Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007203

166 99 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For those who have side projects with Monthly Revenue > 1000. How do you effectively drive traffic to your site?

23andwalnut2• 13 years ago

I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement (http://duetapp.com) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com. The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well.

Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as an effective means of marketing so I'm planning on blogging much more often this year. Hopefully that will help too...

udkl4• 13 years ago

Nicely done ! Especially when you did not use a framework for PHP/JS.

udkl4• 13 years ago

I'm a bit curious though .... it is unclear, did you design the theme or was a 'pre-made' theme used ?

23andwalnut2• 13 years ago

Everything is custom. I designed the Duet and Solo themes, but I used a bit of bootstrap for some of the elements. Both landing pages are custom as well. The Duet landing page uses Foundation and the Solo landing page uses Bootstrap.

Jack000• 13 years ago

I had a digital sign-making business with small income (basically you design a sign on the website and I carve it out of wood with a CNC machine)

the most traffic I got were from giving signs away as prizes on crafting blogs. It seems obvious in hindsight, but you have to be careful when cold emailing with "free" and "prize" in the body, I think more than half of my emails were filtered out as spam.

* I had also tried adwords. It did give me a bunch of clickthroughs, but was not cost effective in the end.

RealGeek3• 13 years ago

I've had decent traction with http://www.ranksignals.com over the past year with SEO, Content Marketing and Email marketing. My app is a SEO tool to explore backlinks of competitors. There is also a SEO Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-seo-pagerank... )which drives returning visitors to the website.

uladzislau• 13 years ago

I just tried it and it's a very cool app. Are you going to monetize it in any way?

I read a lot on this topic (SEO) at the moment but never heard about your spp. So you probably should reach out to top SEO blogs and post on forums. I'm sure they will be thrilled :)

RealGeek3• 13 years ago

Glad you liked it.

I am building more SEO tools to sell with a freemium SaaS model. The existing tools will remain free.

I have reached out to many blogs, some has written about us but many haven't. The SEO community is also spreading the word about RankSignals on SEO & webmaster forums.

JoshTriplett5• 13 years ago

Interesting! What are you using as your data source to find backlinks?

techaddict009• 13 years ago

Same question here. What is source? From where are you finding backlinks? google search?

yoshyosh• 13 years ago

I've been looking for something like this, awesome to see it. That's the issue with marketing, there is a subset of users that are looking for your product, or know they have some sort of problem that needs solving. How you get to specifically them is the tough part.

I bet there are a lot of other up and coming products that just get drowned out/fail to get traction, yet these are the ones that are really trying to innovate.

RealGeek3• 13 years ago

Long tail SEO and content marketing is an effective way to reach niche audience. Additionally, we've got a lot of users from niche forums. Moreover, this is the kind of traffic that converts best.

I have been able to get very good traction with it, and my app has not been featured on any main stream tech blogs yet.

fourstar3• 13 years ago

Most of my traffic for Hipster or Homeless comes from Facebook likes and a Wikipedia article in another country.

neeson• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, did you notice a bump from being mentioned in the movie Drinking Buddies?

fourstar3• 13 years ago

Honestly this is the first I've ever heard of it... Now I'm kind of curious. Was it actually mentioned in the movie (the URL)?

ishener• 13 years ago

My product is an embedded chat widget(http://www.hashworld.co/), and for me it's google adwords, because my target audience is very specific.

miloszf4• 13 years ago

I have no revenue, but around 12-20k unique visits a month consistently for the past 9 months. The site is http://androidwallpape.rs and main sources of traffic so far have been android blogs and podcasts as well as stumble-upon sites. Initially the link was posted to reddit and it was picked up from there. Of those visits around 40% is new unique visitors, each month.

I would say engaging with communities that might be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.

pc86• 13 years ago

Do you have any plans to monetize the site or is it just something fun for you to do? If the former, have you given any serious thought as to how?

miloszf4• 13 years ago

As per my other comment, I've considered it, but haven't gone thought with it. My only motivation for the site was to repurpose what I had laying around on my hard drive in hopes it would be useful to people. Also, I wasn't willing to do anything that would sacrifice experience or quality, so I decided not to. Only thing that I think could work would be approaching android devs directly about ad based sponsorship, because that would allow me to control the relevance and quality of the ads. Decided against it as, honestly, I'm busy with other things and the hassle outweighs any potential revenue I could hope to get out of it.

