Growing Traffic from 1k to 35k – A Zero-budget Marketing Experiment
Posted by Zee Yang at 5:16 pm
Marketing is the art of making people pay attention to you without looking desperate – it’s hard. After re-launching our photo editor in late January, Tali and I had to take on the task of marketing our product with zero-budget. We grew the site traffic from 1k to 35k in this one month period, and here is how we did it.
Before I start, let me show you the before and after picture of our Google Analytics.
January Traffic (~1k)
Feburary Traffic (~35k)
I think our most important marketing decision was made early in the development phase. From the beginning, we knew we had zero marketing budget. The product had to be spread by word of mouth. Almost every design decision was made around that assumption.
The key to creating a viral product is to minimize friction.
We were obsessed with reducing friction. Our swf runtime was optimized from 1mb to 750k to 450k, smaller than a photograph. We used Flash Pixel Bender wherever we can to boost performance. But most importantly, we eliminated the need for user accounts and photo uploads, so people can just open a photo from disk and start editing in seconds.
Everything in our application was designed to get people up and and using Citrify quickly, so they can fully experience the software and tell their friends.
To backup our claim with data, here is our traffic source stats.
Traffic Sources
We were very pleased with the volume of direct traffic, because most direct traffic comes from word of mouth sources, such as email, twitter feeds, or just good old office water coolers.
You will also notice that we were not covered by any A-list tech blogs. As much as we would love to get covered by TechCrunch, we simply don’t have the time to reach out and follow up with various journalists. Instead, we made it easy for smaller blogs to cover us, starting by giving away premium licenses to bloggers, which you can check out here. We also created a FAQ page just for bloggers, which is available here. The small blogs brought in large percentage of our traffic, and it required little effort on our part to generate. However, due to the low authority of these blogs, they did not boost our page rank by very much.
Tali and I are by no means marketing experts. We had limited resource, so our attack vector was to build a high quality and low friction product. We posted our data here in hopes that it would help other startups. In the coming months, we have a few small marketing experiments in the works, and will share that data as it becomes available.
Cheers,
Zee
Joshua 
Zee Yang 
umen 
Mark Hewitt 
FichenDich 
ujjawal 
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