Ask HN: How long did it take to get a good amount of users visiting your site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long did it take to get a good amount of users visiting your site?

12 pointsmootothemax20 comments

I launched a web app in February '10, and whilst it's started to come close to ramen-profitable, I consider the amount of users visiting it to be pretty low: 30-40 unique visitors per day who haven't previously visited the site.

I realise that everyone will have a different opinion of what is a good amount of traffic, but how long did it take before you thought "Yup, it's all going to plan"?

Personally, my knowledge of how to market and bring in traffic is essentially zero; did any of you have one major insight that helped you get to where you are today?

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I started an image bookmarking site 2.5 years ago: http://imgfave.com

Now gets ~40,000 visitors a day and just pays my rent.. so not exactly ramen profitable yet.

A few things I did which helped it grow:

- Got my initial core group of users by soliciting feedback on friendfeed and a few other places. The first version was based on identi.ca and I got some buzz just because it was a novel use of the identi.ca microblogging software.

- Started a bunch of facebook pages around different topics (photography, design, etc..). Got a lot of fans, and posted a new image every day to each one. This was probably the single biggest driver of return traffic.

- Made sure the site is fast. Every time I'd upgrade my server or improve performance in some way (like move files to a CDN) I'd see a huge increase in traffic. Speed is really important.

- Besides that I just gave it time to grow, periodically added a new feature, and sending an email to all my users about it.

Top traffic sources are: direct traffic, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Tumblr, and google search.

List your site on the Chrome web store. It will at least double your traffic.

Oh and stop trying to hide the damn thing. You just lost a few hundred visitors by not even saying it's name here. Do you really want traffic or not?

List your site on the Chrome web store. It will at least double your traffic

Thanks, great suggestion and I have now done this :)

Do you really want traffic or not

Well, yes I do, but at the same time I didn't want this Ask HN to be solely about me. Lesson learned ;)

Off topic but I like your app and it looks to me like you can be loosing significant amount of first time visitors (How big is your bounce rate on homepage?) so I'll write it anyway.

Try some A/B testing with copy and amount of info (3 main blocks instead of 6... write not about what app does, but about what I don't need to do if I use it and so on). Now I see that it's something nice, well made and can be useful but it takes effort to actually understand it while it should be obvious.

It's hard to describe. I just think that this is a bigger problem because of conversion. (I'm a UX designer :))

Hiya, thanks, great suggestion! The bounce rate currently hovers between 40 and 50%, so there's definitely some testing to be done on the design :)

If you have any other suggestions, I'm all ears :)

It's all just scientific poking :) but I'd try for example to address the audience instead of describing app it self. Now you have "Twitter Machine - tool packed with features" so maybe just "tool for Twitter stars" or something like it would work better. What you should understand is that you are basically trying to get people to pay for using Twitter :) so you have to be talking with hardcore users and providing some solid arguments.

Hypothetical but I hope it helps :)

It really does help - I'm a complete and utter newbie at actively trying to market and sell, so it's making a huge difference, thanks :)

You are welcome. neputys at gmail dot com can't promise much but I'll help if I'll be able to

I came across this article on SEOMoz by a YOUMoz member who in two years was able to rank #1 out of 92,000,000 for the term "auto accessories." He doesn't tell us in detail how he did it (step by step), but he does talk about the high level steps he used to rank well and drive traffic to his site. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/boy-do-i-love-linkbuilding-and-yo...

In my experience the fastest way to acquire users, other than paid search, is via an affiliate program. I have launched 7 programs for e-commerce properties in the last 3 years and the average first months traffic to a brand new site has been 20,000 unique visitors in the first month. Traffic growth has always excellerated from month to month as we acquired new affiliates to participate in the program.

I have a hobby launching wallpaper sites. http://www.ScienceWallpaper.com has gone from 0 to 80 organic visitors per day in one month. I've linked it from 3 or 4 of my blogs, and it had a popular reddit post last month. Other than that, just regular updates.

Same story for most other sites. Get lots of content up there, and carry on.

I got a site up and running from zero to 600 daily users in 2 weeks. Then again it was mostly black hat stuff.

Wow, nice work! (even if it is admittedly via black hat ;))

What niche is the site in?

What are your current methods for marketing the site?

Searching for reviews of my competitors, contacting the blog owners and asking for something similar, along with a free subscription - so far to a resounding silence.

It's listed in a few directories, and I still get a few visitors from the likes of KillerStartups (featured it back in March), but other than that I don't really know where to begin :)

Oh! I added an affiliate programme about a month ago and submitted that to various directories, and have had about ten users sign up for it, leading to zero sales.

Honestly, I think the product itself is good and enough people seem to want to pay for it - I'm just not sure what the next steps should be. I'm deliberately not mentioning the site as I want this question to not be specifically about me, but if you have any tips I'd love to hear them! :)

While on one hand your restraint in self-promoting your site here on HN is admirable, I suspect that it reflects a reluctance on your part to aggressively market/promote/sell your site.

If I may be so bold, I suggest you try to get over this reluctance. If you're shy or self deprecating with your marketing message, you won't attract as much attention as you may deserve. Be bold, be aggressive. For example, try different approaches with the media (just asking isn't enough, you have to give them a reason to cover you).

Good luck!

You make a good point and I suspect that you may be right :)

I'll give it a try, I'm going to sit down now and think about what rocks about my web app (ahh, sod it, it's http://tweetingmachine.com), what makes it relevant to the people I contact, and why it should be covered. Thanks!

Looks like a nicely executed product, I haven't tested it, but this is the feeling I get from visiting the site.

However, I think you might have two minor problems here:

1) Getting people on the site and let people know you exist. See rmah's suggstion above. Free accounts for bloggers is a good idea at this stage, but not enough.

2) Customer acquisition: Please tell me immediately _how much_ I am going to spend. I won't hook my twitter account with your app, I've come to know your site 10 seconds ago, I won't let you dive through my contacts. I don't even know if this is a paid or a free service. To me this is a enough to let me close the browser tab and look away.

Thanks! Good point about the money, I've temporarily placed this on the homepage, and will be working at a better way to display and get people clicking "Buy now!" :)

I'm now following the advice and have spent a good amount of time today finding relevant websites and contacting them about TweetingMachine. If all goes to plan I hope to write a successful post here in a couple of months stating everything I did.

go to the library and get some Ries, Kawasaki, and Godin

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