Ask HN: How do you build an audience?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913448

by rfnslyr • 13 years ago

7 10 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868

Was looking at the passive income thread that got so highly upvoted. How do you build an audience HN? I'm a complete noob and don't know anything marketing.

Any good starting points, communities, references, de facto standards, etc?

smartwater• 13 years ago

There's a farm who started posting pictures of their animals on websites like Pinterest and Reddit. They have a pretty big following now, for a small farm. I also noticed that they are outranking pretty big sites(like Petsmart) since they started.

You just have to have something worth sharing.

lifeguard2• 13 years ago

It is all about OC -- original content.

NovemberWest2• 13 years ago

That is a necessary but insufficient criteria. I have original content. I still have no audience. I have more traffic than I used to, but I am still trying to work out just what am I missing? Because an awful lot of pat answers over the years have failed to solve my traffic problems.

lifeguard2• 13 years ago

OK, good. I think these are excellent books on SEM:

"Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day" by Jennifer Grappone

"Getting Noticed on Google" by Ben Norman

And if it isn't measured, it isn't managed:

"Scientific Advertising" Claude C. Hopkins

alanchavez2• 13 years ago

Start collecting your visitor's emails, that's how you start building an audience.

Forget about SEO right now, you don't want really want more traffic, you want conversion rate.

I know people who own websites with hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, but almost 0% conversion rate.

beat2• 13 years ago

Ah, you need to understand SEO (to optimize your site), metrics/analytics (to understand your visitors and measure improvement), and most importantly, interesting content that is connected to people who would be interested in it.

There are hundreds of Great American Novels lying around in drawers as unpublished manuscripts. Many of them are truly great. Don't be one of them! You need to find your audience, get product/market fit. That's about marketing.

alanchavez2• 13 years ago

I hope you didn't list that in order of importance.

First you have to find a niche. If your product/book/website/blog/whatever is the only one out there, it's a red flag because it might mean that there's no need for whatever you offer.

A product will never create a need, you create a product out of people's need.

Try to look for something that already exists, and you know you can make it better, and pitch whatever you built to the your competitors dissatisfied users, and there you go, you have an audience.

Then you can start looking into metrics/analytics and finally into SEO.

beat2• 13 years ago

Well, I did say that interesting content was the most important thing (really, interesting content that those who are interested in it would know about).

babuskov• 13 years ago

It really depends what is your market? What kind of products do you make or services do you offer? You would use very different approach if you're making a game, car or bug-tracking software.

Ask HN: How do you build an audience?

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