How thathigh.com solved the chicken and egg and grew to 1M views/mo with no SEO | Hacker News Reader

How thathigh.com solved the chicken and egg and grew to 1M views/mo with no SEO

blog.mixrank.com

34 pointsjoeyespo22 comments

I run thathigh.com.

This is an old post, and I'm sure HN will take down the site, since my app engine quota levels are way lower than they used to be. Just to fill you in, I've gone to other projects and haven't had time to keep thathigh up to date.

I had some pretty notable twitter followers, including lindsay lohan, snoop dog, bill maher, doug benson, sarah silverman, and a few others. Still hanging in there at 12k followers, and I absolutely must give a shout out to CrowdBooster (I used them a lot to get so many followers).

At the peak, the site was paying my rent in SF. It doesn't really make any money anymore since I've neglected it.

I'd be interested in hearing about how you used CrowdBooster to build a following. Care to elaborate?

Same here - seems like just another Social Media analysis tool. What's so special about that one?

i found their tweet scheduling to be dead accurate, and it was really helpful since most of the most valuable tweets would've happened on the east coast in the morning (or late at night) when I am asleep in CA.

I like crowdbooster because it's simple.

I was just thinking about thathigh the other day and wondering how it was doing :)

What projects are you working on these days?

It was a journey!

I spent some time doing a PaaS startup (djangy) and then spent some time at a social gaming analytics startup (kontagent).

Now I'm working full time on Bloc: http://bloc.io and things are going really well.

Did you abandon thathigh because it wasn't doing well, or is it the other way round, that it isn't do well because you abandoned it?

because I abandoned it. i began working on other things, and it slid into the background, and eventually just sorta coasted.

as a media property it's still pretty well known and has decent traffic. if i needed to go back to it full time to make money, it would be totally possible to respark the site. the twitter account helps a lot with that.

"I've done almost zero SEO."

"I changed the title tags to match each page's content"

That's SEO

"I submitted a site map to Google Webmaster Tools"

That's SEO

"I added the relevant meta tags."

That's SEO.

Sites like this don't tend to grow with SEO, they grow because of a community and social sharing.

He said almost zero SEO.

The title says "No SEO". Just saving some people a read if they were expecting an article explaining how he did it with "No SEO".

Yea I think he means link building, which is by far the most time consuming and daunting task of SEO.

What do you think linkbaiting on reddit etc is? That's linkbuilding too.

I have found StumbleUpon to be by far the best way of generating traffic. It won't work for everyone. Don't bother using it for B2B stuff. But if you create quirky fun content aimed at consumers, it can bring a lot of eyeballs to your site. And you don't even have to pay for ads. Bulk-standard link submissions can work very well.

I have a blog that I have not updated for more than a year that still pulls in 100,000+ unique visitors a month via StumbleUpon.

One of the tricks is that once you have a viral article on StumbleUpon, you can use that article to promote other articles, in the hope that they too will be voted up and become viral in turn.

I'm not saying 1M/mo isn't great and something to aspire to for a site without any prior visibility. But.. I read that title quickly and was thinking 1 million uniques.

Since it's more of a niche site than fmylife, I'm wondering if the Google Adsense will get a higher CTR.

This is the 2nd time an article from thathigh makes it to the frontpage.

I still don't get why it gets upvoted. It is not a high traffic website. I doubt the guy behind makes any money from it.

It made enough to cover his rent in SF for one year.

that's not a lot.

Isn't this the site that stole all of their content from an existing competitor (HighDeas), slapped more advertising on it, then did SEO?

Lame as fuck.

This has been a recurring accusation, and it's pretty much 100% BS. Sorry that we can't be enemies, though.

But you should read the article :-)

I'm not trying to be combative as I'm genuinely curious:

The interview does imply that you scraped your initial content from other sites though. True or False?

Sure, I found some funny stories from different places across the internet to seed the content. Search for "stoner stories" or "funny high ideas" or "weed thoughts" or any remotely similar phrase and you'll find some stuff.

The idea that I targeted a specific site with the intention of ripping them off is absurd, though. That wouldn't even be the right approach to getting something like this off the ground.

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