How do we build traffic ?

This is probably one of the greatest challenges for a new community site. It takes time to grow and accumulate credibility. We don’t have a rich dad, and deep pocket, but we know what it takes to build a successful site.

If you don’t have time, you buy the time. But money doesn’t always work without a great product either. We think that the main reason why eBay Taiwan (or eBay in Asia) failed to dominate the market largely has to with its unsuccessful product strategy for Asia.

When I was in charge of Kijiji Taiwan (eBay started Kijiji classified business in 2005), we also had the luxury of using marketing budget to quickly acquire new users and build traffic. Luckily, Kijiji is free and very easy to use. Users try it out, slowly it works, and then they come back. At the same time, we were also making sure that not only we continue to pump in the money, but also focusing on product usability and generating seeds for long-term free traffic–the result of SEO effect (search engine optimization) and consumer loyalty.

Those are the basic tricks I brought with me to Whiich.com. So back to the topic, how do we build our traffic?

Building Free Traffic through search engine
We build the entire site with SEO in mind, from page html design to feature design. We do not trick the search engine by placing the wrong keywords and content, our philosophy is to focus on usability and the right content. A good user friendly page is also a search engine friendly page. Our homepage reaches at a page rank of 4 in just 2 months, and this is a nice surprise to me. Whiich.com has about 4000+ pages indexed in search engines (at the time of writing), which contribute to 30% of our site traffic right now.

Extend reach to free community channels
We also look at open environment like Facebook.com to build our reach. We have developed a few travel related applications on Facebook. The main application is called Travel Buddies where you can build your travel calendar and share you trip events with your friends, send postcards and share trip thoughts.

Our next project is to bring owners into Facebook and help them gain exposure in social network-something we are currently experimenting with. We are also planning to seed our content into the google maps community.

Building more user generated content
In previous paragraph, I mentioned that SEO also has some influences on how we design our product. One example is the bulletin board feature. The bulletin boards allow owners to build a more direct and real-time communication with the potential travelers. I personally like this feature a lot, because if owners take advantage of this, they can 1) help travelers to discover them and learn more about the local neighborhood, thereby 2) establish owners credibility as the best local resources 3), increase exposure in search engine - all the bulletin posts are indexed individually with property’s name in search engine. The benefits are both-way. We help owners, owners help Whiich.