Ask HN: How do I get to that next level of traffic?

In some ways, building the product is the easy part. Getting traction is the really dicey problem.

Check out some of the SEO/SEM sites like seomoz. SEO is very important. Link-building is also important. Look at getting some reciprocal links or at focusing on a specific niche within your site and really trying to develop a core audience around a few musicians/genres in order to get that "critical mass" of interest. Contact other sites in your space and figure out how you can get them to write about and/or drive audience to you. Hold contests. Build widgets. There's no silver bullet (for most of us).

Knowing the type of user that is attracted to your site is also very important. That will really help you narrow down what kinds of sites and techniques you should be using to capture more audience. Do you have a lot of kids on your site? If so, seek out affinity sites. It will be much easier for you to convert that audience to your product. Use sites like Quantcast to discover sites like yours that have traffic. Learn from the successful sites and employ their tricks (are you asking every user to invite their friends when they sign up? if not, you might be missing out on new users).

And, as always, be patient. My website is a little more than 2 years old and we've gone from 1000 visitors/day to 100k+/day. And even now it's still one of my primary tasks every day (figuring out new ways to get word out and encourage inbound traffic). You should be spending several hours a day working on this stuff.

Well, I think I know exactly the site you're talking about, but I won't blow your cover for you. I saw it on Reddit just a few days ago and there's a suspicious Facebook icon in the corner that wasn't there a little while ago... so if this is your site, shoot me an email (in my profile) because I found a few small HTML bugs and such. It would probably be to your benefit to share the link here though.

The SEO point is a very a good one, especially for a site that is (probably) very JavaScript-heavy. More than just your site's own tagline, you can optimize for keywords such as "social music," "music sharing," "music community," etc. I just pulled these off the top of my head -- I recommend spending some time with the Google Keyword Tool ( https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ) if you haven't already.

With a social music site that's based on upvoting, you also have a tremendous resource that sites like Last.fm don't have. Beyond just allowing people to friend each other like all the social networking sites do, you could introduce a feature along the lines of "Other people who upvoted this song also liked..." as a good way to add immediate value for a new user who has just joined and voted up a few songs, but hasn't added any friends yet.

It's http://cherrypeel.com. I was trying to start a general discussion and not spam HN.

cherrypeel.com

Here is the solution: Organic Traffic. I am not technical so excuse it if I sound naive. Ajax is beautiful, but if you have a content site and want traffic, you are going to hurt your search engine results, and that counts because sooner or later that should be your main traffic source. You need to turn those categories into more pages meaning whenever someone plays a song or creates a list, that becomes a page with a neat URL that the search engine can actually spyde. Think about it, if someone searches on Google for one of the songs you have in your DB your page can actually show up on the first page. Start indexing those playlists/channels/users pages and you will double your traffic.