Zaheer2• 13 years ago

Awesome site! You could easily monetize with just placing even a single AdSense ad on the site. An app might also be useful in monetizing. Is this a custom site? Curious what you used to make it.

miloszf4• 13 years ago

Thanks, glad you like it!

It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset

I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.

tgflynn• 13 years ago

By monetize you mean make $100 or so a month right ?

With RPM's around a few dollars for AdSense isn't that the most he would be looking at in revenue, or am I missing something ?

JoshTriplett5• 13 years ago

You might consider running ads, or providing a simple Android app for random/popular/rotating wallpapers.

User8712• 13 years ago

Very cool, great execution for a wallpaper site. Few suggestions...

1. Filter by color. Allow users to pick a color on a palette, and select all the images with that primary color.

2. Categories. A simple dropdown in the navigation to select nature, architecture, water, abstract, etc.

Lastly, why don't you branch this concept out into other areas? This would be a beautiful showcase for general photography. Allow users to upload their work, 'like' photos, and display the best on the homepage. Mix in profiles, and the ability to comment on images you select, and it would be an interesting site. Somewhat of a behance, pinterest, logopond mix geared towards photographers.

miloszf4• 13 years ago

Thanks, glad you like it.

Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.

I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.

As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)

kruipen3• 13 years ago

My side project (http://kruipen.com) is a database of audio equipment prices (although it is for fun, not monetization). I would sometimes post relevant links on audio forums' for-sale posts. With mixed success.

winslow• 13 years ago

Quick question how do you like jqPlot? Did you try anything like d3js? If so, any pros or cons of each?

I'm currently messing with d3js for some data I have on my F150 for the past year. (Fuel, mpg, odometer, fuel price, etc).

EDIT: I would recommend a "browse/explore" feature. I don't know audio equipment so I don't know what to search for. Your initial hint helps but doesn't keep a non audio expert around very long.

kruipen3• 13 years ago

jqPlot works for me, but I'm not a UI person (as you can tell <g>) and I don't really use many capabilities. The library seems to be relatively big by current standards.

The dirty little secret why the UI is so sparse: this is a purely static site generated once a day by a Haskell program. The is no real browse feature, although you can click to some other "random" pages from actual price pages (e.g. http://kruipen.com/wyred-4-sound-dac-2-5.html). But those links are more intended for search engine crawlers than humans - that's why they appear "random" <g>.

namenotrequired• 13 years ago

Is the name meaning "to crawl" in dutch intentional?

kruipen3• 13 years ago

Wow, you are the first person that's figured it out.

jawns• 13 years ago

I run a site called Correlated (http://www.correlated.org) that landed me a book deal (http://www.amazon.com/Correlated-Surprising-Connections-Seem...).

Although it's not recurring revenue, the income from the book advance is way more than I could have ever hoped to generate by placing ads on the site.

One unorthodox way I've driven traffic to the site is by including it in an iframe at the bottom of a little Excel-to-HTML converter I whipped up a few years ago:

http://pressbin.com/tools/excel_to_html_table/

I use a similar technique here:

http://intellicaps.correlated.org/

It's a service that allows you to convert ALL CAPS text to mixed case, and it includes a sidebar that promotes Correlated by pulling in the most recently published statistic.

I guess the general technique could be summed up as: Make something useful (even if it's boring), get traffic, promote something completely useless but fun, and hope that it piques their interest.

rsivapr• 13 years ago

Going to take this down later this week. My free micro-instance-on-AWS period is over. I get a constant drive of traffic from reddit. Could've thrown in ads, but I really din't want to keep it going. It's kinda stupid, but kinda cool?

Memes As A Service http://maas.rohits.me/

nej• 13 years ago

Mind open sourcing the work you have done so far?

JoshTriplett5• 13 years ago

That's actually rather useful, to avoid manually constructing and uploading images for a quick memetic response.

