For those who have side projects with Monthly Revenue > 1000. How do you effectively drive traffic to your site?
Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#2I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement (http://duetapp.com) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com. The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well.
Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as an effective means of marketing so I'm planning on blogging much more often this year. Hopefully that will help too...
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#3I had a digital sign-making business with small income (basically you design a sign on the website and I carve it out of wood with a CNC machine)
the most traffic I got were from giving signs away as prizes on crafting blogs. It seems obvious in hindsight, but you have to be careful when cold emailing with "free" and "prize" in the body, I think more than half of my emails were filtered out as spam.
* I had also tried adwords. It did give me a bunch of clickthroughs, but was not cost effective in the end.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#4I'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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#5Most of my traffic for Hipster or Homeless comes from Facebook likes and a Wikipedia article in another country.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#6My product is an embedded chat widget(http://www.hashworld.co/), and for me it's google adwords, because my target audience is very specific.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#7I 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 be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#8I 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…
Do you have any plans to monetize the site or is it just something fun for you to do? If the former, have you given any serious thought as to how?
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#9My 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#10I run a site called Correlated (http://www.correlated.org) that landed me a book deal (http://www.amazon.com/Correlated-Surprising-Connections-Seem...).
Although it's not recurring revenue, the income from the book advance is way more than I could have ever hoped to generate by placing ads on the site.
One unorthodox way I've driven traffic to the site is by including it in an iframe at the bottom of a little Excel-to-HTML converter I whipped up a few years ago:
http://pressbin.com/tools/excel_to_html_table/
I use a similar technique here:
http://intellicaps.correlated.org/
It's a service that allows you to convert ALL CAPS text to mixed case, and it includes a sidebar that promotes Correlated by pulling in the most recently published statistic.
I guess the general technique could be summed up as: Make something useful (even if it's boring), get traffic, promote something completely useless but fun, and hope that it piques their interest.