18 replies to this topic

[doogie88]

I'm making a site, that's a joke, but almost seems serious.
It's just a fun project, for the hell of it.
It's a site that no one would ever search for, so SE rank is not important.
I have no video so can't use youtube.
So what's the best way to get the site out initially, to as many people as possible?
Myspace
Link directories
Anything else?

[Jill]

Start sending emails to your friends which point to it. If it's truly great, they will spread it without you doing anything more. If it's not so great it will end there.

[Randy]

If there are new things added to the site from time to time it would probably be wise to set up a mailing list of some sort early in the process too. I have a musician friend from London who did that with his personal site. Started out just sending an email to 20 of his closest friends. Now, a few years down the road, every time he releases some cool new audio, video of him playing with this or that group or even some of his photographs (a hobby for him) it goes out to a several thousand folks who have signed up for his mailing list.

No SEO has ever been done on the site and there's honestly not enough text to do any SEO on the site as it now stands with everything being audio files, video files or images. But he still gets a thousand or visitors per day on average, spiking up to several thousand on the day or two per month he sends something out to his list.

If a few of your friends or friends of your friends happen to be big into social networking, have their own newsletter and/or are into blogging they'll end up doing all of the work for you, assuming your site is truly interesting and you give them an easy way to get notification of updates.

[doogie88]

Thank you both.
I guess we shall see.
It's stupid, but just something fun.
I'll post when ready.

[alexf2000]

There are special people who can spread "viral news", not everyone can do it. So you need to find this people. This of couse can be done in coincident if you send emails to all your friends.

[doogie88]

Question, should I add "Send this to a friend?"
And also, what about Digg and things like that? I've never used Digg, is it ever used for regular webpages? Should I that?

[Jill]

Sure, use whatever you can and learn what works and what doesn't for the next time.

[doogie88]

Okay, I read the help on Digg and FAQs. I see I can submit my article to Digg. But I see on sites, usually blogs, the 'digg this' button. Would I add that somewhere to the site?

** I found 'addthis.com', so I used that.
Also added refer a friend page.

Edited by doogie88, 18 April 2008 - 11:55 AM.

[nethy]

By definition a 'viral website' is one that you are not promoting the users are.

So the job of the owner is basically to have in-built some mechanism for making them want (the successful examples up to now generally did this by making users actually create the thing that they were supposed to promote) to promote it and also making it easy/fun to promote it.

Different examples of viral sites have done this to varying degrees. With some focusing more on the former and some on the latter. Almost all have an element of both.

[annd]

make a squidoo lens
invite your facebooks friends - they wont mind - the site is for fun
if you have something to give away from your site- submit it to freebies sites
my favorite are JV - I get good traffic from them

[tannerc]

I agree with Nethy. Remember that things that go viral do so because the people interested in them decided to share with a friend, then those friends decided to share with their friends and so on. So the best way to get a viral website out there is to talk to your friends and acquaintances, tell them to check it out and to share it with their friends if they like it.

[nethy]

Question, should I add "Send this to a friend?"
And also, what about Digg and things like that? I've never used Digg, is it ever used for regular webpages? Should I that?

Well, if you're planning on spreading the site virally (as opposed to having it spread virally), you'll need to get to know all the viral marketing tools. that is of course all the tools that people use to communicate to each other about fun, silly sort of stuff.

Email, is still one of them (Jill even blogs with an email newsletter). Digg is another. You'll want to use all the majors & maybe some smaller ones if you want to give it the best chance. It's better if you're an actual user of these things. Give you an idea of how the dynamic works.

Think of it this way: Your goal is to submit a topic to HR that will stay active for more then a week with 20+ comments

Do you think that someone who joins today could do it? Maybe. But probably not. I think I would have a decent chance, but far fro 100%. Some older users could do it in their sleep.

Most viral stuff is like that but on speed. Stuff moves a lot faster and the difference between something that goes viral & something that flop is far bigger (even if you ask something like: "I have a site and I need Google to love it. My friend says I need an alt tag. What should I do?" on HR, You'll probably get one or two polite answers, a link & maybe even a clarification. You might even last a couple of days. On Digg or other such sites, 99% of submissions flop (no comments, no diggs) the 1% that don't get seen by thousands of people, get 100s of comments etc. Then they can move organically between sites, tools, etc. when users see them & submit them.

[ezwoodz]

better to introduce it here and to other forums as well

[torka]

Depends on what you mean by "introduce" it. Including a link in your signature file (keeping in mind our [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?act=boardrules]Forum Rules[/url]) would probably be OK. Link-dropping in a post would definitely not be.

Other forums' rules may vary.

--Torka

[savantcreative]

Can you Twitter something like that?