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Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

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Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

Based on my personal experience, here is a two-step guide for getting a blog post to #1 of HN for 2 days.

1. Write lots of blog posts on various topics. Write multi kilo-word reviews of honest to goodness books with reference to the ideas therein. Really pour yourself into the work -- take as your inspiration Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Submit some of these. Watch them get, at most, a single upvote.

2. Write one (1) angry rant about a company well-known to HNers, with no goals other than to vent a bit. Add "sucks" to the title somewhere. Watch as someone else submits it and your primal screeching zooms to the top of the front page and stays pegged to it for days.

Optional step 3: cultivate cynicism about HN and your reasons for sticking around.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#12

Post by hosay123 »

There's insufficient data here to show the new title resulted in the article score. It's a common trait on these kinds of sites, where an article's chance of "success" is massively improved after receiving only a very small (2-5) number of votes.

It's perfectly possible the original articles slipped down the new page too quickly before they got lucky and found a few interesting readers.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#13

Post by duiker101 »

cletus wrote: post #9

I guess it's somewhat interesting that AdWords can confirm what are good titles and what aren't but I could've told you at the outset that the first two titles are vague meaningless titles that won't draw anyone's attention. "The last frontier in payments"? Really? I know I wouldn't read that because it sounds like marketing BS. Also, reaching the front page on the weekend has a lower barrier to entry. I see posts wi…

It's true they hang around for more but it's also probably harder to gain those 13 votes.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#15

Post by guylhem »

jwpeddle wrote: post #10
guylhem wrote: post #6

I don't want to criticize, but if getting to the first page is that important to you, I don't know, but it doesn't seems very healthy. Revenues and products are more important than bragging rights. Ok competition is good, hacking is good, but doing that just for HN sake seems like overengineering for something not important at all (I mean, not central to most business) However, making a product out of it is something…

I think you underestimate how much attention HN can get you and overestimate the effort of doing what they did here. Seems like a great time investment to me.

I tried similar things to play with the Mechanical Turk and Google Ads - especially since they give coupons like candy.

In the end, it is still glorified advertising, while IMHO the core purpose of a business is revenue!

Advertising is very important, but securing paying clients does not depends nor requires advertising.

IMHO again - advertising however is a tool for growing, but just one tool among many others

This whole thing must have taken say half a day total - to say whether it was a good or a bad thing for them, you must consider the opportunity cost

And IMHO again, diverting just one mind away from important problems (to fix side issues instead) is a bad idea.

Focus matter the most.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#16

Post by bmelton »

cletus wrote: post #9

I guess it's somewhat interesting that AdWords can confirm what are good titles and what aren't but I could've told you at the outset that the first two titles are vague meaningless titles that won't draw anyone's attention. "The last frontier in payments"? Really? I know I wouldn't read that because it sounds like marketing BS. Also, reaching the front page on the weekend has a lower barrier to entry. I see posts wi…

As duiker mentioned, getting those 13 votes is likely quite a bit harder. HN on the weekends is a pretty insufferable place to be, and the activity present seems less like the type to be surfing /new and making quality discussion so much as it appears to be the sort of mob who runs around making pithy snark, and upvoting others who engage in like behavior.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#17

Post by myotherthings »

duiker101 wrote: post #13
cletus wrote: post #9

I guess it's somewhat interesting that AdWords can confirm what are good titles and what aren't but I could've told you at the outset that the first two titles are vague meaningless titles that won't draw anyone's attention. "The last frontier in payments"? Really? I know I wouldn't read that because it sounds like marketing BS. Also, reaching the front page on the weekend has a lower barrier to entry. I see posts wi…

It's true they hang around for more but it's also probably harder to gain those 13 votes.

Yup, this is exactly what I've found. Weekends are harder to get votes on, but the posts last much longer once they get traction.

Re: Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

#19

Post by myotherthings »

lazerwalker wrote: post #8

Huh, an interesting concept. I wouldn't be surprised if, for certain products, HN hits are higher-quality hits than the average (higher conversion rate, possibly higher engagement rate after sign-up). Of course, this is the sort of thing you need to be measuring. If that's not the case, you absolutely shouldn't be spending your money and, more importantly, your time on vanity upvotes and hits that don't result in a t…

HN does not generally result in a lot of targeted visitors who are going to be long term users of your product.

However, I find the feedback in the comments section to be hugely valuable. HN readers are inevitably pretty savvy about startups. While you can get a lot of criticism - it can be quite constructive, pointing out things everyone else you show the site too has missed. Getting onto the front page is vital to get any volume of comments.

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