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Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

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11–20 of 102 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#11
Going to take this down later this week. My free micro-instance-on-AWS period is over. I get a constant drive of traffic from reddit. Could've thrown in ads, but I really din't want to keep it going. It's kinda stupid, but kinda cool?

Memes As A Service http://maas.rohits.me/

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#12
post #7

I have no revenue, but around 12-20k unique visits a month consistently for the past 9 months. The site is http://androidwallpape.rs and main sources of traffic so far have been android blogs and podcasts as well as stumble-upon sites. Initially the link was posted to reddit and it was picked up from there. Of those visits around 40% is new unique visitors, each month. I would say engaging with communities that might…

Awesome site! You could easily monetize with just placing even a single AdSense ad on the site. An app might also be useful in monetizing. Is this a custom site? Curious what you used to make it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#13
"traffic" is a really ambiguous word. If I take it at face value, it's really easy to drive traffic to a site: - recruit a bunch of affiliates to post pages with links back to your site (be discriminating on quality and frequency) - use paid ads - connect with a reputable backlink service that doesn't trip Google's radar. - distribute a javascript widget that is hosted on your servers - run a big promo with the promise of free gadets

However, I'm assuming what you really want is users/conversions. In that case, you need to think about your project/site/business as a relationship between 2 parties with the internet simply being a more scalable medium for communication between you.

To get people interested in a product/service, it has to fix a pain point, be really interesting, or you have to be the best. You can "be the best" by showcasing your knowledge of the problem with blog posts, interviews, helping people out on forums, and becoming involved in communities that would be in your target demographic (forums, meet ups, irc groups, etc).

Fixing a pain point or being really interesting is a product /market fit problem so if you've shown your site/product/service to a lot of people and it's not sticking, you need to do in-person interviews to figure out what's not good enough.

In general, if you're trying to build up traffic, that's really building up a community of people (who are the source of good traffic) so you need to approach that in the same way you'd build up a community offline: be interesting, be a good community citizen, and give without asking much in return.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#14
post #9

My side project ( http://kruipen.com ) is a database of audio equipment prices (although it is for fun, not monetization). I would sometimes post relevant links on audio forums' for-sale posts. With mixed success.

Quick question how do you like jqPlot? Did you try anything like d3js? If so, any pros or cons of each?

I'm currently messing with d3js for some data I have on my F150 for the past year. (Fuel, mpg, odometer, fuel price, etc).

EDIT: I would recommend a "browse/explore" feature. I don't know audio equipment so I don't know what to search for. Your initial hint helps but doesn't keep a non audio expert around very long.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#15
post #4

I've had decent traction with http://www.ranksignals.com over the past year with SEO, Content Marketing and Email marketing. My app is a SEO tool to explore backlinks of competitors. There is also a SEO Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-seo-pagerank... )which drives returning visitors to the website.

I just tried it and it's a very cool app. Are you going to monetize it in any way?

I read a lot on this topic (SEO) at the moment but never heard about your spp. So you probably should reach out to top SEO blogs and post on forums. I'm sure they will be thrilled :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#16
post #9

My side project ( http://kruipen.com ) is a database of audio equipment prices (although it is for fun, not monetization). I would sometimes post relevant links on audio forums' for-sale posts. With mixed success.

Is the name meaning "to crawl" in dutch intentional?

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#17
We've only soft launched StartupVitality [1] but if you've just launched your side project and are looking to get some early, targeted traffic, it's a problem we know about.

We're going to release a list of our submission sites so that bootstrappers who have more time than money do it for free but those who have some cash or are funded might find our service useful.

[1] https://startupvitality.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#18
I built https://OpenTokRTC.com to make it super easy for people to go and video chat with each other using WebRTC. It gets a steady 2000 visits every week. After I built the site, I set up google search notifications so I get notified whenever new content relevant to my app shows up ( webrtc posts, articles about video chat, etc ). Then I'd visit each site, read it, and leave a comment about my thoughts and plug in OpenTokRTC.

Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?

#19
post #4

I've had decent traction with http://www.ranksignals.com over the past year with SEO, Content Marketing and Email marketing. My app is a SEO tool to explore backlinks of competitors. There is also a SEO Chrome extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-seo-pagerank... )which drives returning visitors to the website.

I just tried it and it's a very cool app. Are you going to monetize it in any way? I read a lot on this topic (SEO) at the moment but never heard about your spp. So you probably should reach out to top SEO blogs and post on forums. I'm sure they will be thrilled :)

Glad you liked it.

I am building more SEO tools to sell with a freemium SaaS model. The existing tools will remain free.

I have reached out to many blogs, some has written about us but many haven't. The SEO community is also spreading the word about RankSignals on SEO & webmaster forums.

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