Ask HN: Effective ways to attract visitors to your site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Effective ways to attract visitors to your site

7 pointsknwang5 comments

I know it's kinda a broad question, so let me explain it a little.

I have a site http://www.railstutors.com where I teach online Ruby on Rails courses. I think we have a great value proposition - beginners who want to learn Ruby on Rails now either reply on free tutorials (no interaction with teachers) or have to sign up on expensive classroom based training. We provide 4-week online tutored classes with a ton of interaction with students with affordable cost. Our conversion rate also proved this - a quite high percentage of visitors to our site ended up signing up for the course.

What we need to do now is to get the words out, and I'd like to hear from everyone what are the effectively ways to do that. We have done the typical - Quora, Reddit, RubyFlow.. we even tried AdWords.. but the daily traffic just doesn't seem to increase much.

What worked for you to attract traffic to your site?

View on HN

I've looking at railstutors.com and see a lot of room for improvement.

Currently it's NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAR what you're offering (maybe because the name itself focuses on tutors and since a clear service description is lacking, it's easy to get confused?) or what the value proposition is. WHAT DO YOU OFFER and WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT YOU - clearly answering these two questions should be a high priority for you.

A clear CALL TO ACTION is missing: 'Learn more about this course' doesn't cut it. Let your call to action be a megaphone: unambiguous and impossible to miss.

Ok, I've spent some time on your site and being the indecisive type, I'm just not sure if signing up is worth the hassle and cost. Can you GIVE ME A PREVIEW, SAMPLE OR ANYTHING that narrows that mental gap between what I want and what you offer? Testimonials on the front page is a good idea but I want to see for myself. Also, I can barely smell the social proof coming off those testimonials. Humanize those people or get references from more trusted people and sources.

The TYPOGRAPHY LOOKS BAD on Win7/Chrome 21.0.1180.89 m [1] to the point that it makes it difficult to read your copy.

[1] http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/i/31758-916201221158am.png

Thanks a lot for the feedback! appreciate it very much.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527602 - 30 minutes after you posted.

I would suggest you use the hn search for all people who post about learning or wanting to program and offer them a free course in exchange for them writing blog articles about what they liked and didn't like.

Also - on your website you need to be more specific what you actually do. It says "rails tutors" which is specific but it doesn't tell me a) when it happens, b) where it happens, c) what i'm actually going to learn, or d) why it matter.

Here's a good example of someone (Amy Hoy) selling a course -> http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/

The other good example of someone teaching courses http://railscasts.com/

In the real world you can always use skillshare or meetup to target groups of people who are programmers (ruby and or rails) or want to learn to program and meet them in real life.

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback. We do have a separate page talking about details of the course, but looks like that's not obvious for people coming to the front page.

I like your suggestion of HN search and will do that - thanks.

> What worked for you to attract traffic to your site?

Having content that people actually want. If this is so, your audience will increase by word of mouth, no explicit promotion required.

> but the daily traffic just doesn't seem to increase much.

Everyone has a site. Everyone wants visitors. Everyone would like more visitors. The sites that get visitors without coercing them, do it by having useful content -- not content that you think is useful, but content that visitors think is useful. And content that isn't duplicated everywhere, like ... well, one example ... Ruby on Rails tutorials.

Google "Ruby on Rails tutorials" : 3,150,000 hits.

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