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?

#81

Post by LukeHoersten » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:14 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #79

fapi1974 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Active.com before - wondering how this compares to that?

The worst thing about active.com is that they will spam you forever once they have your email address. There seems to be absolutely no working way to unsubscribe from their mailings.

Agreed. There are many things I plan to do differently.

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

#82

Post by LukeHoersten » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:15 AM UTC

codygman wrote: post #66

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!

Snap and Heist. I've used other frameworks and languages before settling on Snap and couldn't be happier. PostgreSQL for the DB.

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

#83

Post by LukeHoersten » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:20 AM UTC

carterschonwald wrote: post #74

codygman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Knowing Luke I'm going to guess Snap, but I could be wrong, the Haskell web tools allow yah to mix and match. Congrats to Luke on launching!

Thanks!

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

#84

Post by aymeric » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:24 AM UTC

adjwilli wrote: post #51

There are lots of "App Stores" now that accept web apps. Google, Firefox and Opera all have them. I think Amazon does too.

Has anyone had any luck with those App Stores? Anymore to add to the list? (Google Apps?)

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

#85

Post by 8bitpony » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 7:09 AM UTC

udfalkso wrote: post #47

I 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.

That's an impressive amount of traffic for a side project. Has the gold membership been a successful form of monetisation?

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

#86

Post by jizie » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 7:24 AM UTC

Check out my site just put it up yesterday. Still working on it. but wanted to come up with idea's to add more users any ideas welcomed. I also created a blog that will show case idea's that will help me grow my site. so any idea's will be posted with my idea's as well thanks jizie.com

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

#87

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 7:24 AM UTC

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 9:25 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.

Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them.

Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491485

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

#89

Post by udkl » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

The comments are turning out to be 'bragging' 's rather than insightful suggestions. Rather than the 'how'.

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

#90

Post by chezmo » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:47 PM UTC

dkoston wrote: post #13

"traffic" is a really ambiguous word. If I take it at face value, it's really easy to drive traffic to a site: - recruit a bunch of affiliates to post pages with links back to your site (be discriminating on quality and frequency) - use paid ads - connect with a reputable backlink service that doesn't trip Google's radar. - distribute a javascript widget that is hosted on your servers - run a big promo with the promi…

I can just agree on that. My side project http://mailparser.io has ridiculous low traffic compared to other projects i developed. Still it's doing much better than the other sites regarding the conversion and finally the MRR.