I promised in a comment in @cryptoctopus's thread that I would post about our experiments with traffic acquisition. The following trials were the initiatives of entrepreneurs rather than professional marketers/advertisers with no formal training.

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Quick Overview of the Guilty Parties Site

Mission: A website with regular content, messageboard-based community and minimal censorship.
Vision: Community unification.

The 'unification' vision is the same vision the initiatives that preceded and followed Guiltyparties had/have -- the entire community under one banner.

Note that this vision is not related to monetary incentives or goals. It is a personal goal of the main founder.

At the height of its popularity, the Guiltyparties messageboard had 30,000+ members. It competed with other 'big boards' that sported 20,000+ members and was aiming to gain entrance into the 50,000+ club. You can read more about the site and our its history here.

Now that the stats are out of the way, let's get down to business.

Premise

We have attempted to direct traffic to the site through cultivating a following on external platforms.

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The main external platforms we experimented with were:

1. Facebook
2. World of Warcraft

You will notice that one of these is a multiplayer video game. Additional platforms that were attempted, at a lesser level, were MySpace and Second Life. Those were given up promptly as they were pieces of shit and had no desirable members. No better way to say it.

The goal of traffic redirection is the cultivation of quality members rather than simply click-throughs. Pursuing click-throughs without engagement on a site that is based on engagement is moronic.

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The pursuit of 'quality members' is very similar to Steemit (and I will try to identify other parallels throughout this discussion wherever possible) in the sense that out of 30,000+ members there were perhaps only 500 "quality" accounts. On Steemit if we run some analytics I can guarantee you there are only 500 or so active, original and popular accounts. We will assume that this is the definition of 'quality' as to ourselves that is what a quality member would bring.

A quality member is:

1. Dedicated
2. Original
3. Openminded
4. Interactive
5. Articulate

Most importantly, they are not a whiner or 'special snowflake'.

Experience and Results

The 'return' is based on number of individuals who created accounts on the guiltyparties.com website during the duration of the promotion project.

Facebook - 0% Return

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I don't have to tell you that most companies have a Facebook page. Those who are successful are typically product providers who market either physical items or services.

The Facebook project ran in 2008 or thereabouts. A Facebook group was created with the hopes of driving traffic to the site. Members were encouraged to read the content and join the messageboard. The group had approximately 200 participants who actively 'liked' and 'shared' posts, as typical Facebook users do.

While the original demographic we were aiming for was young men and to a lesser extent, young women, it was quickly realized that the most active Facebook participants were in fact middle-aged women who had zero interest in the website but simply enjoyed discovering new things and people on Facebook.

The cultivation of the Facebook group (keep in mind we did not invest funds in this project) took massive amounts of time as daily interactions are expected by Facebook users. The site analytics showed only minor content viewership stemming from Facebook links and no further engagement.

Translating Facebook engagement to a) membership on a separate platform and b) digital off-site content proved to be costly in terms of time investment and unprofitable in every way.

Facebook users prefer to stay on Facebook. They will happily read whatever content you share with them and will actively engage with you but they will not create secondary accounts on related websites. Currently, many web platforms allow Facebook logins to be used. This was not an option back in the day and if it was, it goes against the promotion of freedom of speech/minimal censorship/maximum anonymity that Guiltyparties supported. The project was thus abandoned and related accounts deleted.

World of Warcraft - 5% Return

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Two of the Guiltyparties main tech developers/administrators took to Warcraft when Wrath of the Lich King came out in 2008. The goal was to create an in-game guild and use that guild to drive traffic to the website, and obviously enjoy the game. It has come to everyone's attention that Warcraft is an insanely popular game and that players may be interested in a website that at the time had a solid amount of content geared at gamers. Additionally, many of the active membership played the game.

It further come to our attention that no one has ever attempted to use Warcraft to promote harness traffic. There have been previous initiatives by mainstream companies to appeal to the player demographic of SecondLife (and we briefly explored that idea as well) and you can read all about that here if you are interested.

This traffic acquisition attempt had far more success than the Facebook project. Out of an in-game 'guild' of 100 members, 10% or so visited the website more than once and 5% created accounts. The percentage numbers are based on recollection and may be slightly off, but they were far more impactful than the zero Facebook produced. There were also several instances where players recognized the brand in-game either by coincidentally being existing members or having seen the website.

In 2015 this same experiment was repeated with another like website by one of the mentioned developers. This time however, it was with a server-first 1000 person guild. The level of engagement dropped significantly and only 5 active users were produced for a short time. In-game activity simply ceased translating to out-of-game activity.

The main issue was that individuals simply didn't see the connection between a content website/community and a video game. The connection between platforms must be obvious or the initiative will fail.

"It was stupid", one of the members just told me.

1+ Login = Too Many

As mentioned above, cross-platform marketing is believed to be more successful for applications where a physical product or service exists. It was not successful in driving traffic to a different website. We have determined that this is because users are reluctant to create more than one login for different applications. If they have already signed up on Facebook, they want to be able to access all the content through Facebook. They do not wish to sign up on a stand-alone website to access anything as they see it as a unnecessary as they have selected their platform of choice.

Currently, social media platforms are remedying this by accepting one-another's logins. It is a recognized issue that has been dealt creatively by the major providers.

The Single Platform Experience

Everyone has their platform preference and believes in their chosen platform's supremacy. To bring this up to current relevance: Steemit users who are insanely active on Steemit may not see the same level of activity on their off-platform websites, for instance. I would be interested to hear from Steemit users who have personal websites that are not projects to see how the experience has translated for them.

If an individual is able to fulfill their social interaction needs on one platform they are no longer in need of said fulfillment and will not become as active or completely swap to another platform unless prompted by greater rewards.

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Quantification Issues

ROI: It is impossible to calculate the ROI (return on investment) in these traffic acquisition attempts as no formal time tracking was used. We have attempted to run a calculation using the character play time in World of Warcraft once and the numbers came back as nearly zero due to the amount of time one spends waiting or inactive with the game open.

Timekeeping and Stats: This was not done as these are casual ideas that were pursued. Analytics were also not properly preserved. The actual statistics would not have been derivable from auto-generated analytics as they required a qualitative identification of users, which is a manual process.

Timeblocking: While using timers may be a hassle, timeblocking may be a better way to approach these trials in the future. Setting aside an hour a day each day towards promoting cross-platform content (hopefully in a better way) would allow quantification in follow-up.

These issues and plausible solutions are applicable to Steemit as well in my assumption due to the non-monetary goals that create a similarity between Steemit and Guilty Parties.

Steemit

Currently we are attempting our major initiative #3 as you probably guessed by now. This time we learned from our mistakes. We are no longer interested in taking users of one platform to a different platform; we are instead embracing a social platform (Steemit) on its own with all respect that is due to it. Future articles will detail exactly how we aim to do this in a way that is mutually beneficial and amplifies the diversity of the Steemit community while helping us reach our goals.

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This account and posted content are the explicit property of http://www.guiltyparties.com and its team of rednecks and have been written, re-written, adapted and/or intended for Steemit. Additional credit is given where applicable. Watch and follow for our site re-launch in the near future.