Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by miloszf » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 11:17 PM UTC

User8712 wrote: post #33

miloszf wrote: post #7

I 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…

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 user…

Thanks, glad you like it.

Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.

I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.

As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)

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

#62

Post by dreadsword » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 11:44 PM UTC

EDIT: Just re-read the post, and neither of my side projects is "successful," so ignore this, or by all means, click through...

I have two side projects, and rarely promote them at all - the occasional plug on HN or r/startups where its relevant. The lack of promotion would explain why neither has any traffic! One - nerdy bookmarking at http://linkthing.co and Two - I'm working on a feed reader, you can see its output in action at http://techwatching.com

I've always like the Reddit "SYS" tradition - a monthly thread where anyone can post whatever their doing in blatant self promotion without the usual guilt & karma penalties.

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

#63

Post by tgflynn » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 11:51 PM UTC

Zaheer wrote: post #12

miloszf wrote: post #7

I 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.

By monetize you mean make $100 or so a month right ?

With RPM's around a few dollars for AdSense isn't that the most he would be looking at in revenue, or am I missing something ?

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

#64

Post by nkcmr » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 11:57 PM UTC

songzme wrote: post #18

I built https://OpenTokRTC.com to make it super easy for people to go and video chat with each other using WebRTC. It gets a steady 2000 visits every week. After I built the site, I set up google search notifications so I get notified whenever new content relevant to my app shows up ( webrtc posts, articles about video chat, etc ). Then I'd visit each site, read it, and leave a comment about my thoughts and plug in O…

Thanks for building this! My side project uses this. (https://yoursecondphone.co/)

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

#65

Post by udkl » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:00 AM UTC

23andwalnut wrote: post #49

udkl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit curious though .... it is unclear, did you design the theme or was a 'pre-made' theme used ?

Everything is custom. I designed the Duet and Solo themes, but I used a bit of bootstrap for some of the elements. Both landing pages are custom as well. The Duet landing page uses Foundation and the Solo landing page uses Bootstrap.

You should totally package & sell your js and css 'framework' on codingden or elsewhere !

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

#66

Post by codygman » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:12 AM UTC

LukeHoersten wrote: post #41

I 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.

Any more details on the software stack? I'm actually about to write an SAAS in Haskell. Are you using Yesod, Snap, Happstack, plain wai, or something else?

Any commentary on making your SAAS with Haskell, where you thought it helped, where you thought it hurt?

Thanks!

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

#67

Post by antidaily » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:16 AM UTC

http://www.fleapay.com gets most of its traffic from processors we integrate with like Braintree and Auth.net. Most have partner or app pages set up that we are listed on.

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

#68

Post by y1426i » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:23 AM UTC

I built quotes app to learn opensocial and virality and had it on every social network that supported opensocial then. It was a pain working with those and one fine day I pulled my app out from everyone of those, found a $3/month hosting provider and spent a day putting my app as a website http://quotbook.com/. It found a hit on chrome web app store and have been getting $100+ revenue since over two years now with little to no effort.

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

#69

Post by fourstar » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:33 AM UTC

neeson wrote: post #22

fourstar wrote: post #5

Most of my traffic for Hipster or Homeless comes from Facebook likes and a Wikipedia article in another country.

Out of curiosity, did you notice a bump from being mentioned in the movie Drinking Buddies?

Honestly this is the first I've ever heard of it... Now I'm kind of curious. Was it actually mentioned in the movie (the URL)?

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

#70

Post by jkupferman » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 12:45 AM UTC

p8952 wrote: post #46

jkupferman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough I build an app that is almost identical: http://memeifier.com/ Code: https://github.com/jkupferman/meme-creator

I see you are using Puma for your rack server, how do you find it performs compared to Unicorn?

I haven't done any load testing on this app in particular since it's pretty low volume. However on another high-traffic Rails app I did some benchmarking and found Unicorn to have a 10% faster response time and much less variance at the high end. Obviously YMMV.