You've got an kick ass product. You've launched and had a wild spike in traffic. You're back down to low traffic levels after the initial spike. What do you do to maintain and improve your traffic? You could buy ads but it's expensive and you don't know your ROI on this type of investment yet, its a young product. You want to build more inbound links to your site to help your SEO and traffic. How do you do so? Here are some great ways which helped us build traffic to our own site without ads.
Publish resources for people to use.
Got chops? Know something cool in your industry? Share the goodies with others! We publish all of our technical tutorials and resources on our ZURBplayground. You can find anything from the latest JQuery and CSS3 tricks to iPad stencils on our playground. All these resourses help people create better websites while in turn helping build awareness of our brand.
Publish opinions about current events.
Got an opinion about what's going on in the news? Voice it on your blog, ask others to contribute! We recently asked some influencers if they'd buy Facebook stock after the Goldman Sachs news came out. We published their answers on our blog. This sparked a great discussion with many new and old readers on our blog.
Publish case studies.
Run a quick case study about a trending topic and publish the results from it. Make the topic interesting enough for people to engage with it. After the news about the new Starbucks logo came out we used Verify to poll people on which Starbucks logo they preferred and why. We published the results on our blog. This sparked tons of comments and engagement from readers and other publications on our blog.
Get influencers to speak.
We run a kick ass ZURBsoapbox speaker series where industry leaders come in and share their lessons learned. It's a way for the team and local community to learn from people that have accomplished great things building a product. People like the Head of UX at Google, Head of Design at Facebook, CTO and Pandora share their tips and tricks. We document the event by summarizing the key points from the talks and publish the podcasts on our blog. This is yet another way to share useful lessons learned which others will engage with and ask for more.
So go out there, share some useful information with people, and build your audience ad free!