How do you get traffic? | Hacker News Reader

How do you get traffic?

31 pointssecgeek20 comments

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

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!

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..

Any recommendations on how to do stress testing?

i know apache has some benchmarking tools, and httperf is useful for stress testing

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

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

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...

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.

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 :(

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

hmm drupal spam module is also good just got tht.

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.

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

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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