Growth Hacks: Website Traffic Generation Tips

A common question I see asked a lot by first-time startup founders and marketers on sites like Quora and Reddit Startups is “How do I drive more traffic to my startup’s new website or landing page?”

When you don’t have an active user base, any backlinks, or a marketing budget to run paid ads, generating more website traffic can be a genuine challenge, so I’m going to share a few of my favorites growth tips with you.

Here’s a quick list of some of the channels I’ve found to be most effective for acquiring new, organic website traffic:

1. Get your startup or project onto one of BetaList‘s emails (I’ve done this twice and gotten >200 unique signups both times from it for separate projects).

2. Find ways to post things on Craigslist that reference your company (gigs, job posts). I’ve found this strategy definitely drives traffic to website, although often times the quality of the traffic is relatively low-quality compared to some of the other method’s referenced in this post. This approach also worked really well for AirBnB and, more recently, CoachUp.

3. Post quality content and comments on Quora, Reddit, Hacker News, Quibb, Inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com (depending on your content’s subject matter and relevance to those audiences).

4. Create a good infographic and put it on Visually so people find it. I’ve found tech and business journalists often browse Visual.ly looking for new content, and are happy to pull your infographic (assuming they like it) and incorporate it into an article or feature. Doing this got BuzzFork more inbound links and traffic than any other experiment I tried in the first month we launched.

5. Speaking of BuzzFork, hot damn does this app work well for auto-generating awareness (and website traffic) from Twitter [disclaimer: I created it, but there’s a reason why my #1 paying customer demographic is other startups]. In fact, if you’re reading this post and visiting me from Twitter, chances are BuzzFork had a little something to do with it.

6. Write something awesome on Medium that establishes you as a credible thought leader and natively link to your startup/project. When I wrote an unsolicited look at some great product marketing features of Quibb on Medium, the article had a brief viral period during the startup community, racking up over 2,000 views in 72 hours, which led to some traffic to all my web properties from people wondering who the hell I was.

All of the quality ecosystems I mentioned above can be rich sources of website traffic generation to jumpstart your growth hacking efforts. Hope this list proves helpful, and I’d love to hear in the comments section about some quality growth hacking channels that have proved successful for you.