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Ask HN: How do I increase traffic to my site?

10 points by sid6376 ↗ HN
Hi, I built my first website (http://vipreads.com) which basically lists the books of famous celebrities. I launched it 10 days ago and have since updated it with about 20-25 celebs. On some good days I have had 2000 page views a day but most of that traffic has been due to posting in hacker news or in an isolated case reddit. Most of the other days its been a virtual ghost town with about 150-200 page views. I have tried promoting it over facebook, twitter but i guess havent been able to drive traffic through those sources. I am slightly concerned that most of my traffic is driven from these hn/reddit. Ideally I would want it to come from my twitter feed, fb page or rss subscription. I would like to know if you have any ideas or is there anything obvious which i have been missing.

Thanks in advance for the help.

11 comments

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struppi
Disclaimer: I never launched a really successful site (but I am still trying ;) ). This is just a guess.

Overnight success takes years of preparation (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/01/overnight-success-i...), so ten days is just a start. I would suggest the following:

  Try to get a lot of feedback from real users
  Keep improving the site over the course of some months
  Blog about it
  Keep doing everything you do now (HN, reddit, twitter, facebook, ...)
  Read Seth Godin's blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/)
  Read everything Kathy Sierra ever posted (http://headrush.typepad.com/)
When you become successful please tell me what worked, so I can copy your success ;) I want to close with a shameless self promotion: I wrote about something similar in my blog some weeks ago: "I wish I had invented Twitter" - http://davidtanzer.net/node/82
sid6376
Thanks for the advice. I checked out your blog and your new site. Good luck.
dhalsey
It appears like you haven't got very many incoming links to your site yet. Naturally I'm not an expert on optimizing your site, but I would guess that organic search engine traffic should be a major source for you.

For example, I tried googling "books barack obama has read", and you site didn't show up in the first few pages. If I were you, I'd be more concerned about the search engine ranking than optimizing a facebook fan page.

In short: find out ways to get relevant links pointing to your site.

sid6376
It depends. If you google "books linus torvals reads" I am the second result. Bill gates favorite books , I am in the first page. But thanks I will work on this.
toumhi
You should also do some keyword volume research (using adwords keyword tool for example). It will show you which keywords are popular, and then you can tailor your content in consequence.

You can also use the list google suggest gives you: if you start typing "books barack obama" the first reading result is "has read" and not "reads". Hence it suggests to me that you should optimize for "books barack obama has read" (meaning that should be the title of your page and your first H1 tag to start with).

That's just one example :-)

codyguy
has the traffic that you've received so far translated into any actual affiliate business for you?
sid6376
yeah.. but very minimal. out of curiosity, why do you ask?
g-garron
The best source of traffic are Search Engines, and that will take some time. You need incoming links to your site, which I'm sure you are getting from all HNers and Redditors bloggers that visited you. You also need to learn about SEO and keywords, and write respecting that. Take care of meta descriptions, and meta tags. Write good titles, and urls for every post.

But, after all, it is a matter of giving good content, and patience, just wait a little and the organic traffic will start to arrive.

Just my two cents, and please consider that I'm not a SEO expert.

nurik
Great endorsement idea!

Another way would be to show up where the buyers are: i.e. maybe you could add reviews at amazon that also state that this book is a vip read.

You might also consider of using your site a bit more efficiently: instead of posting large pictures and text about the vips (which are known to most anyways) you should post the frontcovers of the books right away.

sid6376
Thanks a lot nurik for the feedback.
diolpah
You may want to reconsider your target audience, because I'd be willing to bet it is roughly equivalent to the null set.

The kind of people who care about the lives of celebrities are quite likely not the kind of people looking for book recommendations. Mascara or purse recommendations, perhaps. But not books.