There are lots of "App Stores" now that accept web apps. Google, Firefox and Opera all have them. I think Amazon does too.
Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#52I get 750k+ visitors per month. Nearly all of it from organic search (aka Google). It took years to build up this traffic organically to User Generated Content. http://isitnormal.com Great Ask HN. Thanks for posting.
Hey I'm building a user-generated content site and I'm trying to slowly crawl my way up organic search but I'm really struggling. I don't really expect you to take time out of your life to look at my stuff, but if you do have time / want to I'd love to hear what you think!
This is the site: http://www.istorical.com
I accidentally Panda'd myself I'm pretty sure. When I put my site up I had thousands of stub pages that got indexed with the thinnest possible content.
I removed (they now 404) a bunch of pages and added 'noindex' meta tags to most others so eventually Google will hopefully only be indexing hundreds of my pages instead of 70,000. So hopefully I won't have Panda penalty / thin content.
Beyond that though, do you have any advice for SEO on user-generated content like this: http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/141
Do you think having keywords actually influences SEO these days? I thought that Google and others just extracted keywords themselves and ignores ones you define yourself?
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#53By the way, if anyone is interested in a nice, but small and very focused (NO POLITICS) forum for those of us working on bootstrapped companies, I've been enjoying this one, so far: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/
For LiberWriter, I've found that the right forums can drive a lot of traffic. Any old traffic is useless - I've got the site up on the front page of HN before, with 0 conversions. HN readers are not our target market at all. Forums also put you in contact with people to just chat about what you offer, which might give you some ideas... Don't let naysayers get you down, either. There's bound to be someone who says they would never pay for that, could build it in a weekend, or whatever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#54I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.
As an active runner/triathlete, I can't stress enough how f*cked-up online registration processes for races are, and this app almost seems solve this. All I can wish you is the best of luck and I hope to signup to races via your app soon. my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option…
Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly my goal. I currently have it so you can create a race w/o signing up. Shoot me an email (link on the bottom of the website) if you don't mind chatting a bit more? Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#55For Pitcherific (http://pitcherific.com/) we began asking friends in the Startup Weekend community, some of them organizers of the event, if they would try out the app with their attendees. This lead to us being invited as coaches, doing workshops etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#56Good design...it opens up so many doors.
CSS galleries, Dribbble postings, trust, sharing on social media, being followed by designers/developers/marketers, etc.
Great design is truly appreciated and breaks down massive barriers when someone first comes to your sites.
It also happens to be a great traffic generator - so don't neglect it!
I run http://hookfeed.com and http://minimalytics.com. And I'm writing http://howtobuildarocketship.com
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#57I'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've been looking for something like this, awesome to see it. That's the issue with marketing, there is a subset of users that are looking for your product, or know they have some sort of problem that needs solving. How you get to specifically them is the tough part.
I bet there are a lot of other up and coming products that just get drowned out/fail to get traction, yet these are the ones that are really trying to innovate.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#58One of my side projects (www.twitteraudit.com) happens to get the most traffic of anything I've ever built on my own :) It gets 50k+ uniques per month and all the traffic has grown organically (mostly via tweets and blog posts). It's been up for just over a year, and I've started spending some more time (on the side) monetizing it. If anyone is interested in helping, send me an email! oops: spoke to soon. It doesnt (…
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?
Probably to use your account to make the requests to Twitter's API. The API is very rate-limited, so using his own account for everyone isn't viable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#59I 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.
Thanks, glad you like it!
It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset
I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#60I 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?
As per my other comment, I've considered it, but haven't gone thought with it. My only motivation for the site was to repurpose what I had laying around on my hard drive in hopes it would be useful to people. Also, I wasn't willing to do anything that would sacrifice experience or quality, so I decided not to.
Only thing that I think could work would be approaching android devs directly about ad based sponsorship, because that would allow me to control the relevance and quality of the ads. Decided against it as, honestly, I'm busy with other things and the hassle outweighs any potential revenue I could hope to get out of it.