Ask HN: Is a free Ipod a good way to drive traffic to my site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is a free Ipod a good way to drive traffic to my site?

7 pointsvital10113 comments

I've been working on a side project for the past couple months. I know that it's not perfect, but I believe that it could be helpful to my target audience in it's current state. The only problem is I need information from my users. The site relies on reviews from end-users to work. If I can get people to start sharing information, I'm hoping it will snow-ball from there.

My target audience is college students, so I thought that if I could entice some with a chance to win a free Ipod touch, then I might be able to get them to write reviews. I thought that if they enter 5 reviews, their name is entered into the drawing once. 10 reviews, and it is entered in twice. I figure I could limit it at 10 so that I don't get a bunch of made up reviews.

Is this a good way to drive traffic and get useful information from end-users? Do you have any experience with tactics like this? Is there another way that I should be exploring?

Update: The students are entering reviews on whether or not they needed to purchase the text book(s) for a particular course that they took.

I bet most college students already have an ipod or iphone, so wouldn't that skew the results toward those who don't already have one? I think the college demographic is pretty jaded when it comes to giveaways.

Even if you got 1000 reviews in exchange for one ipod (if you actually gave it away), that's $0.20 per review. I bet you could get that from Amazon Mechanical Turk for a fraction of the price.

You have a point. I'm fairly jaded when it comes to anything that's "free". Any thoughts about Ipod alternatives? Maybe $25 Itunes gift cars or something of that nature?

...or, you could pay qualified Amazon Mechanical Turkers $0.20 apiece to fill out the surveys?

Can you be _that_ specific when requesting service through Amazon Mechanical Turk? For instance, I need college students (or recent graduates) in Michigan who have taken courses at this set of Universities in the past 3 years?

I actually tried to use iPods to drive traffic to a site of mine a couple years ago. It didn't work very well but I think the reason was that I didn't make them do enough to get the prize. Just make sure that 5 new reviews on your site is going to create enough value for you to warrant the cost of the iPod.

Without knowing anything about your business I would suggest that you look at some of the Minimum Viable Product ideas for customer development. Smart use of Google ads could go a lot further than an iPod giveaway.

just my two cents.

I'm actually testing the waters with Facebook Ads right now. I only worry that people will come to the site, say "Oh, they don't have any reviews. I'll come back later." and then never come back. Any thoughts on how to use Adwords (or Facebook ads) to entice people to contribute content?

Are the folks who'd want a free iPod the folks who you want?

Seriously. Who do you want using your site? What do they want? You need answers to both questions and then you need to connect them.

I'm marketing to the same group, and from what I've experienced, word of mouth is your best ally. Email me: http://scr.im/danl.

Yes- if you are selling iPod accessories. Try something a but more relevant your site (like a voucher for a free text book on amazon or something)

Good idea. Amazon voucher would be ideal.

I was going to provide a few reviews, but you haven't added my former college yet :)

also the site is a great idea

Thank you! My friends have told me it's a good idea, but it's hard to tell if they are being honest :)

Also maybe you could give away Roman Noodles... when I was in college that was basically currency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com