Ask HN: Marketing experiment

2 points by phamilton 15y ago ↗ HN

I've heard a couple different people mention blogs where they pay someone in the Philippines to write content. The blogs run Adsense or something similar. These don't bring in tons of money, but they are profitable if marketed well.

A friend and I found this a little ridiculous. We wanted to give it a shot. 1) It would improve our marketing skills, and 2) it would make an interesting story. We wanted the site to be relatively worthless, content-wise, but still be able to gather a following.

We came up with an idea that wasn't completely worthless though. Our blog is music recommendation service, focusing on good songs to wake up to in the morning. Revenue would be through affiliate advertising for the songs and Adsense.

We launched our blog, wakeuptomusic.com, about 2 weeks ago and we have really struggled to attract a following. We've focused mainly on using social media to attract followers, which hasn't brought a lot of traffic so far.

I wanted to ask the HN community for any ideas you might have on how to market something like this. We're looking at some interesting ideas with Twitter, like a iTunes giftcard raffle, crowdsourcing posts (the post will be the top tweets about the song, instead of one we right ourselves), etc.

What are some standard practices in marketing a blog like this? What are some crazy left field ideas that might work? This is above all an experiment and an exercise, where we have an uphill battle marketing a semi-useless blog.

Thanks!

1 comment

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instakill 15y ago ↗

I'm not in a brainstorming state of mind at the moment, but as for your initial point, it is true. I know of several people that hire people from the Pacific regions via Odesk to do content writing. Combine this with some decent SEO implements and your traffic should see a steady rise in 3 months.