Just launched a new site: My stats & some questions on growth
1. Offering something of value (by either solving a problem or making something easier or cheaper), and
2. Appealing to your target audience on an emotional level
The goal of my website (the site is: ravepad.com) is to become an online destination where you can find a fan club / fan page for anything, or create one if it doesn't already exist. How is that different from Facebook pages? Facebook pages are managed by one person, with RavePad the goal is to allow anyone to add content (images, video, wall posts, forums/discussions, quizzes, articles, comments, etc) as a community. No one person owns the fan club, everyone does.
The stats:
When I launched the site a couple of months ago, I was getting 10 unique visitors a day.
As of today, (after months of data addition and feature updates, and countless long nights), I'm at 900 unique visitors a day, and 2200 pageviews per day (translates to about 25-30k unique visitors a month, but my goal for 2012 is 1 million uniques a month. How do I get there?).
So far I haven't spent a dime on internet marketing (that may change but no plans to do that in the immediate future). The traffic comes mostly from Google/Facebook/Bing, organically.
I have adsense ads up, but I make almost nothing from that per day (I'm focusing on creating something long term/sustainable and that has value. I'm a firm believer that if you build something valuable, if it appeals to an audience, they will find you - and if you build something that delights them, they will come back).
Since launch late last year, I've seen a "slow and steady" growth. It hasn't taken off like a rocket ship like instagram did - but I'm not complaining. I realize the site isn't "feature complete" yet, and there is a lot of work to do, mainly:
1. Expand - Move out of celebrities to other niches that appeal to a wider audience (the plan is: movies, sports, music, travel, not necessarily in that order).
2. Allow anyone to add content (fan clubs, pages, articles, images, video, etc). At the present moment it has all been added manually or via scripts.
3. Add features to improve engagement / stickiness, virality, Monetization, Tracking and Analytics, Performance / Scaling)
What I'd like is to open up this question to anybody and everybody, with these specific focus areas:
1. Community - how do I turn each page (or fan club) into a community, for example this one on Minka Kelly:
ravepad.com/page/minka-kelly
Each celebrity (there are 20000 of them on the site now) has it's own "page" or fan club.
For the community to grow, I'd like to have people start adding wall posts and comments, (and eventually images, video, polls and quizzes when I open up that functionality to anybody). But how do I get each page's (or fan club's) community started?
2. Registrations - How do I get more people to create accounts and register? Right now, the incentive I use is that you need to create an account to save your responses to picks/polls and quizzes...but I realize that isn't reason enough to generate more sign ups. Thoughts here?
3. Stickiness (right now an average person spends 30 seconds - 1 minute on any given page, I'd like to increase that as much as possible). I have some ideas how to make that happen, but they are average at best, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think I could do to make that happen.
4. Engagement (average 3% of visitors are returning / repeat, with 97% of them on any given day being new visitors). How do I get to 30% or even 50% repeat visitors?
5. Virality: I'd like to eventually achieve the "zen" of having the site grow by word of mouth, but I have no idea how to get there.
Monetization, Tracking/Analytics and Performance are separate discussions as of themselves, so I'm trying to leave them out of this thread (just wanted to mention that I plan on addressing them as and when I find pockets of free time).
If you have either...
1. Suggestions on any of these focus areas listed above
and,or
2. General feedback on the site as it is now
and,or
3. General feedback on what you think the site could/should morph into, what kind of content would appeal to a large audience?
...I'd love to hear it. I'm not very sensitive, so if feel free to be harsh with your comments if need be. I'm very open to feedback, and take every bit of criticism as an opportunity to improve.
Thank you, and I appreciate every piece of advice this forum can throw at me.
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SpikeS -
Thanks
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sliceanddice -
Thanks
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