Ask HN: How to Grow Your Site?
So I've been running a website since 2014 geared towards tech, science, and entertainment articles. Its a pretty broad category and one which thousands of other sites operate in. But nonetheless, I have given it a go because it is something I enjoy and is interesting (to me).
In the 3 years I've had it, we've had some very good days, but the rest are pretty average or even poor. The biggest roadblock to growing it is during the summer months, I am almost completely inactive on it as other commitments take up most of my time to think up, research, and craft articles.
I have tried a lot of free advertising options - for example, sharing some (ok, a lot) of articles here but I don't want to spam HN which I practically did when I first found this place. Rarely they are hits, most times not (which is understandable). I am also on some promotion websites. Of course, with little traffic reading the content, it means they never get submitted to places like Reddit or here which can drive lot of traffic. And while I'm on social media with it, there isn't usually much response there either as the accounts only have a couple dozen followers.
But basically, I came to ask, especially if you have a website/blog/forum, what you did to grow yours and also how you found some people to help you do it.
Getting anyone to help write a few articles here and there has been extraordinarily difficult, even now that I have started offering guest writers the chance for a backlink if it is connected to the article. It would be awesome to pay the staff, but the site generates little revenue and that goes towards paying for hosting.