How do you get traffic?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104627

by secgeek • 19 years ago

31 20 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How you get traffic after initial launch? How you market your startup websites?

JohnN• 19 years ago

Well there is a few standard things we did at our startup.

* BUILD SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT - it isn't so obvious what people want though.

1. Social Bookmarking - Reddit, Digg etc

2. Add any Feeds to RSS Directories

3. Keep a blog and update at least 3-4 times a week about your industry area. We created the first Blog Carnival focusing on Journalism. That made us friends in journalism community and we got some write ups.

Interview people on your blog.

4. Network - there are countless events in which to attend here in London so there must be more in the valley. That being said, they may be crap.

5. Get mentioned in the Press or on Blogs (best way is to meet the people face to face first). Random emails seldom work.

6. Create Facebook Group, get your friends to join. After Google, Facebook is our number 1 referring site. Get your friends to add your site as one of their fav sites on their facebook profiles. We've got a lot of traffic from that.

Create Facebook App?

7. Create a Podcast? But this is a bit of an effort, prob best focus on blogging.

8. SEO! work on it from day one!

marketer• 19 years ago

One small suggesion: do STRESS tests before submitting your page to Digg/Reddit/TC. On the off-chance that it does make the front page, it will get hammered, and any scalability bugs will instantly bring the site down. It would be unfortunate to miss all that traffic.

Also, put the company name in your signature whenever you send e-mails, forum or blog comments, etc..

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Any recommendations on how to do stress testing?

sabat• 19 years ago

I've just got a little blog going, mainly for fun and possibly for some minor supplemental income. We have seen a surprising amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. I'd recommend you hit that up (along with JohnN's excellent suggestions). Join it, get some friends on it, and get yourself stumbled up.

hacker64• 18 years ago

SU does send a lot of traffic, but don't let the numbers fool you. SU users are channel surfing, and usually don't stay for more than 2 seconds. Divide the number of users you get from SU by 10 to get it's equivalent in Digg users. And divide that by 10 to get it's equivalent in users coming from a blog post. If you didn't follow that, here is the simple equation:

1 user refered by your blog = 100 SU users

fleaflicker• 19 years ago

Depends on the site. Google AdWords is a good place to start.

If there are small niche sites that your customers may visit, buy banner ads and post on their forums (but obviously don't spam).

marcus• 19 years ago

Just as important as getting traffic is converting it and retaining it, track your conversion statistics along each step of the way, find your major pitfalls and fix them.

Split users randomly so they see different landing pages for example and track the changes in conversion.

This will improve your virality as only active users spread the word.

mindplunge• 19 years ago

See this link: 10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008

http://searchengineland.com/080108-134105.php

secgeek3• 19 years ago

hmm, i have started a news site http://newskicks.com but its not receiving much traffic and spamers are attacking it so i m wondering how to fight with that as most of my time is goin in deleting the unwanted posts rather then addin new features :(

mtw• 18 years ago

you can use defensio, they have an API for that sort of thing

secgeek3• 18 years ago

hmm drupal spam module is also good just got tht.

kingnothing• 18 years ago

I would definitely add a captcha to cut down on the spam.

Show it for every post to anonymous users, and only once for registration for users with accounts.

secgeek3• 18 years ago

thanks foe the suggestion how the hell i forgot that simple thing!! added now :)

techboy• 19 years ago

word of mouth can win you if you give people something simple to talk about, may not necessary be your core competency. SEO is the key, get your site crawled by Google.

ALee• 18 years ago

PR is also important I think. If you build something people want, then it.s just about letting ppl know about it. We're in the media industry thugh, so it may be diff for others.

webwright• 18 years ago

Seems to be entirely word of mouth and blogs-- we don't do any marketing effort.

For many/most startups, I think the best strategy is one where users generate users. Viral/widgets, word of mouth, or SEO/UGC.

http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-...

Read that 10 times. ;-)

For a b2b startup, obviously that's not entirely practical...

dawnerd• 18 years ago

I've found most of my traffic coming from google on articles I have written in the past.

Kaizyn• 18 years ago

Ask yourself this question: what is it that makes you want to visit another website? Whatever channels you use to receive information will probably work for getting the word out to others about YOUR website.

shafqat• 18 years ago

Blog, blog, blog. We haven't fully launched yet, but we get a tremendous amount of traffic to our blog. We talk about the insides of our startup experience, but also a lot about the ideas and movements that we're passionate about. Don't forget the importance of being earnest!

How do you get traffic?

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