How to get 30k Hacker News visitors to your website
marketingexamples.com
marketingexamples.com
What matters is whether an article is interesting. That's what you should spend your effort on. An interesting article doesn't mean you'll get noticed, but an uninteresting article means you won't. Articles that try to make a system out of how they succeeded on HN always miss this point. In reality, what happened is that they hit on something that the community found interesting. (In this case, it was how Nike sold its first shoes.) Then they try to generalize based on the mechanical tricks they used. But those are not what made the article interesting.
What makes this difficult is that it's hard to produce interesting articles repeatedly when your motivation isn't curiosity but marketing your business. With most content marketing articles, you can feel what the author was solving for: "What's a thing that HN would find interesting that we can use to market our startup?" You can even imagine the brainstorming session that led to that topic getting selected. There's a limit to how interesting such content can ever get—if it's not something even the author is intrinsically interested in, why would it excite readers?
I've gotten some of my own writing to the front page of HN. Titling things well is hard and very important, but the content also needs to be good.
For some quick and dirty data:
I used to track pieces of mine that made the front page. I've had several, maybe as many as a dozen, that got at least 10k page views.
My best piece got over 50k page views the first 24 hours. That was in January of this year. It took me about two weeks to write it.
It wasn't content marketing. I'm a blogger. It made me no money whatsoever.
In a nutshell: Take any write-ups about "How to get X amount of traffic/sales/whatever from HN!" with a grain of salt.
Good points and I do agree. I honestly think we're arguing from the same side. One of the points the case study makes is to not overthink and think about "marketing".
To quote the last line of the case study: "He isn't a marketer on Hacker News, he's a Hacker News user on Hacker News."
Contrary to what you're saying one of the main lessons in the case study is NOT to use a clever title. To quote, "bleed out all the superfluousness".
Regards to the Nike story I never extrapolate back from this or generalise from this title. To quote, "In spite of this success, I’ll be the first to admit that I am pretty clueless when it comes to Hacker News."
And regards to your final paragraph, again, I couldn't agree with you more. And that is in fact the whole point of the conclusion. To quote,
"But to call him a great marketer I think misses the point. Adriaan is a great Hacker News user. He understands the intricacies of the forum, offers thoughtful insight, and is never pushy with his business. The naked eye doesn’t see self-promotion. It sees someone passionate about privacy. He isn't a marketer on Hacker News, he's a Hacker News user on Hacker News.
Once you start hanging with your perfect audience, you don't have to try so hard."
The reason why Adriaan is so successful is because he is intellectually curious. And that he isn't writing articles drummed up by a group of content marketers trying to game the system.
My own experience certainly backs this up. The two case studies I've submitted that reached the front page of Hacker News both took were purely done out of my own interest.
If you're selling a product that HN readers will buy then that's awesome, and well worth doing. Those of us who sit and read /newest will happily upvote things that are great.
If you're selling something that will appeal to a different group of people who don't read HN, or to the mass market so HN readers won't make much of a dent in the metrics, then it'll just spike your bandwidth costs for a while with no upside. If that's the case then focus on marketing to your potential customers. Ignore everything else. 30K views from random people who won't buy what you're selling is vanity.
"The point is that once you start hanging with your perfect audience, conventional marketing goes out the window. You don't have to try so hard.
Find the place where your tribe hangs out. Show up, help people out, talk about what you're doing, and the rest will take care of itself."
Hacker News is useless, unless you blog / product is aimed at the Hacker News archetype.
I also hear a lot of people knowing Simple Analytics from Hacker News. So maybe they don't convert to customer yet, they know about my tool. Which is super useful and got me talks with DuckDuckGo and other great companies. It's not only for selling your tool, it's also great for getting your name out there.
[1]-https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/024-moritz-dausinger-of...
Not sure how far you would get in the world of advertising sales with that observation!
30K views from the nit-picking HN crowd could be very useful if you want to refine your product for a wider audience. Things like whether the page loads without errors or spelling mistakes will be useful to correct with the HN audience. You might not get sales but you will get your sales pitch debugged.
If your product fits into this niche (or better, you can create a product specifically for the niche), I doubt you will have many problems. Otherwise, good luck reaching even page 5.
Create good content for one group of people (ie HN readers) while generating SEO juice for the real buyers(teachers).
PS It only works if you are earnest about both sides of the equation.
"Find the place where your tribe hangs out. Show up, help people out, talk about what you're doing, and the rest will take care of itself."
The article starts out sounding like it's about effective marketing, but as it progresses, the unavoidable conclusion becomes that it only works because he's sharing content relevant to HN, in a way that appeals to HN, because he himself is a HN user.
Marketing as an insider of the crowd you're marketing to is trivial. Marketing as an outsider is hard.
A set of small communities, like on Redit, have a much more predictable behavior. If you have content that interests one of them, it is very likely that it will get picked.
