musicians/genres in order to get that "critical mass" of interest. Contact other sites in your space and figure out how you can get them to write about and/or drive audience to you. Hold contests. Build widgets. There's no silver bullet (for most of us).

Knowing the type of user that is attracted to your site is also very important. That will really help you narrow down what kinds of sites and techniques you should be using to capture more audience. Do you have a lot of kids on your site? If so, seek out affinity sites. It will be much easier for you to convert that audience to your product. Use sites like Quantcast to discover sites like yours that have traffic. Learn from the successful sites and employ their tricks (are you asking every user to invite their friends when they sign up? if not, you might be missing out on new users).

And, as always, be patient. My website is a little more than 2 years old and we've gone from 1000 visitors/day to 100k+/day. And even now it's still one of my primary tasks every day (figuring out new ways to get word out and encourage inbound traffic). You should be spending several hours a day working on this stuff.

1 comments

papa, this is off-topic, but your site's "ajax_updates_iframe" architecture needs some serious attention. As it stands now, each time it's updated (every few seconds) it creates a new entry in the browser's history (at least Firefox 3's... haven't tested others).

This totally mangles a user's history... after just a few minutes, every entry in my history was fanpop, which I was not at all happy about. I'm sure this upsets others too and there are ways around it (iframe within an iframe, for example, which doesn't affect history). Just FYI.