2 builders who never spoke to each other
Keep showing up long after your launch day
This channel pays on presence rather than on one submission. Nine months of a launch plus posts, replies and questions pulled more than thirty thousand visits and about sixty percent of one company's traffic, with the business mentioned only lightly. The reverse holds too: one writer's annual views more than halved the year he stopped promoting what he published.
The method
- 01
Publishing without promoting is what kills your traffic: stop submitting to aggregators and the numbers fall even if you keep writing.
- 02
Become an actual participant in the forum rather than a marketer visiting it: sustained useful contribution, with the business mentioned lightly, is what produces the traffic.
What it returned
- 300,000
Justin's blog fell from about 300,000 views in 2014 to about 130,000 in 2015, which he attributed partly to no longer focusing on promoting posts on Hacker News.
- 9
Across 9 months - a single launch plus assorted blog posts, replies and questions - Simple Analytics pulled more than 30,000 visits from Hacker News - around 60% of all its traffic.
Sources
- Make stuff and be happy (2015 year in review)Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · What were my biggest hits of 2015? · undated
- How to get 30,000 Hacker News visitors to your websiteHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · Conclusion · undated
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
More in hacker news
- Bank the front page wave as reputation, not revenue2 unconnected
- Test the idea there, then distrust the verdict2 unconnected · contested
- Answer the question first, name the tool second2 unconnected
- Plan the front page spike as reach, not signupssingle source
- Publish your own numbers in unglamorous detailsingle source
- Expect the throwaway post to travel furthestsingle source · contested