Websites That Boost Your Traffic For Free | Hacker News Reader

Websites That Boost Your Traffic For Free

bondero.com

65 pointscharlieirish24 comments

These are terrible! The only traffic you'll get from these are curious clickers and bounces (unless you're targeting entrepreneurs). I'd argue that these sites have a negative effect, since you're skewing your numbers without getting any meaningful stats (where people are dropping out of the funnel, why people are bouncing).

Instead, get featured on small industry blogs and build up from there. A little press goes a long ways. In my experience, I haven't even had to pitch larger new sites after getting a couple articles on smaller blogs. They see the smaller posts getting mentioned on Twitter and reach out to write their spiel.

What's your process to finding these smaller blogs?

Alltop [0] is great. BlogRank [1] is good too. Look at the sources that bigger news sites get their leads from (the via link at the bottom of articles).

Spend more time than you think necessary writing really great emails for the editors of the smaller blogs. Include a press kit with the stuff they'd need to write a nice looking post: generally a couple photos/large logo and a bullet point description of your pitch and company story.

[0] http://alltop.com/

[1] http://www.blogmetrics.org/

I partially agree with you. Nevertheless traffic is good in order to get your brand out there.

It depends on if the sites you post on have the traffic you want. Posting on HN is great if you are looking for feedback from a hacker perspective (so your product should have some utility to them). Obviously, just posting everywhere will get you clicks, but the important part is that the people clicking might actually want to use it. If you do that well, and you have a high bounce rate, I'd actually say that you got valuable feedback about how useful your product actually is.

Crunchbase? Really? (I have a number of projects mentioned in Crunchbase and the number of hits I get in a year from that source can be counted on one hand)

Crunchbase is included as it is pretty much a standard if you want to have a startup profile for possible investors, PR people, etc. But you're right. It doesn't drive much traffic.

The problem with most of this websites is always that you might get a spike of traffic but the actual conversion to regular users is extremely low, it's better to find your specific public instead of such a generic one. Not saying that they are bad, just they might not be the best for getting good traffic.

Unless your ideal customer is a tech-entrepreneur, this is all very misleading. It's going to amount to very little lasting growth.

AppStorm announced they were closing before this post. http://mac.appstorm.net/general/appstorm-news/appstorm-closi...

When I saw HN in the list, I was afraid to enter an infinite loop if I clicked the link

you forgot the New York Times, L.A. Times, Time Magazine & the Huffington Post... they publish for free all you need is a good story.

I was looking more into "early adopters", etc. :) but yeah.

Free traffic is a lot like a gridlocked city. It looks impressive in pictures, but it takes you nowhere.

Yes and no.

Paid traffic is expensive. The issue is that you're competing with two things: (i) people who pay $X per click and get a solid $Y in revenue per click, where $X>$Y, and (ii) people/organizations who pay too much for ads. (To take an example of how you have to compete with deep-pocketed ad buyers who have the lights on and nobody home, if you search for

https://www.google.com/#q=bing

you get an ad for bing; another phenomenon is that many businesses buy ads on local radio, cable, or the newspaper just because they get pleasure in hearing or seeing their name.)

If you've got a type (i) business model, then paid traffic may be good for you. If you want to create a content business supported by advertising (i.e. put w3schools out of business) or create something social, you can't afford to pay for traffic unless you can afford to cut a check to Google for a few million dollars with a high risk of not getting any payback.

Thus, if you want to create that kind of business you really do need some source of free traffic which is 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the stuff mentioned on that site.

I'm distinguishing between qualified free traffic (search/viral) and spaghetti at the wall free traffic like StumbleUpon or one of those skeevy pageview buying services. I didn't actually read the post before commenting (!), and I see that it describes some good traffic sources.

Is Firespotting on the list because it's related to the author or what? It doesn't appear to actually have any traffic (a strong per-requisite to being able to promote other sites).

"Where do I find a site to promote my app/website/service?"

^ Number one indicator that you didn't spend the time upfront to understand your audience and develop your customers

Those are not the traffic sources you would usually want to get actual paying users.

However, patio11 will tell you that some of those might be good for SEO though, which helps in the long run..

I have had success with StumbleUpon https://www.stumbleupon.com

Free or paid?

So, what of those 10 sites did they wanted to boost traffic for, by posting this on HN?

Hi, Nader from bondero here. I didn't want to boost any site mentioned. In the discussion thread on the site I even included more sites. I have a startup myself and know how tedious it is to find sites to submit to / generate initial traffic.

reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/startups

Reply on news.ycombinator.com