Free traffic sources for your project with ROI
I have performed few test runs of my soon-to-be-released productized service, and I ended up with quite a lot of data about free sources of traffic and leads they generate for a startup.
Here is a quick recap of few sources, that gave me meaningful data (I have tried many more sources, but the ones below are "general," "popular" and delivered a lot of data, that's why I am sharing them).
The investment here is my time and "ROI" is revenue generated/per hour. The test subjects were three projects - one paid, one with free and paid options, and one with free accounts only.
💥Quora:
Creating engaging, viral answers in niche related questions. I am manually researching questions, which can become one of the featured ones. I try to create long, quality answers that will rank on Google and keep getting traffic.
Total visitors: 10057
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 26 hours
Total conversions: 559
Conversion: 5,5%
Revenue Generated: $611
Revenue per hour: $23.5
The test showed that Quora traffic is universal, but the best use of it is with free to use option, so users can test it before buying anything.
💥Reddit:
Reddit is all about viral content - the bigger audience you can reach, the better chances are for you to get paying customers. So you need to create something that falls within the current (often weekly or monthly) trends. In all honesty, Reddit is hit and miss - if you will create content, that can be taken as self-promotion, you can get downvoted completely.
Total visitors: 2289
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 11 hours
Total conversions: 283
Conversion: 12.3%
Revenue Generated: $517
Revenue per hour: $47
Reddit traffic is one-size-fits-all. You pick the subreddit that matches your niche to get access to a targeted audience instantly.
💥IndieHackers:
Highly viral, community-oriented website. Before you can try to get visitors, you are better to get some trust by sharing kickass, helpful content.
Total visitors: 3953
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 18 hours
Total conversions: 6
Conversion: 0.15%
Revenue Generated: $944
Revenue per hour: $52
If you are in SMB niche, then IndieHackers is an excellent place to hang. You can learn valuable stuff and socialize with like-minded people.
💥HackerNews:
HN is one, that can make you, or break you. I find that re-sharing content created for other sites works best - you can host it on Medium or another blogging platform as a "buffer."
Total visitors: 22909
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 16 hours
Total conversions: 503
Conversion: 2.19%
Revenue Generated: $645
Revenue per hour: $40
HN is one that is often called hit and miss - but more often a miss. You need to post right thing in the right moment. Otherwise, your content will get lost. I would advise on using HN to complement other methods and re-share content created for other mediums. I would use it mostly for tech related stuff.
💥Facebook:
I have heard a lot of bad about Facebook, but I took a lot of time to refresh my skills in reaching niche groups. This resulted in quite good numbers. Facebook is all about the first impression. Users scroll through a ton of content, so you need to do everything in your power to stop them for a second - you can use images and unique headlines. With each group, it is good to build up a bit your name by sharing valuable content.
Total visitors: 6896
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 18 hours
Total conversions: 231
Conversion: 3.3%
Revenue Generated: $652
Revenue per hour: $36
Good revenue, but a lot of very intensive work is required to get the results. It will take a few hours before you will get the hang of it. You can target communities based on their interests, which works well.
💥LinkedIn:
For me personally the most challenging platform. It is tough to surface above all the low quality, overly hyped content. If I targeted LinkedIn as a part of the strategy, I would invest more time in building up "brand" and followers before starting any promotion.
Total visitors: 1185
Total time spent acquiring visitors: 10 hours
Total conversions: 22
Conversion: 1.85%
Revenue Generated: $204
Revenue per hour: $20
If you have a B2B or jobs related project, then LinkedIn is your thing! Hard to get first leads, but once they start rolling in, it gets easier.
So here you have it, I hope this helps some of you. If you have questions regarding traffic generation or anything else - ask in comments!
Nice insight, thanks @BartBoch :)
Thanks!
Thank you for sharing. Amazing post! :)
That is a nice list. How many times do you have to post into each to get maximum benefits
It depends really. Reddit is usually 1-3 times. HN is 1-2 times; Quora is 15-25 times (trying to optimize this though), Facebook probably around 15-20 as well, LinkedIn - I am still working on that one, IH 4-5. That's roughly - it changes depending on if I have reached the target or not.
Thanks for sharing!
Sure thing!
nice work! can you share the general categories of products you tested? B2C vs B2B, etc
B2B, B2B/B2C (business related, can be used by both), and B2C. I very selectively picked the projects to have the whole spectrum.
To make things more precise - I have promoted three different businesses.
Really appreciate the insight, will save a lot of us a lot of time!
I am glad to hear that!
Thank you for this detailed report. Not surprised at LI. Any views about twitter, PH?