The example linked at the top works, but when I try to construct one, I get a "We're sorry, but something went wrong." error. For instance: http://maas.rohits.me/boromir/One%20does%20not%20simply/serv...

How much traffic does it cost? If you put ads on it to pay for the traffic, and added some usage statistics and "top N served" (by traffic and by unique referrer) to get people to browse the site directly, you could probably keep it going pretty easily. It'd be handy.

Also, have you considered directly serving the image in response to the request? That way, people could use your URLs directly in the img tags rather than the imgur URLs, which would let you get the traffic statistics for the images, and promote the use of your service.

jkupferman2• 13 years ago

Funny enough I build an app that is almost identical: http://memeifier.com/

Code: https://github.com/jkupferman/meme-creator

p8952• 13 years ago

I see you are using Puma for your rack server, how do you find it performs compared to Unicorn?

dkoston• 13 years ago

"traffic" is a really ambiguous word. If I take it at face value, it's really easy to drive traffic to a site: - recruit a bunch of affiliates to post pages with links back to your site (be discriminating on quality and frequency) - use paid ads - connect with a reputable backlink service that doesn't trip Google's radar. - distribute a javascript widget that is hosted on your servers - run a big promo with the promise of free gadets

However, I'm assuming what you really want is users/conversions. In that case, you need to think about your project/site/business as a relationship between 2 parties with the internet simply being a more scalable medium for communication between you.

To get people interested in a product/service, it has to fix a pain point, be really interesting, or you have to be the best. You can "be the best" by showcasing your knowledge of the problem with blog posts, interviews, helping people out on forums, and becoming involved in communities that would be in your target demographic (forums, meet ups, irc groups, etc).

Fixing a pain point or being really interesting is a product /market fit problem so if you've shown your site/product/service to a lot of people and it's not sticking, you need to do in-person interviews to figure out what's not good enough.

In general, if you're trying to build up traffic, that's really building up a community of people (who are the source of good traffic) so you need to approach that in the same way you'd build up a community offline: be interesting, be a good community citizen, and give without asking much in return.

chezmo• 13 years ago

I can just agree on that. My side project http://mailparser.io has ridiculous low traffic compared to other projects i developed. Still it's doing much better than the other sites regarding the conversion and finally the MRR.

startupvitality2• 13 years ago

We've only soft launched StartupVitality [1] but if you've just launched your side project and are looking to get some early, targeted traffic, it's a problem we know about.

We're going to release a list of our submission sites so that bootstrappers who have more time than money do it for free but those who have some cash or are funded might find our service useful.

[1] https://startupvitality.com/

JoshTriplett5• 13 years ago

The very first thing that comes to mind when reading your front page is "SEO spammer", and reading the rest of the site does nothing to dispel that impression. You might want to give some specific portfolios of what you've done in the past for specific sites, to reinforce that you're not (for instance) comment/forum/blog spammers.

startupvitality2• 13 years ago

Hi Josh, thanks for the comment. We don't and will never do unsolicited comment/forum/blog spamming.

We weren't really going to post on HN because most of the audience will think this is SEO spam. It's not and we would never do that. We're only interested in promoting your startup to sites that are interested.

Firstly, we reject and refund low quality sites that don't meet our criteria.

Secondly, to give you a few examples, if your site has a great design, we will post to DesignerNews. If SEO is your thing, we'll make sure it gets exposure on Inbound.org. However, it starts to get more interesting when we move outside of the 'known niches'. So, if your startup/site is doing innovative things with data, we'll post to DataTau; if it's food related, we'll post to FoodNews (hypertexthero); if it's travel related, we'll post to outbounding.org.

We also promote on paid, premium sites such as betali.st, erlibird and KillerStartups.

