HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you promote your website?

14 points by andjones ↗ HN
What are some techniques that the HN community uses to drive traffic and otherwise promote their website?

Each website is different and I know there is no one shot way to promote all websites. Building a website or online service that people want to use is step one. Assuming that condition is met, what combination of things work well? Paid clicks, organic search engine traffic, phone calls, face to face time, crazy marketing trick X?

In my case, I have a online service based website that I'm trying to promote. I'm making calls to those who sign-up and leave a valid phone number to get feedback (not very often), as well using Google AdSense, following the best search engine practices, signing up for local conferences, and telling everyone I meet about my site and will listen. What else makes sense?

6 comments

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rgbrgb
A list of probably obvious things to try:

HackerNews Delicious Links StumbleUpon Niche blogs - There are people who don't get a lot of freebies who will actually do a full write-up in exchange for a free trial etc. Without knowing what your product is, it's hard to reccomend anything to specific in this category. Twitter - Tweet about new features, promotions, related news at least once a day. This is also a nice informal way for your users to speak directly to you in a public forum. Company blog - Get a Tumblr or something and have this feed to your tweets as well. Facebook page

Out of curiosity, what's the audience?

andjones
My startup offers online surveys, which are mainly used for research, company and employee evaluation, and feedback.

I don't consider the service so glamorous, but I think its useful and I'd like to spread the word as much as possible. I come from a programming side, so I can make all the website magic happens, promoting my website does not come so naturally to me.

andrewtbham
i assume this is your web site? http://new.surveyshare.com

who do you consider your main competitors? survey monkey?

anyway, you might want to think about running an adwords campaign and using the names of your competitors as the keywords and target them directly... like we under cut their prices... or something of that nature.

ig1
I know you're asking about advertising but I think you might benefit from stepping a little back and thinking about marketing before you think about advertising.

Think about who your target customers are (i.e. the individuals within these firms who will pay for your product), are if they using existing products or are they completely new to the product type. What's your value proposition to these users.

Once you understand that it should be much easier to promote your product to those users. If your target market is HR staff in SMEs then use linkedin to target that group, get featured on HR blogs, magazines, etc. and make sure your value proposition clearly comes across whenever you advertise.