“People, where are you?” Or how to search for the first users of a startup

It is given: fresh, fully functioning startup. Objective: to attract an audience and start making profits. The main question: what to do?
Someone buys media advertising, hanging their banners at all more or less suitable under the theme of the open spaces of the network. Someone begins to actively promote in the media of medium and large size even at the development stage. There are also social networks, which are crammed behind crowds, but not always there are real users.
Using the example of my startup DocDoc , I will tell you how to reach 1000 unique visits per day in 2 months after launching the beta version, and in another month to double this number. The simplest and most obvious ways.

DocDoc is a free service for finding and choosing doctors, and more recently, for St. Petersburg. Not an online consultation, but a database of detailed, thoroughly checked questionnaires from Moscow doctors, who provide clinics with which we work according to the “pay for patients who have arrived” scheme. I wrote about it in detail in April. So, to get the first thousand users we needed seo chips.

Free domain. Is this important?

Standard startup theme: "Oh, how to find such a sonorous, memorable, interesting and at the same time not clogged name."
How quickly and fervently passed the naming of DocDoc, I have already told . So, when, having defined the name of a startup, we began to check the corresponding domain for unemployment ... It turned out that it was already long and densely registered by unknown cybersquatters. This fact does not cast us into sadness. The current owners were quickly found, and the domain after a short correspondence and a certain number of conventional units was redeemed.
And by the fact that the positions of DocDoc in the search engines have steadily started and continue to grow, we boldly recommend that you take a closer look at old-domain names more closely.

Semantic core: no traffic is important - conversion is important

Selecting keywords for contextual advertising and seo, we actively used our marketing experience in medicine. There are hundreds of traffic inquiries whose conversion tends to zero — a simple example of an obstetrician and all its derivatives. At this request, people search for information (first of all, articles and advice), but they still prefer to choose the doctor in the old-fashioned way - on a tip from friends and acquaintances. Practice shows that the more serious the issue - the lower the level of confidence in the Internet.
Of course, this tendency is in principle characteristic of the sphere and our main task — to increase the level of trust in our resource, but from the first step it would be foolish to rush into the battle with prejudices. Moscow was not built right away, the Beatles didn’t collect stadiums from the first day, so we decided not to swim against the current.
Based on these simple installations, at the first stage, the semantic core was formed solely from those queries that, in practice, actually always gave the greatest conversion to clinics. For example, a whole pool of urological requests. They do not pull rubber there, but actually act as quickly as possible - that is, they apply immediately. In total, we have about 10 formed lists of 100-150 requests. With them, and started.
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Contextual Advertising: Instant Effect

To start the site, it was necessary to fill the site with the first questionnaires of doctors. To negotiate with the clinics - a certain attendance. As we agreed with the first "partners" - the topic for a separate post about persistence, sweeping charisma in its path and active use of existing links.
The fact remains: as soon as the base of the first questionnaires of doctors was collected and checked by content managers, we had to start receiving visitors. Therefore, we immediately launched a contextual campaign on hundreds of ads. And this campaign was successful, for the first month of work we received 100 real patient requests.

Clever SEO: in one cart with usability

Chips are proud of:
• No purchase links - only really high-quality literate article promotion, which was ordered not at 30 rubles per kilogram, but really bother with the quality of publications. And we continue to bother further - now articles with links are written exclusively by pr-managers. For a reputation for a startup is really important.
• From “a” to “z”, the well-thought-out seo-architecture of the site - internal linking is convenient for the visitor and understandable to search robots.


• Literate URLs for each page. For example, a metro filter gives a page like docdoc.ru/doctor/urolog/krasnopresnenskaya .
• Friendly content for users. An example is a patient handbook. This is really interesting information, verified by the reliability of our honey. an expert. This information will help you to understand which doctor is doing what, how he takes patients, when, under what symptoms you need to contact this doctor, what is included in his appointment, etc. - this is a kind of “patient record”.

Hooray! They come back

The result of this work became obvious - the number of users who regularly returned to the DocDoc website grew. This is not only an indicator of the quality of the service, its need for users, but also a pleasant response to the ongoing work on finishing usability.

Month	Attendance (unique visitors per day)
September	6,426
October	8,067
November	7,412
December	8,673

Reputational work: PR and SMM

To be honest, for a long time these were our most vulnerable areas, which, until a certain point, neither time nor attention was worthy of. Today we took the PR team into the team, and are slowly moving - we began to regularly send and publish our news, intensified in the networks. - Vkontakte and Facebook groups are maintained and regularly updated on a positive wave. And if earlier it was just some funny "pictures" on the topic, anecdotes, tips, "educational" posts, today we decided to more clearly position our resource in social networks: we regularly conduct our own polls on okolomeditsinskuyu theme, publish our news and analytics + we scrutinize more interesting medical content. To attract users to the group organized a photo contest with good prizes. Over time, we want to add our analytics, we are working on it.
My question to you: - Is it possible to increase the credibility of the service with the help of groups in social networks and how to do it? If you have thoughts, advices and even commercial offers, we will be glad.