OK, so I know I’ve been posting a lot about Music-Alerts. I was intending on writing a post today about how this has been a really up and down week. A lot of great stuff has happened, and a lot of frustrating stuff that makes me want to run full speed into a wall has happened too. It really has been one of those weeks where you drain yourself by running through the entire gamut of human emotions.
Instead, I’m posting about Music-Alerts. After my little marketing challenge was done I expected traffic to taper off and traffic to level off. Then I could get back to “real work”. Instead – in true roller-coaster-week fashion – something inexplicable has happened: the site has worked it’s way UP the blogsphere and landed itself on giant tech sites like Lifehacker and MakeUseOf. Previously with iPrioritize I worked my ass off for months to get a mention on a big blog, and then watched the press mentions and traffic trickle down to smaller sites and eventually taper off. Instead, it seems like every day a bigger blog or site picks it up, and traffic just keeps growing. The site also now ranks top 5 for popular terms like”album release dates” in Google, which kind of solidifies the stream of traffic and means there won’t be a total crash once this PR wave stops.
The only explanation I can give is that it’s a really, really simple service that fills a need that was somehow unmet…and people love it. Honestly, it’s kind of cool and also kind of depressing at the same time. I mean, today Music Alerts will more than double the traffic for all of the rest of our sites combined! That’s SportsLizard + Detailed Image + Detail University + this blog + iPrioritize + the rest…all of which do pretty well for themselves. If traffic continues at todays levels, it will be well over 1 million unique visitors this month…wtf!!! Has everything else we done been so shitty compared to this? We’ve spent years on other sites and I spent a few hours on this one, and yet this one is really that much better???? Really makes you think.
My inbox has been flooded with “thank you” notes about the service, one person even going as far as saying “it’s guys like you that make the internet a better place”, when in reality all I was trying to do was make a feed for myself so I didn’t miss another album release. I even had a large Web2.0 music company contact us about integrating it with their application (we had a quick phone chat). It’s just been an insane day. This is probably the first project I’ve done where I really didn’t even think about as a business – aside from this blog – and it’s the most successful day (in terms of traffic) that one of my sites has ever had.
I don’t even want to think about what would happen if it lands on TechCrunch and continues to grow. At what point do you try to monetize something that is very tough to monetize…and is there a way to do it that doesn’t turn people off from the simplicity that attracts people to the site in the first place? Obviously, more affiliate links to buy/download + feed ads wouldn’t be overwhelming, but also probably wouldn’t make much money. Maybe the user base – which has grown by almost 1k today – will be worth something in and of itself…kind of like how Kiko made a business of growing a large user base and selling off.
Oh – and I now have an addiction to checking my stats every 10 minutes. I’m like a crack addict who can’t get off the high, but who knows he’s going to crash and crash bad. There’s no way it can keep growing…can it?
Congrats man!
Most BIG successes I’ve seen started as a “side project” or “hobby” which just happened to explode.
Think about it: if YOU needed this service, there’s a good chance a bunch of other people do too.
Good job…now how to monetize….?
-Nev
Thanks Nev…that’s the million dollar question.
Wow that’s awesome – well done Adam. I remember when you launched the service and that marketing hour seemed to have worked so well!
Thanks Adnan – blogtrepreneur has really taken off, I keep meaning to compliment you on how great of a job you’ve done…looks great aesthetically.
[...] Music-Alerts caught on last week, my partners and I debated exactly what to do with it. We pretty much concluded what I’d [...]
[...] like with Music-Alerts, I only spent 1 hour marketing Z.ips.ME. In a future post I’ll outline exactly what to do to get your site/app noticed with [...]