How I got 50K Visitors to My Blog the First Month | Hacker News Reader

How I got 50K Visitors to My Blog the First Month

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7 pointsAmberShah22 comments

Anyone can get 50K visitors in a month. Hell, I got 50K visits to a blog of mine, over 24 hours, for posting about renaming { and } to openstache/closestache.

The bigger problem is keeping people's attention after the initial spike.

"I’ve had over 50K visitors to the blog, over 500 subscribers via RSS and email, 221 comments and over 150 Twitter followers."

The OP claimed to get 500 RSS subscribers from those spikes (avg. subscription rate of 1%)--was this similar for the spikes you experienced?

Well, I might have if I had setup the <strike>RSS</strike> Atom feed correctly. I literally "launched" the blog that day and in the midst of the craziness, setup Feedburner and plugged it into typepad incorrectly. Long story short, anyone who tried to subscribe during that time probably got an error, but I didn't notice it until the end of the spike.

Thought about ignoring the haters, but figured I'd just say this: Submitting your own articles to a site dedicated to sharing articles is not spam. I use Hacker News (and other SM sites) to discover new sites, just as other people can discover mine.

And for those who think it's easy to get 50K visits on a blog in the first month (and who've actually done it, as opposed to just talk) then congrats to you, seriously.

I almost posted something to this effect a moment ago.

If 2/5 of the articles you submit hit the front page, it shows you have good discretion and a good understanding of this community.

I'd be willing to bet that a huge percentage of the articles coming from smallish/new websites are submitted by a proxy of the author.

Same practice, just hidden. I prefer your approach.

Agreed mostly, but I would argue that hitting the front page is more luck than quality (at least 60/40 in favor of luck, timing, etc).

That's interesting. I'd like to hear your argument/read your thinking on that.

Maybe something for its own post. The dynamics of sharing, promoting, and finding content are highly relevant to this community.

A few points:

-the number of people who have friends vote their stories to the front-page (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206)

-the time of day (and day of week) you submit your story (http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacke...)

-(related to above) how many stories are submitted soon after yours determines how long your submission stays on the New page, even if they're all spam

Notice that none of these factors have anything to do with the quality of the posted content.

I don't agree with the people who are being critical of you, but I think you may be missing their point. I don't necessarily think you're being criticized for submitting your own articles as it is that you're being criticized for only submitting your own articles.

It's pretty easy to design content that will bring a bunch of hits via HN or Digg or Reddit.

OK, so now you've got traffic to pages about stuff you don't really care about. What's the point?

Step 1) Create accounts on sites such as HN solely for the purpose of submitting your own articles.

I got 45k visitors to my personal blog in the first month, and over 200 comments on my first post. But I didn't really think to blog about how I did it. Consider this my how-to post:

1. I wrote something interesting and original.

2. I told some people about it and posted on HN.

3. They told some people about it and posted it on Reddit.

4. They told some people about it and posted it on StumbleUpon.

The assumption this article is making is that you want to get 50k views in the first month. After getting slashdotted once, I can say that I'm not in as big a hurry to show my blog off to the masses as I was beforehand.

I'd much rather target my post to a smaller number of intelligent people who will get it than a large number of people who will bikeshed it.

Curious, what does it mean to "bikeshed" something?

Lammy is correct. Essentially, it means to start a controversy over something not because it's important, but because it's easy to understand. For instance, everyone can have an opinion about whether Python should have an explicit self argument on methods. But few people would argue with me if I suggested that Python should do away with metaclasses (which would probably have a much bigger effect on the language as a whole than doing away with self) simply because few people actually know what a Python metaclass is.

I believe j_baker is referring to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality

Or a small number of people who will buy, versus a whole lot of people who couldn't care less.

> My biggest fear was of people reading the blog and yawn moving on

yawn

Edit: Aren't posts like these a dime a dozen? I mean, writing about something controversial and submitting posts to social networking sites isn't exactly groundbreaking advice. How does this get to the front page?

By spamming HN?

The accounts been around for 18 days and 4 out of 5 submissions have been for the same website: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AmberShah

The fifth is for this article, a guest post of hers.

Every single submission they posted relates to the HN community in some way. I would hardly call that spam. Since when did we start penalizing people for creating original content rather than submitting/re-posting other people's content?

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