How to drive more traffic for a start up website, and how we are doing it

Dan and I came up with this idea to start a collaborative creative writing website where users can vote for the next part in a story. So we have spent several hours of our free time developing this application and now we want to get people to use it. In order to do this we will essentially recruit people to use it. So this post is about how we plan on doing that. The concept is simple, search the web, find sites that are talking about creative writing already, and ask people to write about votepages.com. I have gone on google, digg, del.icio.us, stumpleupon to find sites that are already talking about creative writing. I basically look for a “contact us” page and ask the admin to write about us. They do not need to even use Votepages or like it. In fact they might even HATE the site.  Just talk about it and link to it so that…

1. our SEO improves in with more links and more people can find our site, and

2. people read what others have written and decide to try it out.

So far, these are the sites that I have found that I am going to prospect to get more traffic. These sites are all web 2.0 small business type sites. I will give these sites links in our blogroll if they write something about votepages.com. After we do decide to “launch” my main job at the start is going be just doing this - finding as many linkers as I can and getting people to the site. BTW, I think the word “launch” is kind of a funny thing to call it for a small start up… for us “launch” pretty much means everything is all hooked up and its time to submit our links to other sites. We are not going to be throwing parties or anything. So these are the sites. I will keep documenting how this PR this is going as it develops.

http://www.web20searchengine.com/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=323
http://go2web20.net/
http://www.web20show.com/
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007262.html
http://paulbhartzog.org/
http://www.adify.com/default.aspx – not as much PR but advertising for site.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cat_startups.php
http://www.lulu.com/
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9698865-2.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/
http://isbw.murlafferty.com/
http://commandshift3.com/
http://www.listio.com/web20/search.php?search=shop&tag=true&fp=&tnm=0
http://gorillanation.com/
http://www.killerstartups.com/