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

Why do I need to authorize a connection to my Twitter account in order to audit someone else's? What are you using it for, and could you either make that more clear up front or drop the requirement, preferably the latter?

Very cool, great execution for a wallpaper site. Few suggestions...

1. Filter by color. Allow users to pick a color on a palette, and select all the images with that primary color.

2. Categories. A simple dropdown in the navigation to select nature, architecture, water, abstract, etc.

Lastly, why don't you branch this concept out into other areas? This would be a beautiful showcase for general photography. Allow users to upload their work, 'like' photos, and display the best on the homepage. Mix in profiles, and the ability to comment on images you select, and it would be an interesting site. Somewhat of a behance, pinterest, logopond mix geared towards photographers.

Write about it. Make it so your articles explain useful stuff for people not necessarily interested in your niche: what general learning can you extract from your experience so far? What did you try? What did and didn't work? This will drive high quality content to your article, which will in turn build up links and percolate to your site. This is what's worked for http://greaterskies.com. Nothing else I've tried has had any impact.

I've built a successful side business (http://www.mohawkapps.com) and was even featured in an e-book: http://www.sideprojectbook.com/ - by creating iPhone apps for niche markets and marketing heavily to them through facebook and in-person tradeshows. I gross about $2k-$4k a month but I haven't quit my day job yet.

Apple does a lot of my marketing for me but I also rely heavily on word of mouth. I make sure to have a screen in all my apps that allow users to tell their friends through texting and email about the app. I'm also an apple affiliate so all the traffic that goes to the app store through my site nets me another 7% of all that user's purchases during the session... it makes up for the gigantic chunk of change that Apple takes from my sales.

Recently, I've started branching out into more generic apps that are useful to a wider market, but my niche apps make way more money than the broad-audience apps.

Hi Josh, thanks for the comment. We don't and will never do unsolicited comment/forum/blog spamming.

We weren't really going to post on HN because most of the audience will think this is SEO spam. It's not and we would never do that. We're only interested in promoting your startup to sites that are interested.

Firstly, we reject and refund low quality sites that don't meet our criteria.

Secondly, to give you a few examples, if your site has a great design, we will post to DesignerNews. If SEO is your thing, we'll make sure it gets exposure on Inbound.org. However, it starts to get more interesting when we move outside of the 'known niches'. So, if your startup/site is doing innovative things with data, we'll post to DataTau; if it's food related, we'll post to FoodNews (hypertexthero); if it's travel related, we'll post to outbounding.org.

We also promote on paid, premium sites such as betali.st, erlibird and KillerStartups.

Happy to provide more information if you like.