Was looking at the passive income thread that got so highly upvoted. How do you build an audience HN? I'm a complete noob and don't know anything marketing.
Any good starting points, communities, references, de facto standards, etc?
There are hundreds of Great American Novels lying around in drawers as unpublished manuscripts. Many of them are truly great. Don't be one of them! You need to find your audience, get product/market fit. That's about marketing.
First you have to find a niche. If your product/book/website/blog/whatever is the only one out there, it's a red flag because it might mean that there's no need for whatever you offer.
A product will never create a need, you create a product out of people's need.
Try to look for something that already exists, and you know you can make it better, and pitch whatever you built to the your competitors dissatisfied users, and there you go, you have an audience.
Then you can start looking into metrics/analytics and finally into SEO.
You just have to have something worth sharing.
Forget about SEO right now, you don't want really want more traffic, you want conversion rate.
I know people who own websites with hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, but almost 0% conversion rate.
"Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day" by Jennifer Grappone
"Getting Noticed on Google" by Ben Norman
And if it isn't measured, it isn't managed:
"Scientific Advertising" Claude C. Hopkins