How can I increase the number of site visitors?

Startup Traction: How can I increase the number of users and returning visitors to my music recommendation site?

• I would love to get some advice on how I could increase the number of signup's and number of recommendations being made by those signed up users. I am not that bothered about getting huge amounts of traffic, more increasing the quality and loyalty of what's coming through. I'd also be interested in getting any ideas on how to promote awareness of the site - the feedback I've had from users is that the site is a great idea so I'm quite confident the the site is a useful resource for DJ's and music lovers. There are a small group of users who are regularly coming back to the site to make recommendations but I would love to increase this number. The site is http://www.soundshelter.net

• Answer:

  I struggled with this same question as I ran the music recommendations site http://themusiclobby.com for a few years. Like you, we wrote recommendations of stuff we liked, not reviews of all the latest stuff. Making a music site that catches on is incredibly difficult, and then equally hard to monetize. Ignoring the last part of that sentence, there are a few things you can focus on to help traction. 1. This a content driven model. Figure out what content drives eyeballs. As cool as personalized recommendations are, people think they can get that anywhere. http://Last.fm, Pandora and many others do a decent job at this for a music listener, and even aren't terrible for hardcore fans. In order to get someone to look at your site, you need content to attract them that goes beyond that. Not saying you need to do a ton of stuff, but the successful sites in electronic music have found something like this to continually bring people back. FACTMag has the FACT Mixes, Resident Advisor has the DJ charts. You're going to need things like that to initially get people to the site. From what I know already about the site, I'd say weekly playlists through Spotify are a no brainer. Some ideas: Top 10 lists DJ mixes Label profiles/histories Exposés into different scenes Interviews with prominent DJ's/musicians: especially if they can use it as a pres opportunity for an album/gig Guides to certain genres Columns by record shop workers that power the content: this could get them more excited about the site and drive their visitors there. Right now, it seems like they wouldn't want to do this because it'll cannibalize sales. 2. Be obsessive about social. This was the biggest mistake I made with The Music Lobby. I didn't tweet, create a Facebook page, etc. Frequency is the name of the game here. You need to push out five tweets a day that are super relevant for the brand you're trying to create, and interact immediately with anyone who responds to you or just reaches out. Also, strike up conversations with like-minded music fans and artists. Make sure that content I talked about above is given every chance possible to succeed. Some ideas: Facebook/Twitter Connect for creating accounts. It's faster, and makes it easier for users to share content to social networks. Ask if I want to tweet/Facebook share every recommendation I make Go to popular music forums and build up a presence. Don't spam. For example, most of my install base for my site came from IGN's music boards or WATMM. 3. Optimize for SEO. People are going to be searching for that song they heard last night. Be that resource to make sure they find it with the content people are going to search on e.g. lyrics, samples, track lists, cover art. Make sure all of that content is indexed by Google, and interlink all of that stuff on your site. Look at what is trending on Google Insights for Search and see if you can fill a need on what people are searching for. Remember though that those types of searches are typically in and out, so be sure to put the hard sell on your landing page to create an account without being annoying. Some ideas: One site. Not a .net and a http://.co.uk. That confuses Google. On every release page, link to similar recommendations in text form. Google can't read those images well. Build topic ontology like Quora that creates great high level pages for Google, but for genres and labels and aliases e.g. I had no idea Head High was a Shed alias until I hovered over the reaction 4. Make email marketing actionable. Bleep and Boomkat send out great newsletters, and their goal is easy to decipher. They want you to buy records. Because of that, they can't be as good as your emails can be because their opinion is biased. Develop recommendations by email targeted by people's previous recommendations Drive calls to action to the site to get feedback on how good the recommendations were so your recommendations get better Email some of your most popular content 5. Optimize content. You want to make this a great resource for finding new music. So you need to optimize every part of the process to make sure it's not only easy, but accurate. That means fast and reliable are Make a master page for all versions of a release. Right now, my recommendations list is just a list of the vinyl versions of all the CD's I already recommended. Make it take less clicks to do everything. If I'm looking at a list of a ton of releases, make it easy to see I can recommend from that list. Right now, you have a grayed-out icon for that. It took me forever to notice it. Make it possible to remove recommendations you know you don't like. DJ's function on genres. Make sure to categorize recommendations so people know what to expect. Pull in data for Discogs, http://Last.fm, or review sites so there's textual content on the page. Use Facebook Likes of sync with http://Last.fm to generate recommendations immediately 6. Develop a long-term engagement strategy that fits the profile of your users. Figure out what motivates your audience and build engaging features around that encourage repeat usage and sharing. Lesser minded people will call this gamification, but when people use that term they tend to just jump right into badges and leader boards, which misses the point. It's all about what is going to keep your users hooked into the site and getting more people to the site for you. For Dropbox, that was as easy as rewarding people with more storage if they referred a friend. For Quora, it's upvotes and credits. Some ideas: Reward adding a new release to the site (can't do this currently, it looks like) Create experts in certain genres based on activity 7. Be iterative. There's nothing worse than a site with a million features that all have zero engagement. You want to add to the site over time as demand build, not add a bunch of things before you have enough traffic to know what people really want to use. Don't have leader boards until you have... leaders. It sounds basic, but I did this wrong with The Music Lobby, and tons of other sites fall for it too. Some ideas: Remove Disqus commenting until you actually have enough people to comment on recommendations