So, I just awk/grep'ed Apache's access.log [1]. The results were about 23k requests from 17k unique addresses in a couple of days and then a longer tail for about a week, but haven't checked since.
From memory, I got about 20K hits in the first 24 hours, and another 5K over the next few days, trailing off to nothing after about a week. It was exciting at the time but I had no evidence of any retention.
I initially started out this blog to improve my writing skills; I don't have any tracking, ads, analytics. I don't know (and don't care, tbh) if and how many people read it. It allows me to write down things I've learned, really cement that knowledge, and it's also hella fun!
Many people that I know, which maintain their own blog are on the same page. Writing in public also allows other interesting people to offer their opinions, and start a conversation. This is the best thing I've got from it, helpful comments, criticism, and different viewpoints from strangers!
As for my blog, it is very unfocused and for every well-thought out post on technical matters there are half a dozen "check out these photos" posts.
http://www.damirscorner.com/blog/posts/20150105-HowToConfigu...
I had a couple of moderately popular posts in June this year. HN sent 31,588 views directly - plus associated views from apps. A post of mine in March got 36k.
I wonder if HN has reached a local maximum of readers?
> ...
> What I’ve noticed some people do is put out a tweet directing people to the newest page. This gives their followers an easy route to find their post.
I'm pretty sure this method gets flagged. It's easy enough to detect a bunch of users landing on the new page with Twitter as a referrer all upvoting the same article. The mods and the community don't appreciate sockpuppeting (unless you're in YC of course).
That's not true. Votes from YC alums get no special treatment, and HN's voting ring detection software works the same on their posts as anyone else's. If you or anyone has concerns about this, I'd be happy to address them, but specific links would be helpful. It's pretty hard to respond to drive-by accusations like this, which have no information in them.
The first thing we tell YC startups is not to solicit upvotes and comments. If they email us complaining that their post didn't get traction, we tell them the same things we tell others.
A large part of our job is trying to prevent HN from being gamed. YC startups don't get to do that any more than others, and if we notice egregious cases we email them and give them an extra scolding.
Posts by YC startups after their initial launch don't get any special treatment. If a submission doesn't say "Launch HN", it's subject to the same rules as everything else.
Edit: HN also displays YC alumni names in orange to other YC alumni.
If you look at all the new submissions there are many interesting articles and most of them only get like 1 or 2 upvotes. So either its all random luck or people are coordinating it like they do on Reddit. But ofc: I will trust this totally legit website about marketing that everything is hard work, organics, yada-yada-yada, here's my email bro and ill be sure to click your referral links too ;>)
Of course, all my efforts so far have failed to engage the sort of people I want to engage. But then I've been here for less than a month - not an excuse, I know - and I am still trying to work out what sort of tone/content a post/comment needs to convey to get people to engage with it.
The other problem I'm suffering from is a lack of self-discipline: every day I come to HN with the intention to make an impactful post or comment, but then I click on some links and find myself drawn into articles and conversations that have nothing to do with my work/projects, but are just too interesting in their own right to be ignored ... and suddenly the clock's gone forward another hour and I've done nothing productive! HN is too addictive (but I'm not ready to quit it yet!)
I'll not post any links to my projects etc in this comment - maybe I'll try out Lesson 2 tomorrow.
So there are times when you might want to hold off on adding comments if it's close to that threshold.
Or is it a "If a tree falls in a forest..." type situation in that an unknown website with great content will continue to be an unknown website?
Since Google can't truly understand content quality/semantics, a certain level of marketing does seem to be needed to bring traffic in.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506088
Edit: just noticed that there was indeed 1 comment. Made my day :)
After we got featured on HN for awhile, whenever I hangout at some tech communities, there will always be someone saying “yeah, I came across the post about TablePlus (my product) on Hacker News the other day. Tried already”
That feels good tho. Also a good way to start a conversation and ask for feedback.
Unacceptable!!! The first link should always start with [0], not [1].
Joking of course! But I still prefer [0].
FWIW, had a few failed "Show HN's" myself. You certainly need a certain amount of luck in order to get enough upvotes to be noticed.
Choose the correct title and your startup can be projected to thousands. Write a thoughtful comment and you can make 20 sales. Ask the right question and you can end up with a Silicon Valley job (that actually happened)!
I came across Simple Analytics [1] a privacy-focused startup which pulls in huge traffic from HN. Fortunately all their traffic was all "/open" so I could compare traffic spikes with their founders [2] Hacker News activity and understand what really does works on Hacker News.
Comments were far different. Almost all of them were negative and highly unconstructive. I don't mind criticism, but I really mind criticism from which I can't learn anything. One HN reader actually took the time to write a constructive comment. I don't know who it was nor did I thank him at the time, but that one constructive criticism was way more helpful than all the traffic boost I got.