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Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

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Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#11

Post by redxblood »

dragonbonheur wrote: post #3

Find out how they are linking. There are several paid and free tools available to do that: Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk. Find out how they promote on social media. Search for social media analytics tools and use them. Find out how inbound marketing and modern SEO work - there are several free resources on Moz.com and other similar sites. Finally this question might be better answered by the Hackernews…

Thank you! I'll be checking out moz and inboud.org, hadnt heard of them. Will definitely make some SEO work. Thanks for the advice!

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#12

Post by redxblood »

mbreedlove wrote: post #5

I think most people that would want to "Vent" on the site would need prior knowledge of your site. This isn't something they will go search out when they need it. I think you should target various Facebook groups and just get the word out. I think a lot of people would be supportive of the site and you could get some viral marketing out of it. Emotional support is in vogue. There's dozens of niche support websites th…

Hm.. i'll definitely try to target facebook/tumblr/twitter groups, thanks for the idea! You're right, simply spreading the word out is the best way to get people to know my site, advertising itself can do only so much. Thank you again :)

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#13

Post by redxblood »

cakrawala wrote: post #2

One thing that you can do is to examine the backlink profile of your competitor's site. Look at the sites linking in and see if you can get links there as well. You can also get a decent idea of what ancillary social media work that they're doing and try to mimic that as well. I would be looking to get mentions on high traffic places with user generated content like huffington post and forbes.com. There are plenty of…

I like your ideas! I will definitely try to get mentions, i think you are right, that's what really drives high movements of people from site to site. And am right now checking for backlink exposure :) Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#14

Post by T2_t2 »

dragonbonheur wrote: post #3

Find out how they are linking. There are several paid and free tools available to do that: Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk. Find out how they promote on social media. Search for social media analytics tools and use them. Find out how inbound marketing and modern SEO work - there are several free resources on Moz.com and other similar sites. Finally this question might be better answered by the Hackernews…

SEO is not really the best bet.

SEO is for when you have a clear way to find something - e.g. "buy iphone 6". I don't many people search for a site like this.

The traffic landscape has changed. I have a client that generates 40% of their traffic from Mobile Facebook - as in m.facbook.com not the usually, desktop version - essentially from public transport pre/post work and at lunch.

For a site without a clear SEO term, the best bet is Social Media. That takes time, and luck more than anything, but without a clear SEO hook, is unfortunately the best option. Thankfully, a lot of eh work for SEO is the same as for SM. what you need to make it work is:

1. Actual content - currently you have virtually none. Get a blog, summarise the best rants of the day.

2. Some sort of validation - karma is a good example of a means of encouraging people to come back, and a leaderboard is really helpful.

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#15

Post by Gustomaximus »

I work in marketing with a focus on customer acquisition and have gotten something like 300+ million purchases/downloads/signups etc over ~10 years etc. So I should know what I'm doing by now... really I would say people cant really answer this for you without knowing more. And if you want general anecdotes there is a bunch of online material that will give better general answers than here. You need specifics for your business. You can narrow down a bunch of option for you business specifics these questions;

- Would you prefer to use time or money?

- For time/money, how much are you willing to spend/invest?

- How many users do you want in what time frame? I'm guessing with this service you need to hit some level of minimum mass to be viable to users.

- Do you have a particular audience you want to attract? - Can you give a best guess on LTV of a new user?

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#16

Post by partisan »

adventured wrote: post #4

Before I'd run advertisements on Google - which is very expensive - I'd look at alternatives like StumbleUpon and several other sites with plenty of real users and decent targeting. I would consider reaching out to help groups around the US. There are zillions of them, large and small. I'd enable groups to set up their own subs on the site, which they can control and utilize for their own purposes (perhaps with some…

I just had a similar experience on blahtherapy just now. My chat ended in them asking, "r u female".

I don't think this sort of thing can work, at least not with the free aspect. It appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#18

Post by homeslice »

Welcome to creating a me-too product. It's some of the most difficult and expensive marketing possible.

Imagine creating a cola that's exactly like coca-cola except it's 20% better tasting (in your option). Well good luck beating out Coca cola - even though your product is better.

And you have to be very careful about assuming that your product is better in a way that people actually care about. For example, I visit the site FML every now and then --- and I never, ever post there...I just got to read other people's misfortunes to feel better about myself..

So be careful about your assumption that yours is better in a way that people care about.

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#19

Post by thesmileyone »

Blahtherapy has 850 backlinks.

They have 0 Adword traffic - so if they are using paid traffic for advertising it is not at Google.

They monetize their site via Google Adsense though.

My thoughts lead to the conclusion they use organic and maybe blackhat SEO and probably did the old trick of leaving their domain on comments before people got wise to this.

On the plus side they get A LOT of traffic so the demand is there.

Re: Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic?

#20

Post by thesmileyone »

homeslice wrote: post #18

Welcome to creating a me-too product. It's some of the most difficult and expensive marketing possible. Imagine creating a cola that's exactly like coca-cola except it's 20% better tasting (in your option). Well good luck beating out Coca cola - even though your product is better. And you have to be very careful about assuming that your product is better in a way that people actually care about. For example, I visit…

To be fair, Blahtherapy is not the cola cola of the internet. I had never heard of it before this post.

It is more like creating a cola that is exactly like "Richmond Cola" but 20% better.

Also there are hundreds of brands of better tasting beers out there yet they have to compete with Stella Artois and they manage..

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