Website Critical Mass

There are few things as rewarding as seeing a website you developed hit its critical mass (see – tipping point ). Unless you are flush with venture money to pour into a massive marketing campaign, with a new website you have the a catch 22 that no one wants to join, read, become a member, buy from, or use a site that no one else is using. This leaves bootstrap web entrepreneurs struggling each day to get to the point where visitors see enough activity at the site to make them feel comfortable using their site’s services on a regular basis.

I have been fortunate to be part of two websites to hit a critical mass. First, I started LinkAdage on a hunch, this was during the time before the Google sandbox and the Adsense explosion when it was much easier for underfunded sites to gain traffic quickly and cheaply. There was also a pent up demand of ordinary webmasters looking to buy links. At launch, I wondered how I could sell auctions without buyers or get auction buyers without listings. Then one day, someone listed an auction and someone bought it an hour later and within days, more and more auctions were listed and sold each day. In this case, a critical mass was hit very quickly and LinkAdage took off and I had to quit my regular job just to keep up.

Between then and now, I had a few failed projects that did not hit a critical mass that I had to abandon. Then just over a year ago after much planning and requirements writing I started LinkXL.com. Using LinkAdage as a marketing springboard and the fact that LinkXL was a revolutionary/evolutionary text link advertising link brokerage service, I expected LinkXL to explode virally as soon as it came on the scene. I soon realized the LinkXL had a few barriers to entry slowing it down.

First, Google double downed on their anti-link misinformation campaign which effectively stopped viral blog articles that touted our new service. The last thing our happy early adopters wanted to do was brag they were using a new text link advertising product that really worked. Second, we were selling something SEOs and webmasters wanted but did not know was possible (no one believes in magic); and third, we realized we needed 10 times the inventory that old school footer or sidebar link brokerages need to be able to sell links consistently.

This third issue was the one that really blind-sided me. In hindsight, it is something I should have thought about and built into my early pro forma. Think about it… say an insurance company wanted to advertiser their new pet insurance product and they want the anchor text “Pet Insurance”. With an old school text link brokerage, the advertiser could ramrod their preferred anchor text on any non relevant page they wanted, meaning links could be sold even if a link brokerage had only a few publishers. With LinkXL, since we provide natural links in existing content, the phrase “Pet Insurance” need to already exist on a relevant page before we could sell the link. Otherwise we lost the sale and potentially a customer.

When we were just getting started, a somewhat unique phrase like “pet insurance” might not have been available for sale when we had less than 100 publishers. Luckily, some advertisers were smart enough to look for more broad spectrum anchor text like “Pets” and “Insurance” and would still buy a few links, but most text link advertisers are accustom to buying the anchor text they wanted on any page they wanted no matter how unnatural link-to-content fit. In our quest to increase the quality of text link advertising and bring this type of advertising into the mainstream, we had to turn away customers that would be happy to buy an insurance link and a computer page.

Fortunately, with lots of hard work bringing in new publishers almost every day, things improved and now that we have around one million publisher pages, some of the most obscure anchor text is available. If fact, for the pet insurance companies out there, we have over 200 relevant pages with the phrase “Pet Insurance” available

Now that we have a solid publisher base, we are selling more links every day and are finally beginning to reach a critical mass. We now have enough publisher pages to satisfy almost any advertiser purchase and are losing fewer buyers because of their anchor text not being available. The great thing is, as we get more and more publishers, we will get more and more advertisers and we will sell more and more links and LinkXL will continue to take off exponentially.

As a bootstrap entrepreneur you need to work hard and keep the faith in your website idea to even have a chance at success. However, there are few things as rewarding as seeing a site you dreamed about, built, marketed, and put hours of time in finally catch on and start to take off. Whatever your site’s business or topic, the feeling of seeing others finally buy into your idea is priceless.

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Tags: bootstrap, Entrepreneur, websites

Category: Internet Marketing