Why being at the top of Hacker News doesn’t mean as much as I’d hoped | Hacker News Reader

Why being at the top of Hacker News doesn’t mean as much as I’d hoped

urbanverticalproject.wordpress.com

4 pointsgiltleaf9 comments

I've had blog posts make it to the top page of HN before, and likewise haven't really gotten much in the way of "conversions" from it. But that's OK... our blog[1] is a default Blogger template and there isn't much in the way of a "call to action" associated with most of our blog posts. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't think there's even a link on the entire blog, to sign up for our mailing list.

And while I should probably correct both of those deficiencies, I'm not too worried about it. Why? Because the goal of our blog posts isn't necessarily to get people signed up for a mailing list or anything. It's mainly just about having people see the name "Fogbeam". It's all towards trying to establish what marketers call TOMA - Top Of Mind Awareness[2]. We just want people to keep hearing our name over and over and over and over, until eventually it sinks in. One day, I want to be at a place where if somebody asks a friend "Hey, do you know anybody who makes a cool Enterprise Social Network product we could use?", that friend will go "Hey, there's this company named Fogbeam Labs..."

That said, it wouldn't hurt to try and get more engagement out of the blog posts. We do end a lot of them with a call to follow us on Twitter at least, but it really wouldn't hurt to push the mailing list more. It goes to the whole "permission marketing"[3] idea.

[1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness

[3]: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-m...

HN is more of a 'show and tell' rather than a platform for repeat-marketing. Every time someone reveals numbers behind their front paging it's awful as a growth mechanism, if the blog posts aren't even selling your company/product then it's even worse because that's another cliff in the conversion funnel from visitor to anything-of-value. Another startup recently revealed they got just 44 trial registrations from three distinct front page stories [1] and over 9000 visitors.

Another example that comes to mind is yesterday's marketing blog post by GrooveHQ [2]. It was their second front page post in nine months and 50+ attempts, and it wasn't even about their company or product. Instead it was about a different company whose content marketing for their ideal visitors had ironically grown their blog to 250,000 visitors a month. I wouldn't be too quick to consider optimizing for HN harmless.

To me it all reeks of @sama's "fake work" post from yesterday [3], right down to the justifications founders come up with - you're not going to achieve "TOMA" for enterprise social network software from a briefly popular blog post about something silly and unrelated Oracle said. You already achieved everything you will from it - a brief bump in your page views.

[1] http://blog.yesgraph.com/yesgraph-tc-ph-hn-omg-bbq/

[2] https://www.groovehq.com/blog/zapier-interview-with-wade-fos...

[3] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-post-yc-slump

Good insight, thanks for providing those articles. Especially interested in [3] and how it might relate. I think it's just more of a disappointment related to what marketing websites talk about and what the reality of the situation is.

To me it all reeks of @sama's "fake work" post from yesterday [3]

Blogging in general, or submitting to HN? If you mean the former, I strongly disagree. Blogging is, IMO, a key way of attracting attention and getting our message out. As for submitting to HN... well, once I have a blog post published, it takes 30 seconds to submit it here. Why not do it, if it's reasonably on-topic?

you're not going to achieve "TOMA" for enterprise social network software from a briefly popular blog post about something silly and unrelated Oracle said.

Not by itself, no. Of course not. It's just one more thing to get people reading our blog. And that most recent entry was not just an attempt to draw hits for the sake of hits... since everything we do is OSS, we actively look for opportunities to promote the use of OSS, especially in favor of proprietary plays like Oracle. And a blog post pays continuing returns over time due to hits from search.

So anyway, I agree that HN in and of itself isn't necessarily a great tool for driving specific actions. But I will argue that submitting an article (which would have been written whether or not there was a HN) here is just part of a broader overall strategy for building awareness / gaining attention. A small part, granted. :-)

I wouldn't be too quick to consider optimizing for HN harmless.

Oh, absolutely. And I can't speak for anyone else, but we don't "optimize for HN". We write about the stuff we feel is important or needs to be said, and (usually) submit the link to HN (unless it's completely off-topic or irrelevant).

    Blogging in general, or submitting to HN?

I mean targeting HN with an ongoing effort to reach the front page again and again, doubling down on relatively easy traffic with a few customers vs the much harder challenge of finding a good customer acquisition channel.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

I think that many of the comments in HN highlight the economical problems of vertical farming. So a typical HN reader will be more skeptical than a reader from a site with less technical discussion.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10092184 (78 points, 1 day ago, 121 comments)

Partial transcript of the first two comments:

> Vertical farming is an energy nightmare. It requires at least 1000x more energy than conventional agriculture because you have to provide supplemental light for the plants to grow indoors. [...]

> What's making this transition difficult is the economic viability. It only makes sense in densely populated areas but those areas also have ridiculous property values and higher utility costs. That makes it increasingly difficult for these farms because the margins in farming aren't that great. [...]

That's a really good distinction and one that I hadn't realized until now.

First, reading an article doesn't mean I'm super interested in the topic. It could just be that I was curious about the title and didn't need to know more than what was in the article.

Second, email is broken (thank you spammers). I don't subscribe to mailing lists because I'm not sure you're not going to give (voluntarily or not) my email address to third parties and most of the time it just clutters my inbox. I probably go on my spam account twice a year. One year later I will be wondering why I receive these emails about vertical farming and why aren't they trying to sell me viagra instead ;-)

So yeah page views just means you managed to get some people to click on a link, that's it.

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