Retrospective 2: Promotion

Promoting any new site is a major issue. Word-of-mouth on the internet is not to be underestimated, but it won't do much for a site with no unique features—see yesterday's entry for a bit of discussion of that one. Even on an unusual site, word-of-mouth won't get things going very fast from the beginning, and you end up in the vicious cycle of having no material, making it difficult to pull in new members to add new material. Some people have ridiculously large collections of material gathered from various sources, such as audiobooks or movies. I know of people whose porn collections are measured in terabytes, but I prefer not to know them personally. Regardless, if you can upload your own collection piece by piece, you may be able to make your tracker appear much larger than it actually is, and use your unique material to pull people in.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do by way of promotion in the early days aside from shameless spamming. A point related to my earlier mention of the usefulness of connections: I am active enough on some high-profile communities that I could get away with throwing links into my signature and posting a few spam threads. Don't try this as a new member, and certainly don't try to join communities exclusively for the purpose of posting spam messages. It will only generate ill will towards you and your site. If you don't have a place to do this, it may be a good idea to hold off on your plans until you do. It's important.

Dump sites are great promotional methods. Sites such as MiniNova and Demonoid allow you to upload torrents tracked elsewhere, so configure your new tracker to accept unregistered IP addresses (temporarily if you intend to go private) and upload your torrents to a bunch of dump sites like that. In the torrents' descriptions, include a comment such as "find more great torrents like this at www.example.com". You can even throw a text file inside the torrent to the same effect. You'd be amazed by how well it works.

I'll leave you today with a couple of graphs showing the rate of growth of the site. As you can see, it pretty quickly surpasses the size of an average private tracker, so the processes involved may start to diverge a bit as we progress and as I start to deal with a larger and larger tracker.