Should I focus on retention first, or traffic?
My product is a directory of blogs. A few days ago, I posted the c++ tagged blogs to the c++ subreddit, and hit the front page of that subreddit and got 1000 users. I also launched to HN and got to the front page there, which led to lots more traffic.
A few days later, the number of users has come back down, which has led me to conclude two things:
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Posting specific tags to the right subreddits will probably be a feasible marketing strategy in the short/medium term. While I can only post once, there are a lot of niche communities to post to.
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I have no stickiness at all and should probably do something about that.
I tried adding an email list signup on every tag page that would give you the most recently added blogs for those tags, but even though thousands of users saw it, almost no one signed up.
One thing people seem to want is a feed of posts so they can find stuff to read from all these blogs. Adding that would be a bit of work, but would help add a lot of return value.
Should I hold back on any further marketing attempts until I add some type of sticky functionality to the site? It kind of feels like I'm throwing away users by sending them to the site right now. Though, there are probably SEO and other benefits to posting all these links and getting attention from various communities.
retention > everything. if you can retain one person... who
LOVESyour shit... then, you're practically there.... but, don't underestimate how hard it is to get someone to truly love your new idea / project / product / community; which is as it should be.
What's your bounce rate? How long stay users on the website? Which pages do users look at?
I would see if you can find a way to interact with the people coming to your site. Don't make assumptions about what they want. Try to get direct feedback. Maybe you could integrate some very simple but easy to answer question that changes weekly to try and get user feedback.
There's a possibility that you assume you know what they want, spend time building it, and then you find out that's not at all what they want.
I think that you need to develop a good retention system and then u can focus ur efforts in acquisition. This is my humble opinion and is completely open to debate. Have a good day mate!
While it is good you want to see immediate returns on your marketing efforts, you should also think long-term. SEO is a long-term strategy effort, and I believe should continue on that because it would bring massive returns later on.
Do everything you can to collect users and increase traffic. That should be your priority. If you will have a big traffic, you can think about retention and conversion.