The Dollar-a-Day Advertising Strategy
A while back I heard about Eric Reis’ five dollar a day strategy for driving traffic to his site. He was talking about it when he visited us at SEG. The gist of it being that you shouldn’t really have a “launch” for a webapp, rather, just let it grow and adapt to your users in a more organic fashion by spending $5 a day on google ads to drive a small number of people to the site every day.
It’s actually a smart idea, because it drives a steady stream of people to the site and allows you to see how they use the site and see what bugs they hit along the way. This is in stark contrast to simply getting a massive spike of traffic like we did with phonebooking back in 2004. In that case, anything that was wrong with the site was seen by the thousands of people who visited it from the CollegeHumour link. The bulk of the people saw the site as it currently was and didn’t come back. It was very much a flash in the pan (not that I expected that joke to have any staying power, there are only so many humourous ways to assault a friend with a large book).
Applying this to whichishotter, I’ve been using a dollar-a-day advertising strategy on Facebook. The idea being that I pay Facebook a dollar a day to show an ad for the site and this gets be about 5 or 6 random visitors a day. The ads are targeted at Canadian women under 21. It used to be 20-somethings in Vancouver, but Ray Lai had an interesting theory about how social media expands that we’re trying out. This gets a small trickle of new users who vote on things, click on stuff, and break a few things. I have a few users who are really good beta testers, but they are people I know. The average user will not be someone I know and I know really technically competent people.
This allows some of the sites shame to be more private. The first random user I had trying to signup actually hit an error when doing so; something quite embarassing. Fortunately, any landmines hit are seen by a small number of people. I can also track how many comparisons people vote on, which ones they hit, and there isn’t so much data to absorb that it’s like drinking from a firehose.
All-in-all, I’m going for the slow growth. I’d rather respond to how people use the site rather than force them into certain behaviours. Like, right now, I’m learning that people are hesitant to post comparisons of themselves. Perhaps because they haven’t thought of anything interest at that second, or perhaps it’s not easy for the user. These are the little things I can tweak as we go along. It makes for slow growth, but I’d prefer that to flash in the pan. Although, I don’t mind the occasional spike to move things along like with what happened when I posted the UW logo comparison.
The slow strategy also means I have more free time to enjoy the warm Vancouver weather 
Site overhauls can happen when it rains.