An anecdote from somebody who is very successful, when presented with a similar question: "Buy my girlfriend a bracelet for $180, spent $20 on sending email to my opt-in list." "But what if you didn't have the opt-in list?" "Not my problem, but if it will eventually be your's, start working on that opt-in list today."

Stupidly, I forever put off doing that one!

So...I don't actually understand what you mean by "spent $20 on sending email to my opt-in list".

Do you mean this person owns a list and spent $20 somehow sending email to this list? How does this relate to the $180 bracelet?

Please excuse my ignorance :-)

Something I learned on HN a long, long,long time ago was that if you wanted really cheap, unfiltered traffic, you could buy quite a bit of it using Mechanical Turk. As the commenter said "It's pretty amazing what will happen if you throw up a few nickels". I've only used it once, but it worked.

But with only $200 you want to make sure every dollar -- every penny -- counts towards getting action. So I would use it on the most targetted ads I could get. For most fly-by-night web apps that only have a $200 ad budget, adwords would be the best way to do this.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the MT strategies? I have used it in the past to create survey data the quick way, but ho do you use it for traffic?

It's really as easy as creating a HIT(? been a while but I think that's what they're called) that says "Beta test this website/app/game" for $0.05. You will probably get a lot of feedback that you didn't expect, even if you don't ask for it.

You can get more sophisticated if you want, but that's all I did. I ended up getting around 4000 seed users for a Facebook app I built in '08 this way.

I agree that this can work. However, they are very strict about collecting any sort of personal data from the MT workers. Thus you may end up not having any stick from this because you cant ask them for an email. Cellis, how did you get around this?

Wow, I actually found the link!

You can read it for yourself here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341774

Adwords can provide nearly instant gratification for driving traffic if that's all you're after.

However, it would be foolish to neglect the free and (arguably) better way to drive traffic: SEO.

Patio11 has a blog full of information about enhancing your SEO, creating targeted content, and building your site to generate a lot of traffic without the need to spend money.

Edit: Start Here - http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ I know it seems like a ton of stuff to read, but it is absolutely worth it.

You're going to hate this answer, but it depends.

Reddit has good CPC and engagement rates, so long as you have content or an application that appeals to that crowd. (See Gabriel Weinberg's post on the topic).

StumbleUpon has a more mass-market appeal, but relatively high cost-per-view with low engagement.

Adwords is expensive unless you spend a long time honing in on niche keywords. Even then it is expensive.

There was a great post on ASmartBear this morning (guest post) about how effective cold-calling can be. And that's essentially free (not counting your labor hours).

Pud has a great write-up on this topic: http://pud.com/post/5239917032/users

This is something I struggle with too, so I'll be interested to see the other responses.

A friend once told me that to get things done, it is money and time. If you have no money, then you have to spend time.

The important theme online though is to leverage someone else's audience.

Adwords, SEO are all leveraging Google's audience.

Approaching bloggers in that space is leveraging on those authors' audience.

Finding complementary products and offering them a commission is another way of leveraging an audience. There were a few interviews on Mixergy where SaaS makers deliberately integrated Freshbooks or Shopify because it brought them customers.

In order to answer the question appropriately, it would help to know what your objective is. Do you just want to rig your traffic numbers without caring about who comes to your site and what they do on your site?

If not, then the answer is it depends. It depends on who you're targeting, and on what action (reading an article? sharing it? signing up for a product or newsletter?) defines success.

What demographics are you targeting?

Example: Mint has infographics because people who love numbers will love those pictures. So, they pay the cost of someone designing them.

A social network like MySpace/Facebook wouldn't attempt this because they are not looking only for an audience that love numbers.

$100 in gas money visiting every customer you can

$100 on a table at your customer's industry event

Probably the best one if you have customers

Hello! Pls to review Kabutar -a web & iphone app kinda reddit for real world. www.kabutar.in | http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kabutar!/id477970251?mt=8 pretty pls :)