For those of you with current or previously successful Internet sites (however you want to define it): what is/was the major cause that fueled your growth? If you don't know, don't answer.
Organic traffic from search engines, i.e. SEO
34 points
On-line word of mouth, e.g. twitter, facebook, digg, delicious, etc.
30 points
Off-line word of mouth, i.e. magic
29 points
Write-ups on blogs
21 points
Engineered viral solution intrinsic to product
13 points
More than one above
13 points
Paid traffic from search engines, e.g. Adwords
6 points
Traditional press, e.g. newspaper, magazine articles
5 points
Traditional advertising, e.g. TV, radio, newspaper
One paying beta client recommended us to another company who helped us setup another couple of meetings and so on. We now have just under 20 clients and are debating whether we need to hire a sales guy ;)
Even with solid organic growth it might be a good idea. You won't need to, but you'd be paying a relatively small amount to jump start the product. If word of mouth is bringing you in x% new customers per month (the way it tends to do) you'd rather start off getting that on 500 customers than 20. You'll achieve high market share quickly that way.
Obviously you may not want to scale that fast though.
Our services can be considered more consultation and customization around our core product and expertise at this point(integration of data and geospatial technologies). Although I would love to have 500 customers (a milestone I look forward to), our current team size (3 people) would make that hard and would probably result in my head spontaneously exploding!
We are however working diligently on a couple of utilities and technology that can be considered a single product/service and would allow us to scale quickly.
For Kongregate, it's organic search (people searching for specific games) plus referrals (gaming blogs etc linking to games) plus in-game sponsorships (we pay game developers on a CPC basis to include our logo and link inside their games on other sites).
Every other game site does that too, our advantage is stickiness (people stay for achievements etc) and good SEO/pagerank.
Probably a lot of word of mouth, too. We could see this in our early days we would notice that a particular town would light up on analytics. In many cases most of the traffic was coming from a particular high school or something.
I noticed this network-effect with one of my Facebook apps, also. It really took off in Toronto, ON and after that I'd estimate that 10% of my users were from Toronto and at least 50% or so were from Canada in general. Google Analytics always indicated Canada as the most popular country of origin.
No matter what I did I couldn't seem to level the metrics back to the US, and this was on an app that now has ~1m users.
Blogs and press are great traffic drivers, but some have a more receptive audience then others.... with our experience here are the top blog traffic drivers.
1. Lifehacker
2. Engadget (1 & 2 tie each other)
3. TechCrunch
Asides from press the best thing has been StumbleUpon!
Though turning visitors into users is an entirely different story.
For example, you might get a write up in a blog that then gets you a lot of karma on social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, etc.) and then that gives you the immense traffic that makes you succeed. Do you mark that as being based on the blog write up, on being based on social bookmarking? (which isn't even on your list)
I would call social bookmarking part of on-line word of mouth.
And in the situation you describe, I would ascribe the major cause to the blog write-up because you can trace it back to that. There are certainly many situations where you can't trace it, i.e. it is a murky combination of many things. In those cases, I think the correct choice would be more than one above.
That's interesting, because I consider "word of mouth" to mean verbal communication (such as telling people on Twitter, IMing, e-mailing friends, etc) rather than voting up a link on Digg or del.icio.us, say.
Perhaps I should have separated them, then (assuming other people think like you do). I guess I consider them the same because people are similarly taking the initiative to share the link on-line with a community, be it their friends or a more general community.
It's not the general intent ("sharing") or the community that differentiates them to me. It's the action. Adding a bookmark to del.icio.us is quite different to saying "Wow! Check out this awesome site http://example.com/" on Twitter to my followers - not at a technical level, for sure, but in terms of potential effect.
The best idea I ever had remains figuring out how to write content my customers wanted to read. The second best idea was figuring out how to make it scale with regards to dollars invested instead of my time. Everything else about my marketing is commentary.
Positive online reviews on specialized websites. This is simlar to getting dugg or slashdotted, but the effect is far more lasting. It also helps with getting to the first page in Google & Co.
Sites, blogs, forums catering to the communities of users that you are after. Which ones these are exactly clearly depends on the nature of your product. For example, if it's a security-related application, it'd be nice to get a mentioning on Security Focus. If it's low-end networking stuff, something like tweakers.net might be a good fit. Etc ..
We advertise a gaming related site to Facebook users with interests like Halo, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, etc. If I recall correctly, for $5 a day we get an average 3-5 new sign ups out of 50 or so hits.
One paying beta client recommended us to another company who helped us setup another couple of meetings and so on. We now have just under 20 clients and are debating whether we need to hire a sales guy ;)