BCRecommender Traction Update

This is the fifth part of a series of posts on my Bandcamp recommendations (BCRecommender) project. Check out previous posts on the general motivation behind this project, the system’s architecture, the recommendation algorithms, and initial traction planning.

In a previous post, I discussed my plans to apply the Bullseye framework from the Traction Book to BCRecommender, my Bandcamp recommendations project. In that post, I reviewed the 19 traction channels described in the book, and decided to focus on the three most promising ones: blogger outreach, search engine optimisation (SEO), and content marketing. This post discusses my progress to date.

Goals

My initial traction goals were rather modest: get some feedback from real people, build up steady nonzero traffic to the site, and then increase that traffic to 10+ unique visitors per day. It’s worth noting that I have four other main areas of focus at the moment, so BCRecommender is not getting all the attention I could potentially give it. Nonetheless, I have made good progress on achieving my goals (first two have been obtained, but traffic still fluctuates), and learnt a lot in the process.

Things that worked

Blogger outreach. The most obvious people to contact are existing Bandcamp fans. It was straightforward to generate a list of prolific fans with blogs, as Bandcamp allows people to populate their profile with a short bio and links to their sites. I worked my way through part of the list, sending each fan an email introducing BCRecommender and asking for their feedback. Each email required some manual work, as the vast majority of people don’t have their email address listed on their Bandcamp profile page. I was careful not to be too spammy, which seemed to work: about 50% of the people I contacted visited BCRecommender, 20% responded with positive feedback, and 10% linked to BCRecommender in some form, with the largest volume of traffic coming from my Hypebot guest post. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t scale, but the most valuable thing I got out of it was that people like the project and that there’s a real need for it.

Twitter. I’m not sure where Twitter falls as a traction channel. It’s probably somewhere between (micro)blogger outreach and content marketing. However you categorise Twitter, it has been working well as a source of traffic. Simply finding people who may be interested in BCRecommender and tweeting related content has proven to be a rather low-effort way of getting attention, which is great at this stage. I have a few ideas for driving more traffic from Twitter, which I will try as I go.

Things that didn’t work

Content marketing. I haven’t really spent time doing serious content marketing apart from the Spotlights pilot. My vision for the spotlights was to generate quality articles automatically and showcase music on Bandcamp in an engaging way that helps people discover new artists, even if they don’t have a fan account. However, full automation of the spotlight feature would require a lot of work, and I think that there are lower-hanging fruits that I should focus on first. For example, finding interesting insights in the data and presenting them in an engaging way may be a better content strategy, as it would be unique to BCRecommender. For the spotlights, partnering with bloggers to write the articles may be a better approach than automation.

SEO. I expected BCRecommender to rank higher for “bandcamp recommendations” by now, as a result of my blogger outreach efforts. At the moment, it’s still on the second page for this query on Google, though it’s the first result on Bing and DuckDuckGo. Obviously, “bandcamp recommendations” is not the only query worth ranking for, but it’s very relevant to BCRecommender, and not too competitive (half of the first page results are old forum posts). One encouraging outcome from the work done so far is that my Hypebot guest post does appear on the first page. Nonetheless, I’m still interested in getting more search engine traffic. Ranking higher would probably require adding more relevant content on the site and getting more quality links (basically what SEO is all about).

Points to improve and next steps

I could definitely do better work on all of the above channels. Contrary to what’s suggested by the Bullseye framework, I would like to put more effort into the channels that didn’t work well. The reason is that I think they didn’t work well because of lack of attention and weak experiments, rather than due to their unsuitability to BCRecommender.

As mentioned above, my main limiting factor is a lack of time to spend on the project. However, there’s no pressing need to hit certain traction milestones by a specific deadline. My stretch goals are to get all Bandcamp fans to check out the project (hundreds of thousands of people), and have a significant portion of them convert by signing up to updates (tens of thousands of people). Getting there will take time. So far I’m finding the process educational and enjoyable, which is a pleasant surprise.