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The key to creating unique content is to work backwards from the queries which don't satisfy you currently. Answer those questions and expand upon the entire category of knowledge if possible. If you start with just publishing whatever fits your fancy, you're only guaranteed to have the psychic benefit of putting your thoughts out there.

If you have to buy ads, this means that the content you are producing already has large enough pool of competitors. Nothing wrong there, as long as you have a sustainable biz model.

Understand that at the end of the day, no matter how much HN users disparage Google as a advertisement company, their core product is still search. Search is the process of bringing users to the content which satisfies their queries. We can dispute the quality of results or pine for the search landscape of yesteryear, but the core premise remains. Google still needs to produce a modicum of relevant results.

SEO games will come and go. At the end of the day Google will always have an incentive to deliver the meaningful results users crave. The metrics they use to measure satisfaction will change, but the need for satisfactory content will not. RSS feeds, sitemaps, structured data and other essentials are only tools. At the end of the day the content is what you build. Many high traffic sites have completely bungled these basics and do well.

Simple to say, harder to execute, but entirely within the realm of the possible. Think more about the value you are providing to the user.

There's no pool of competitors -- that's why I'm doing this in the first place. The resources for learning this stuff are scarce. I just don't know how to get the word out there. I'm not looking to make money, I just want to give this away for free, because I think it's worth it. I can't even give it away D:

Then you need only change your page titles and h1 headings to better match relevant queries. The other problem could be that there isn't any search volume for that niche.

I'll try that out, thank you for the advice!

You're confusing two Internets. It's understandable, because they have the same name.

In one, search engines are advertising platforms, and list reams of content, which is also an advertising platform, designed to solicit revenue in one way or another.

In the other, search engines are for finding information, and they list sites that publish helpful/interesting/weird/fun/whatever information for free, in case someone other than the author might like it.

Confusing the two leads to disappointment.

This is a super interesting perspective, I have genuinely never thought of the internet in this way.

Something I used to do way back in the day was answer related questions on forums and have my website in my signature. It worked pretty well.

Wonder if having a "signature" on reddit (or even HN!) like this would get you banned...

Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high rep folks start selling signature space for advertising/influencer marketing.

I'm sure it would. They have mod bots monitoring how many of your links are to your own stuff. I run a totally free public education nuclear site (no ads, no cookies, plain old static HTML) and used to answer nuclear questions on reddit. I'd often back up what I was saying with links to detailed writing on my site, but I got banned from a few huge subs for self-promotion. Lol. So for the most part I just stopped answering questions on reddit.

I went snooping in your HN profile to find the link, and that is a really well done site. Clean design, relevant pictures, and interesting material. It's probably going to cost me an hour or two of productivity today.

Link for people lazier than me: https://whatisnuclear.com/

Having self promotion "rules" under the guise of "protecting communities" when it's really to force you to buy Reddit ads. As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...

I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to (tastefully?) promote in my comments

As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're someone else. It would be better to encourage people to stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine line there).

In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.

But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.

Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have something to contribute to forums but love to read about people's projects. I've been in the position before of actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it just feels like such a slap in the face from a community that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into arguments with mods about it and eventually just having to unsubscribe. It hurts.

Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel. In my experience the vast majority of the people who were banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear from their histories that their entire purpose in using reddit was exclusively promotion.

They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.

As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...

As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.

This is an amazing website. It's horrible that when asking educational questions you will absolutely never see these websites. Just the same horrible quality ones that are trying to take all your data and advertise to you.

I see lots of people with links to a home page in their user profiles (on HN, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc...) I may be in the minority here, but if I find someone particularly insightful or interesting I sometimes click through to see if they have a link.

Hmm, that does sound like a good idea!

Not only are you helping the community by answering questions, it also gives you some trackback links that Google used to weigh higher (not sure if it still does).

@dang

Sigs on HN soon pls?

Click on user name to see their profile.

Please no. Too much noise.

It was said in jest but I think everyone is taking me literally. I liked sigs on older phpBB forums when they were 2-3 lines and just some userbars. Cool back in the day, but they wouldn't really translate to the more minimalist HN.