I will be doing PH soon, I decided to focus on "work hard to get constant results" platforms, rather than a one-off like PH for now. With the ones I posted, I can get repeat results, while with PH you cannot really, despite being an amazing source of traffic. As of Twitter, not enough data:
187 - Twitter (9 signups) - 1 hour - 9 signups/hour - 4.8%
(this is for entertainment project)
There is more data, but I have not had time to gather it (this is a very time-consuming process, unfortunately).
How is the revenue "generated"? What are you selling and are you selling the same thing to each audience?
Without that information, the rest of the numbers are fairly hard to do much with.
I have done 3 projects, one for B2B, one for B2B/B2C (can serve both), and one for B2C.
B2B was my own service https://afteridea.com
Two others are not owned by me, so I cannot give much detail.
B2B/B2C was in a business niche, related to finances. It serves both companies and regular users. It's free to use with an upgrade available to extend its features.
B2C was in a specific entertainment niche. Free to use, people can (don't need to) signup to get more features.
Here are specifics (the numbers might be slightly off, as I do not remember if this is final edit - I have redone calculations when writing the article today):
Total - 22,531 visitors - $3376 in 24 sales - 55 hours spent promoting it - $61.38/ph - $0.14/revenue per visitor
Total - 7732 visitors - 344 signups (69 paid, $345 MRR added) - 23 hours - 15 signups per hour - 4.4% conversion (20% free to paid, 0.9% visitor to paid).
Total - 21,172 visitors - 1440 signups - 34 hours - 42 signups per hour worked - 6.8% conversion
Were all three promoted in similar ratios on HN, FB, Reddit, etc? If not, it's not really an apples to apples comparison for the sites!
It's not apples to apples, and it never will be :)
The B2C was not promoted on LinkedIn; only B2B was promoted on IndieHackers. All other channels were used similarly.
This is not scientific data, when I pulled out, I found it interesting, so I published. Everyone should do their due diligence of possible lead sources.
Still it's useful to have the clarification, so thanks!
Sure, the more data there is, the better!
@BartBoch I just launched: https://www.mynext.team (Jobs oriented). I'm curious about your LinkedIn approach for driving traffic. Did you just post public updates or was it more 1 to 1 messaging?
Any insight on how I could reach Employers first (to drive job listings) and then Job Seekers second through LinkedIn.
Thanks!
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-use-linkedin-to-promote-your-home-business-1794731
This is a good start (sorry, just picked randomly). Once you get a hang of basics, you can try visiting marketing forums that have a LinkedIn section or pick a fresh ebook about the subject. I think LinkedIn has the highest learning curve to do it right, I am still battling it myself.
Thanks for the link, I'll dig deeper. Cheers!
I really like how you broke down your post. Can you talk about what you were doing per channel? Were you just posting interesting content? Engaging with the existing posts?
Majority of my activity was based on creating content, rather than engaging in comments. Content created by you will get more exposure than comments in most cases.
Thank you for the information, can you elaborate on Quora, how did you pick which questions do answer, as some I quite old. Also did you create your own questions
There are few methods actually, but usually one of the two is best.
Either find a new-ish question with 20+ followers and 2-3 answers or find a popular question with 200+ followers and slightly outdated best answer.
Nope, I did not create my own questions. I think there is enough on Quora already.
First of all, thanks a lot for taking out the time to write this post. Can you please elaborate on how you got traffic from Reddit? Did you submit a post with a link to your website, or did you put a link to your website in the comments?
It was done using textual posts, I have did fa ew tests with comments (quite good), but they are not included in the results.
Thanks for getting back. Would it be possible for you to share the links to some of those Reddit threads? That would be very helpful. If you can't, I understand the reasons. Once again, thank you very much for such a great post :)
Unfortunately, this would reveal other test subjects, and I promised to keep them anonymous. Thanks!
Hey Bart! Thanks for the share!
On facebook were you doing ads or just narrowing down on niches in public/private groups?
Nope, no ads, all was done using the organic content. So its groups + comments on group posts/niche pages.
Great, thanks Bart :)
Hi,
thanks for sharing your experience. I have a couple of questions, though. About FB:
Which "ton of content" do you mean if you spend only 18 hours for FB? What actually have you been doing that time? Or, 18 hours didn't include the time when you produced that content?
And the same about IH - I saw only 1 article, so which "kickass, helpful content" are you talking about?
And, it would be great, if you give a little bit more details about your business.
Thanks!
I have used IH only for my own service to test the waters. The results were better than expected. I have posted I think 5 articles/discussions - 4 with journey and 1 about something else.
As of FB, no, that includes creating content for it. Most of the time it is working with groups. There are some comments involved as well.
As of more details about business - I have, its in one of the comments :)