question Where does their user base come from?

[SimpleDomaining]

I am not new in web development, however my question will sound naive.
The way i make site successful is using organic traffic, adequate marketing, networking, reviews, etc, and to grow site from nothing to something known takes years and money and grows naturally.
Past couple years i seen lots of sites going form nothing to high pr, from 0 sense of public presence to full of reviews & conversations websites overnight. (i will not name that sites, i am sure you been noticing this as well) My question is how do they do it? And i keep wondering how can you fill your site with such an amount of product reviews, user ratings etc, because if you go to archive.org and check that sites, that reviews wasn't even there a month before they got so big. But its not like they just sit and wrote that reviews, its not like 1-10 of them, i am talking 100s of conversations, opinions, reviews etc, image shares. Do they buy it somewhere? Where?

 

[robert_jones]

It's very hard to say how these websites are able to become so popular over night but I believe it’s either they got a massive amount of targeted traffic to their website in a short period of time and/or they spammed like crazy to create a lot of fake reviews and make their website just look bigger than it really is.

But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it’s a combination of both.

If I was trying to make a website take off fast I would invest some money into getting a lot of social proof like fake reviews, likes on Twitter etc… Then I would perform an aggressive marketing campaign on all possible fronts like SEO, PPC, FaceBook ads, Twitter, networking and getting endorsed traffic etc… The longer you can sustain your marketing campaign the more likely you’re going to reach success (assuming your still flipping a profit of course).

Another thing you need to factor is it could be possible some of these people are just really well connected in their industry. For example, say if you know the top 10 guys in an industry that control anywhere from 50% to 80% of the market share and you got all of them to endorse your website you too would have overnight success.

Sometimes in life it’s not “what” you know but WHO you know. Networking with key players in an industry is one of the fastest ways to grow you business because it allows you to cut in line in front of others that are trying to grow their business organically.

 

[webmarshals]

There are also some sites that use cheap seo strategies to bring their site to the top position. Those sites though in the short term rank good in the long term they would be penalized by Google. So its better not to follow the strategies of those sites