As you can see in my recent history of posts, I just launched a site aimed at collecting amusing and unusual quotes from girlfriends. Since it has launched, I've tried a couple things to get users to come and look at it with limited success. However, there have been some interesting revelations.

I've posted the site across many social bookmarking sites and such. Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and others have not yielded much success. However, Reddit yielded about 140 hits (most of them low quality, but there was a new quote added by someone other than me) in the course of 2-3 hours. No, that's nothing to write home about, but it is a start.

On the other hand, I threw $100 at AdWords and added all sorts of combinations of humor, funny, strange, quotes, girlfriend, etc. to my keyword list. I ended up doing about $1 per click. I spread that out over two days, which just meant the hour after I created the campaign and 12-1 AM the next day. All told, that generated about 140 hits, just like Reddit (which quickly got voted down to 0, by the way).

With a lot of effort and cold, hard cash, I created 140 hits on the website with advertising. Of those, I may have some new subscribers (I will provide an update when I can determine anything), but I did not get any new quotes posted. With Reddit (5 minutes of my time, most of which was looking for my account and creating a new one), I got the same traffice and a new quote from someone else for free.

Now, I could go and repost on Reddit over and over again and piss people off, or I can create AdWords campaigns over and over again without anyone really noticing. Granted, the Reddit effect is limited if you cannot compel the community. It will create more raw traffic, though, which is what you need when a site is starting up.