Happy to provide more information if you like.

songzme• 13 years ago

I built https://OpenTokRTC.com to make it super easy for people to go and video chat with each other using WebRTC. It gets a steady 2000 visits every week. After I built the site, I set up google search notifications so I get notified whenever new content relevant to my app shows up ( webrtc posts, articles about video chat, etc ). Then I'd visit each site, read it, and leave a comment about my thoughts and plug in OpenTokRTC.

nkcmr• 13 years ago

Thanks for building this! My side project uses this. (https://yoursecondphone.co/)

eam• 13 years ago

We do some guest blogging which drives part of our traffic to http://www.wishbooklet.com, the rest is mostly viral links in social sites.

davecap12• 13 years ago

One of my side projects (www.twitteraudit.com) happens to get the most traffic of anything I've ever built on my own :) It gets 50k+ uniques per month and all the traffic has grown organically (mostly via tweets and blog posts). It's been up for just over a year, and I've started spending some more time (on the side) monetizing it. If anyone is interested in helping, send me an email!

oops: spoke to soon. It doesnt (yet) have much monthly revenue :(

JoshTriplett5• 13 years ago

Why do I need to authorize a connection to my Twitter account in order to audit someone else's? What are you using it for, and could you either make that more clear up front or drop the requirement, preferably the latter?

dangrossman• 13 years ago

Probably to use your account to make the requests to Twitter's API. The API is very rate-limited, so using his own account for everyone isn't viable.

billmalarky• 13 years ago

How do you determine if a follower is fake or not?

pibefision• 13 years ago

I've started this side project (http://CryptoCurrenciesTalk.com) to have conversations on that topic.

Getting traffic by participating only on reddit (subreddits about litecoin and litecoint mining) and just by helping people, I'm getting new members and very interesting organic search results. (+1000 new visits from Google on keywords related to the topics).

coreymaass• 13 years ago

I launched my web app development service Built from Ideas (http://BuiltFromIdeas.com) a couple months ago. I've experimented with Facebook ads, but saw no real result. Then I wrote guest articles for Bootstrappist (http://www.bootstrappist.com) and a couple other small, targeted newsletters and saw immediately results. Inbound marketing for the win!

juanre• 13 years ago

Write about it. Make it so your articles explain useful stuff for people not necessarily interested in your niche: what general learning can you extract from your experience so far? What did you try? What did and didn't work? This will drive high quality content to your article, which will in turn build up links and percolate to your site. This is what's worked for http://greaterskies.com. Nothing else I've tried has had any impact.

fogleman• 13 years ago

By pimping the projects in threads like this one, by the looks of it.

rebel• 13 years ago

The traffic driving methods used are much more useful if you know the site/market they're being used for. I'd much rather people included the project URL than not.

markrickert• 13 years ago

I've built a successful side business (http://www.mohawkapps.com) and was even featured in an e-book: http://www.sideprojectbook.com/ - by creating iPhone apps for niche markets and marketing heavily to them through facebook and in-person tradeshows. I gross about $2k-$4k a month but I haven't quit my day job yet.

Apple does a lot of my marketing for me but I also rely heavily on word of mouth. I make sure to have a screen in all my apps that allow users to tell their friends through texting and email about the app. I'm also an apple affiliate so all the traffic that goes to the app store through my site nets me another 7% of all that user's purchases during the session... it makes up for the gigantic chunk of change that Apple takes from my sales.

Recently, I've started branching out into more generic apps that are useful to a wider market, but my niche apps make way more money than the broad-audience apps.

LukeHoersten7• 13 years ago

I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.

antr• 13 years ago

As an active runner/triathlete, I can't stress enough how f*cked-up online registration processes for races are, and this app almost seems solve this. All I can wish you is the best of luck and I hope to signup to races via your app soon.

my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option to do so during registration, but not before). This sector needs an Eventbrite for sport events. Best of luck.

LukeHoersten7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly my goal. I currently have it so you can create a race w/o signing up. Shoot me an email (link on the bottom of the website) if you don't mind chatting a bit more? Thanks!

codygman• 13 years ago

Any more details on the software stack? I'm actually about to write an SAAS in Haskell. Are you using Yesod, Snap, Happstack, plain wai, or something else?

Any commentary on making your SAAS with Haskell, where you thought it helped, where you thought it hurt?

Thanks!

carterschonwald• 13 years ago

Knowing Luke I'm going to guess Snap, but I could be wrong, the Haskell web tools allow yah to mix and match. Congrats to Luke on launching!

LukeHoersten7• 13 years ago

Snap and Heist. I've used other frameworks and languages before settling on Snap and couldn't be happier. PostgreSQL for the DB.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them.

Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491485

LukeHoersten7• 13 years ago

Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.

Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?

jasonkester• 13 years ago

For Twiddla, I make a point of giving free accounts to teachers and students (or basically anybody who bothers to write an email and ask for one).

This leads to tons of word-of-mouth referrals, and I'll sometimes watch as an entire school comes on board, one class at a time, over the course of a few weeks.

People tend to write about this (and they like the product), so it finds its way onto the radar of companies who do Online Tutoring. We have an API they can use to create and embed our whiteboards for use as online classrooms. That's the bit that costs money. It's a tiny fraction of our userbase, but it accounts for nearly all the revenue.

cheyne• 13 years ago

My side project is gaining users slowly everyday. It's called noteshred and it allows to you send people self shredding, encrypted notes with unique URLs, https://www.noteshred.com. I'm curious to know how you guys transitioned from a free tool to something that generated income. I can't imagine advertisements wouldn't bring in much revenue, so how did you go about introducing a paid model?

udfalkso• 13 years ago

I get 750k+ visitors per month. Nearly all of it from organic search (aka Google). It took years to build up this traffic organically to User Generated Content.

http://isitnormal.com

Great Ask HN. Thanks for posting.

istorical• 13 years ago

Hey I'm building a user-generated content site and I'm trying to slowly crawl my way up organic search but I'm really struggling. I don't really expect you to take time out of your life to look at my stuff, but if you do have time / want to I'd love to hear what you think!

This is the site: http://www.istorical.com

I accidentally Panda'd myself I'm pretty sure. When I put my site up I had thousands of stub pages that got indexed with the thinnest possible content.

I removed (they now 404) a bunch of pages and added 'noindex' meta tags to most others so eventually Google will hopefully only be indexing hundreds of my pages instead of 70,000. So hopefully I won't have Panda penalty / thin content.

Beyond that though, do you have any advice for SEO on user-generated content like this: http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/141

Do you think having keywords actually influences SEO these days? I thought that Google and others just extracted keywords themselves and ignores ones you define yourself?

Zaheer2• 13 years ago

What are you using to power your site in terms of stack if you don't mind me asking?

8bitpony• 13 years ago

That's an impressive amount of traffic for a side project. Has the gold membership been a successful form of monetisation?

adjwilli• 13 years ago

There are lots of "App Stores" now that accept web apps. Google, Firefox and Opera all have them. I think Amazon does too.

aymeric• 13 years ago

Has anyone had any luck with those App Stores? Anymore to add to the list? (Google Apps?)

davidw• 13 years ago

By the way, if anyone is interested in a nice, but small and very focused (NO POLITICS) forum for those of us working on bootstrapped companies, I've been enjoying this one, so far: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

For LiberWriter, I've found that the right forums can drive a lot of traffic. Any old traffic is useless - I've got the site up on the front page of HN before, with 0 conversions. HN readers are not our target market at all. Forums also put you in contact with people to just chat about what you offer, which might give you some ideas... Don't let naysayers get you down, either. There's bound to be someone who says they would never pay for that, could build it in a weekend, or whatever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

mapster• 13 years ago

Wouldn't the front page of HN would be more about the readers sharing / promoting the site than direct conversions? Maybe coders don't tweet as much as I thought.

andersschmidth• 13 years ago

For Pitcherific (http://pitcherific.com/) we began asking friends in the Startup Weekend community, some of them organizers of the event, if they would try out the app with their attendees. This lead to us being invited as coaches, doing workshops etc.

SDMattG• 13 years ago

Good design...it opens up so many doors.

CSS galleries, Dribbble postings, trust, sharing on social media, being followed by designers/developers/marketers, etc.

Great design is truly appreciated and breaks down massive barriers when someone first comes to your sites.

It also happens to be a great traffic generator - so don't neglect it!

I run http://hookfeed.com and http://minimalytics.com. And I'm writing http://howtobuildarocketship.com

dreadsword• 13 years ago

EDIT: Just re-read the post, and neither of my side projects is "successful," so ignore this, or by all means, click through...