From my time in the dying days of Usenet, I can remember there were compact codes so you could fit as much about yourself into your signature as possible. Something like the old dating ad codes, e.g. GSoH = Good Sense of Humour, but more geeky.

GeekCode, see, eg. https://geekcode.xyz/geek.html

tbf it wouldn't be a bad signal for search engines that can understand forum markup.

A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends what, you basically rely on the topic and words.

I enjoyed yours.

Does it matter that much if only a small number of people know about it?

Yes -- and this is a good question with a good answer -- because I want to help people who might be interested in the language and culture find it. And I _know they're out there_ by the number of people who at least _tried_ some really obscure languages on Duolingo. It's not for my own vanity, I want to help get the language and culture out there. The resources for it are scarce, and I feel like I can help supplement them. I'm doing the building, but I'm still waiting for the "they will come" bit.

Why do you assign such a high importance to 'help get the language and culture out there'?

The small number of people who have read it will further disseminate it themselves if they truly believe it to be valuable. As long as this is more then a few dozen people, then that should be sufficient.

To me, language and culture have intrinsic value. I also feel very attached to my cultural heritage because I'm descended from holocaust survivors. I don't want to simply sit back and watch as the culture and language disappear, and I want to provide an entrypoint for people like me who are interested but perhaps have a little less time on their hands, or who struggle with learning languages.

I'm planning soon to start releasing some videos where I read some of the old stories in English! There's not enough of it out there. It's important to me to preserve it, and the best way to preserve culture and language is to disseminate it.

and edit -- I'm sorry you got downvoted. I think your question was a very good one, and I don't think the answer is obvious at all.

I don't put too much stock in downvotes, there are so many new users joining over the past few years, some fraction inevitably of questionable quality, that votes as a signal have become much less meaningful compared to say 10 years ago.

In fact, it's probably more of a positive signal for the really interested folks.

I'm not quite sure how the language/culture intrinsically having value or not relates though. Surely it would be the relative strength that impacts the successful rate of sharing?

And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.

> And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.

Definitely! I think that on the culture side specifically, there's not very much "English-side" voice for it. Hence why I'm looking to read stories, share songs, etc. in English, so that people who don't speak the language can still find information about the culture.

Then the other prong, I guess, is helping to build out the language-learning side, so that people looking to enjoy the language have more resources to do so.

Which language? Because I've desperately been looking for a good resource to practice/learn Slovene that's not an expensive course from the University of Cleveland.

Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian. I'm adjacent to you, but I don't think they're quite the same, I'm afraid.

https://www.clozemaster.com/languages/learn-slovenian-online

Thanks, I'll check it out!

> What am I supposed to do ??

You're supposed to "growth hack" AKA post on popular subreddits, forums and sites pretending to be a casual user (or use bots) that links to the site while talking about how great it is.

That feels kind of dishonest... But then, is "justifying means by the ends" really harmful in this case if it's free stuff that I'm just desperate to give away ?:D No ads, no cloud, no data sales, just plz look at my site plz plz.

I dunno, what do you think?

Everybody with a subpar product thinks that what is lacking for them is exposure. Most of them start spending a lot on ads.

Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a public.

Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.

> Everybody with a subpar product thinks that what is lacking for them is exposure. Most of them start spending a lot on ads. Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a public.

You didn't have to be mean, you chose to be. Whether it's true or not, this isn't constructive criticism, it's just mean spirited.

> Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.

And why would I now? Now that I already know you're expecting it to be bad, I'm guessing that whether it's nice or terrible, you're going to think it's terrible. I don't have any interest in sending my website to someone who isn't interested in giving constructive criticism or giving suggestions.

I've dealt with this extensively in business, taking to business owners who have problems getting customers and think the problem is lack of exposure, while ignoring obvious flaws in their offering.

This might not be true of your site, but the pattern is so common that I assumed so. As you haven't linked the site, it is not a criticism of it. I admit the comment is mean and maybe I shouldn't have posted it.