So, yesterday we looked at many different marketing strategies to have people flocking to your website. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, please go and read that first by CLICKING HERE. This article is a continuation of yesterday’s and we will pick up where we left off with some more effective and diverse marketing stategies to drive a lot of traffic to your website for free.

More Marketing Strategies to Bring You Lots of Visitors..

Be the first to get onto a new user acquisition platform: There is a window when a new channel launches when users are still “gullible” enough to be harvested. Yelp did it with SEO, Zynga did it with Facebook. The same tactics don’t work when both the users and the channel get more sophisticated later on. Advice is: keep an eye out and get in there fast.

“Steal” Users: There are a lot of niche classifieds and e-commerce sites that compete with Craigslist. Quite a few of them started off by posting listings on Craigslist and directing the traffic to their site.

Use Widgets; Be shareable and embeddable: Facebook sharing was great but users have, over time, become desensitized to what gets shared on Facebook. Instead, ensure that what gets created on your platform can get shared where your savvy users want to share it, namely on blogs and niche forums. YouTube got traction because MySpace users (musicians) needed a way to share videos and Youtube offered them a solution

Fake it ‘til you make it: When users come initially to your platform and there’s nothing there, they see little value in using it. Platform usage requires investment; you set up a profile, you browse around… it takes time. Users won’t invest if they don’t see activity. Well, if there isn’t any activity, create some. Reddit did it. Paypal did it. A lot of marketplaces do it. Once you create some activity, more users start coming over and things start to happen!

Piggyback on an existing network: Piggyback on a thriving network as long as your platform is contextual and complementary to that network. StumbleUpon benefited a lot from being one of the first plug-ins on the Firefox browser. It was a natural complement to a browser which is essentially used to find information. It was one level of abstraction above Google’s “I’m feeling Lucky” if i could put it that way.

Seed the community on standalone mode: Essentially, a user should be able to derive value out of the product or website even when other users aren’t on it. A product that has standalone value irrespective of the network is more likely to get traction among at least one set of users.

Design your product to align growth and engagement: e.g. when I post this on Quora, it will allow me to broadcast it to my network. Posting the answer helps with engagement, the simultaneous broadcast helps grow Quora. These type of actions make great marketing strategies.

Provide a service for other affiliates that enables them to interact with their consumers: This is so obvious, it’s often ignored. If you already have affiliates they already have consumers. There, that’s the solution to getting in more users for free. Loyalty startups like Shopkick also do something similar. Get the affiliates, get their consumers on the network, cross-promote other affiliates to these consumers. Rinse. Repeat.

Content marketing is AMAZING free marketing: Blog away like the guys at Buffer and Mint, and not about your product, just anything that your target market would want and that would make them want to explore the product.

SEO at scale: Ensure that whenever users create content, the permalinks are search-engine friendly. This is a great way to get users to market your product, service or website. Quora does this amazingly. Check the URL above.

If you’re building for user-generated content, ensure that users create good content and are appropriately motivated: Usually, only about 1-10% of your community actively contribute content. To keep creating value, you need to ensure you cater to their motivations.

Create organic virality, a product that spreads every time it’s used: SurveyMonkey, EventBrite, MailChimp, and the original HotMail, are products that just have to be spread to be used. But even if your product or service doesn’t fall in this category, you can create features that show this property. For organic virality, ensure that there is a non-monetary incentive for users to spread the word.

Find a hook that turns your users into marketing agents. Examples include:

– Skype

– WordPress

– Thumblr

– About.me

– Whatsapp

– Dropbox,

Using Dropbox as an example, to-date they have over 100 million users. The early days were much more challenging. Their initial marketing strategies were based on buying Google adwords too. Other channels were tested as well. The challenge was that AAC for the free service hit $1000. One of the experiments was a simple video posted on Digg, a social news service. Within 24 hours the waiting-list hit 75,000. Dropbox, by the way, also implemented a hook. Since it was a sharing file service, sharing the file with non-Dropbox members required them to register and download the client to get access to the file shared. Similar to Instagram, Dropbox utilized its users to promote Dropbox for free.

Focus on superconnectors: Remember, Branchout gained rapid adoption the day Michael Arrington downloaded the app. He had a large following on Facebook. Marketing strategies that involve be-friending leaders have been successful and authority for your own site can be created through those leaders.

Build an invite list before you launch your site, parts of your site or specific products: Nothing is as good as having a Launchrock-powered user base raring to hit your product on day 1.These type of marketing strategies work particularly well in product and network marketing type launches.

Demonstrate immediate value for all users: Often marketplaces never have value when users visit in the early days. Groupon solved this by doing 2 things very well:

A. Solving for the buyer: Focusing on a specific transaction and attracting buyers to a current and live transaction rather than a (dead) marketplace with a potential for future transaction

B. Solving for the seller: Allowing the seller to back out if a minimum number of buyers were not achieved

Make the two-sided network one-sided: Target a specific group which has both the consumers and producers of your service and where the lines between them blur. Even if they are two distinct types of users, the members of this group fulfill both requirements, or at least some of them do. This is important because the word of mouth required to spread the word among the producers simultaneously spreads the word among the consumers  as well since they’re part of the same group. This is what worked for Etsy. People who make crafts typically like to buy from other craftspeople. This really helped them target exactly one group and spark transactions within that successfully before branching out.

Provide access to new production infrastructure that the user would use even if the network was a ghost town: When Youtube started off, users didn’t care if there was a network of potential users, early users were happy enough to have a facility to host a video easily and embed it on their sites.

Be exclusive but be smart about it: Try starting with an invite-only beta. However, this is not a one size fits all as what worked for gmail didn’t work for google wave. Make sure you research your area when implementing these types of marketing strategies.

Get a marquee player or seed your own content: An extension to the above point, sometimes, signing up a top-notch producer can help draw consumers in, especially if you serve as an exclusive channel for that producer. Once consumers come in, other producers can be signed on and the network grows.

Remove barriers to product usage: Also known as “Build a great product”. Create a product that makes something that people want to do, but currently can’t do, extremely accessible to them.

There we have it, lots of marketing stategies that are not always considered when trying to grow traffic. I hope that these have given you some ideas for how you can apply these to your own business. I don’t know the specifics of your exact product or service, but this is a general guideline that any online business can follow. We will re-visit this topic in future posts.

Which marketing strategies are you currently using?