I have two side projects, and rarely promote them at all - the occasional plug on HN or r/startups where its relevant. The lack of promotion would explain why neither has any traffic! One - nerdy bookmarking at http://linkthing.co and Two - I'm working on a feed reader, you can see its output in action at http://techwatching.com

I've always like the Reddit "SYS" tradition - a monthly thread where anyone can post whatever their doing in blatant self promotion without the usual guilt & karma penalties.

antidaily• 13 years ago

http://www.fleapay.com gets most of its traffic from processors we integrate with like Braintree and Auth.net. Most have partner or app pages set up that we are listed on.

y1426i• 13 years ago

I built quotes app to learn opensocial and virality and had it on every social network that supported opensocial then. It was a pain working with those and one fine day I pulled my app out from everyone of those, found a $3/month hosting provider and spent a day putting my app as a website http://quotbook.com/. It found a hit on chrome web app store and have been getting $100+ revenue since over two years now with little to no effort.

Doches• 13 years ago

I publish a digital-only literary magazine called Far Off Places ( http://faroffplaces.org ) with a team of 4 (myself, two editors, one designer). It has recurring revenue from email and iOS subscriptions that we've ploughed back into the project. Our initial subscription revenue has funded our expansion into related projects (launch an iOS poetry promotion app, record a fortnightly podcast, &c.) all of which we use to drive readers to the magazine. They also make us look pretty awesome on grant applications...

We promote pretty heavily on Facebook (poetry & literary fiction readers are a seriously niche audience), which we use to drive traffic to the (free) side projects. From there it's just straightforward cross-promotion to convert e.g. podcast listeners into magazine subscribers.

pranaya_co• 13 years ago

For StartUpLift (http://startuplift.com), the best results have been through contacting related sites / bloggers and requesting a writeup. The only way to get this done on a smaller budget is a relentless hustle. You need to request “getting featured” in as many blogs and sites as possible. Here is a sample list that you can go through:

Hacker News - http://news.ycombinator.com/

StartUpLift - http://startuplift.com/submit-your-startup/

Springwise - http://springwise.com/tipus/

CrunchBase - http://crunchbase.com/

Appvita - http://www.appvita.com/

Techattitude - http://techattitude.com/

Minisprout - http://www.minisprout.com/

Emily Chang - http://emilychang.com/

Rev2 - http://www.rev2.org/

Ziipa - http://www.ziipa.com/

On The App - http://www.ontheapp.com/

Next Web App - http://www.netwebapp.com/

DIY Startup News - http://www.netwebapp.com/

AppUseful - http://appuseful.com/

Startup Booster - http://www.startupbooster.com/

Paggu - http://www.paggu.com/

Robin Speziale - http://robinspeziale.com/

Submit Startup - http://www.submitstartup.com/

TechHotSpot - http://techhotspot.com/

YouNoodle - http://younoodle.com/

Lovely Pages - http://www.lovelypages.net/

Generation-y Startup - http://genystartup.com/

Netted - http://netted.net/

Killer Startups - http://www.killerstartups.com/

GotoWeb2.0 - http://www.go2web20.net/

StartupMeme - http://www.startupmeme.com/

SimpleSpark - http://www.simplespark.com/

VentureBeat Profiles - http://venturebeatprofiles.com/

FeedMyApp - http://www.feedmyapp.com/

BigStartups - http://www.bigstartups.com/

GreatWebApps - http://greatwebapps.com/

Wwwhatsnew - http://wwwhatsnew.com/

Best Websites - http://101bestwebsites.com/

MakeUseOf - http://www.makeuseof.com/

LaunchFeed - http://www.launchfeed.com/

MoMB - http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/

Demo Girl - http://demogirl.com/

WebDev 2.0 - http://www.webdevtwopointzero.com/

DzineBlog - http://www.webdevtwopointzero.com/

Sociable Blog - http://www.sociableblog.com/

emilioolivares• 13 years ago

I run Flipmeme (http://www.flipmeme.com). Just hit 30k uniques this month, mostly from Reddit and people posting our pages to Facebook. My biggest surprise is Google which sends the most traffic organically. Unfortunately, I've learned that web traffic doesn't happen overnight, it's a LONG hustle and requires time and patience.

jizie• 13 years ago

Check out my site just put it up yesterday. Still working on it. but wanted to come up with idea's to add more users any ideas welcomed. I also created a blog that will show case idea's that will help me grow my site. so any idea's will be posted with my idea's as well thanks jizie.com

udkl4• 13 years ago

The comments are turning out to be 'bragging' <div>'s rather than insightful suggestions. Rather than the 'how'.

ktaylor• 13 years ago

Interesting thread. I've gleaned a few useful ideas.

http://www.eventwax.com is an online event registration tool that uses several techniques for increasing traffic.

1. We use a freemium model and about 75% of our users use the free service to host their free events. This helps us because of #2 below.

2. Our built in viral mechanism is that when one hosts an event, everyone who signs up for an event sees a "powered by eventwax" logo at the bottom of the registration pages. So, even for free events, we are getting a tiny bit of passive exposure to all event's audiences. That means 10's of thousands of people a month see our logo.

3. We have a semi-active blog that brings in some high quality traffic.

4. We've had success at targeting a few keyword phrases that bring in a bit of traffic but SEO targeting has also been one of our biggest disappointments. Online event registration is a very competitive field and we've "wasted" a lot of time trying to improve our keywords.

5. We do run very limited Google Adwords and Linkedin PPC campaigns but haven't optimized them yet. Our current combined budget is only about $100/month. The next think we need to do is "bucket" our keywords into semantic groups and then create custom landing pages for each group to increase relevancy.

NikaLander• 13 years ago

We have launched Varycode (https://www.varycode.com/) about a year and a half ago. It is online source code convertor between C#, VB, Java, C++, Ruby, Python and Boo. Have not been doing any marketing or PR for quite a long time because were still adding new directions of conversion, fixing bugs and improving design, but were getting new users by spreading word of mouth by customers who liked our service. Right now we are running social Like and Share campaign (unlimited access as a bonus), writing pitches to programing magazine’s editors and bloggers and planning on providing trendsetters with a free account. Daily users and registrations numbers have doubled.

someotheridiot• 13 years ago

I run http://rebrickable.com and have built it up mostly via making it so awesome all my users drive the traffic for me :)

rachelandrew• 13 years ago

Our side project (http://grabaperch.com) ultimately became our main business. We're a couple of developers, when we launched four and a half years ago we had little to no marketing knowledge. So I have learned by experimenting.

We launched into an audience we knew well, and already worked for. The product is pitched at web designers, as a consultancy the majority of our clients were web design agencies. Our main initial tactic - and something we still do - was to write content that appealed to that audience. Not necessarily anything to do with content management, but anything that might appeal to designers and design agencies and then link back to Perch.

I've experimented quite a bit with BuySellAds (http://buysellads.com/). There are bargains to be had that convert well if you look at the smaller sites, and find those that are well matched to your audience. They might not send through huge amounts of traffic but if they are really well selected then the conversion rate can be better than the expensive high traffic sites.

The surprising success for us in terms of advertising has been sponsoring relevant podcasts. In our case that is podcasts that target web designers. The trick is to sponsor those who actually take the time to talk a bit about the product during the show - rather than just read out your name at the beginning. We've also managed to find podcasts where the hosts use Perch - that's even better!

Mostly it is just working on incremental gains in terms of traffic and visibility. An article here and there, some well placed ads, sponsoring podcasts. None of this causes a crazy rush of traffic but we're in it for the long game, so a steady growth that is sustainable is really more interesting to me.

ericthegoodking• 13 years ago

Interesting!Your website looks amazing. Good job on the design.

eddyparkinson• 13 years ago

I like the perch tag idea.

Can you help, you understand web designers, would this suit the web designer market: An easy way of creating/editing web applications, lets people who have basic excel skills build sophisticated web applications. http://www.cellmaster.com.au/AppBuilder.html

satyap• 13 years ago

My side project is a specialty, niche application for speech pathology and audiology courses at major universities. So, traffic is driven by word-of-mouth (all the people in charge of these programs form a community, go to conferences, etc). And then the people involved in the courses are required to use this app. It tracks their progress towards course completion.

Edit: And yeah, it made me, personally, > 1000/month last year. That's after my X% cut of gross. There are < 10 people involved.

Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

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