I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement (http://duetapp.com) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com. The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well.
Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as an effective means of marketing so I'm planning on blogging much more often this year. Hopefully that will help too...
Everything is custom. I designed the Duet and Solo themes, but I used a bit of bootstrap for some of the elements. Both landing pages are custom as well. The Duet landing page uses Foundation and the Solo landing page uses Bootstrap.
I had a digital sign-making business with small income (basically you design a sign on the website and I carve it out of wood with a CNC machine)
the most traffic I got were from giving signs away as prizes on crafting blogs. It seems obvious in hindsight, but you have to be careful when cold emailing with "free" and "prize" in the body, I think more than half of my emails were filtered out as spam.
* I had also tried adwords. It did give me a bunch of clickthroughs, but was not cost effective in the end.
I just tried it and it's a very cool app. Are you going to monetize it in any way?
I read a lot on this topic (SEO) at the moment but never heard about your spp. So you probably should reach out to top SEO blogs and post on forums. I'm sure they will be thrilled :)
I am building more SEO tools to sell with a freemium SaaS model. The existing tools will remain free.
I have reached out to many blogs, some has written about us but many haven't. The SEO community is also spreading the word about RankSignals on SEO & webmaster forums.
I've been looking for something like this, awesome to see it. That's the issue with marketing, there is a subset of users that are looking for your product, or know they have some sort of problem that needs solving. How you get to specifically them is the tough part.
I bet there are a lot of other up and coming products that just get drowned out/fail to get traction, yet these are the ones that are really trying to innovate.
Long tail SEO and content marketing is an effective way to reach niche audience. Additionally, we've got a lot of users from niche forums. Moreover, this is the kind of traffic that converts best.
I have been able to get very good traction with it, and my app has not been featured on any main stream tech blogs yet.
I have no revenue, but around 12-20k unique visits a month consistently for the past 9 months. The site is http://androidwallpape.rs and main sources of traffic so far have been android blogs and podcasts as well as stumble-upon sites. Initially the link was posted to reddit and it was picked up from there. Of those visits around 40% is new unique visitors, each month.
I would say engaging with communities that might be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.
As per my other comment, I've considered it, but haven't gone thought with it. My only motivation for the site was to repurpose what I had laying around on my hard drive in hopes it would be useful to people. Also, I wasn't willing to do anything that would sacrifice experience or quality, so I decided not to.
Only thing that I think could work would be approaching android devs directly about ad based sponsorship, because that would allow me to control the relevance and quality of the ads. Decided against it as, honestly, I'm busy with other things and the hassle outweighs any potential revenue I could hope to get out of it.
Awesome site! You could easily monetize with just placing even a single AdSense ad on the site. An app might also be useful in monetizing. Is this a custom site? Curious what you used to make it.
It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset
I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.
Pretty much. Buddy of mine runs one of the most popular wallpaper sites and the ads make pennies on the dollar. You can't really monetize a wallpaper site at all (especially if you aren't the one making the wallpapers).
Very cool, great execution for a wallpaper site. Few suggestions...
1. Filter by color. Allow users to pick a color on a palette, and select all the images with that primary color.
2. Categories. A simple dropdown in the navigation to select nature, architecture, water, abstract, etc.
Lastly, why don't you branch this concept out into other areas? This would be a beautiful showcase for general photography. Allow users to upload their work, 'like' photos, and display the best on the homepage. Mix in profiles, and the ability to comment on images you select, and it would be an interesting site. Somewhat of a behance, pinterest, logopond mix geared towards photographers.
Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.
I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.
As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)
My side project (http://kruipen.com) is a database of audio equipment prices (although it is for fun, not monetization). I would sometimes post relevant links on audio forums' for-sale posts. With mixed success.
Quick question how do you like jqPlot? Did you try anything like d3js? If so, any pros or cons of each?
I'm currently messing with d3js for some data I have on my F150 for the past year. (Fuel, mpg, odometer, fuel price, etc).
EDIT: I would recommend a "browse/explore" feature. I don't know audio equipment so I don't know what to search for. Your initial hint helps but doesn't keep a non audio expert around very long.
jqPlot works for me, but I'm not a UI person (as you can tell <g>) and I don't really use many capabilities. The library seems to be relatively big by current standards.
The dirty little secret why the UI is so sparse: this is a purely static site generated once a day by a Haskell program. The is no real browse feature, although you can click to some other "random" pages from actual price pages (e.g. http://kruipen.com/wyred-4-sound-dac-2-5.html). But those links are more intended for search engine crawlers than humans - that's why they appear "random" <g>.
Although it's not recurring revenue, the income from the book advance is way more than I could have ever hoped to generate by placing ads on the site.
One unorthodox way I've driven traffic to the site is by including it in an iframe at the bottom of a little Excel-to-HTML converter I whipped up a few years ago:
It's a service that allows you to convert ALL CAPS text to mixed case, and it includes a sidebar that promotes Correlated by pulling in the most recently published statistic.
I guess the general technique could be summed up as: Make something useful (even if it's boring), get traffic, promote something completely useless but fun, and hope that it piques their interest.
Going to take this down later this week. My free micro-instance-on-AWS period is over. I get a constant drive of traffic from reddit. Could've thrown in ads, but I really din't want to keep it going. It's kinda stupid, but kinda cool?
How much traffic does it cost? If you put ads on it to pay for the traffic, and added some usage statistics and "top N served" (by traffic and by unique referrer) to get people to browse the site directly, you could probably keep it going pretty easily. It'd be handy.
Also, have you considered directly serving the image in response to the request? That way, people could use your URLs directly in the img tags rather than the imgur URLs, which would let you get the traffic statistics for the images, and promote the use of your service.
I haven't done any load testing on this app in particular since it's pretty low volume. However on another high-traffic Rails app I did some benchmarking and found Unicorn to have a 10% faster response time and much less variance at the high end. Obviously YMMV.
"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 promise of free gadets
However, I'm assuming what you really want is users/conversions. In that case, you need to think about your project/site/business as a relationship between 2 parties with the internet simply being a more scalable medium for communication between you.
To get people interested in a product/service, it has to fix a pain point, be really interesting, or you have to be the best. You can "be the best" by showcasing your knowledge of the problem with blog posts, interviews, helping people out on forums, and becoming involved in communities that would be in your target demographic (forums, meet ups, irc groups, etc).
Fixing a pain point or being really interesting is a product /market fit problem so if you've shown your site/product/service to a lot of people and it's not sticking, you need to do in-person interviews to figure out what's not good enough.
In general, if you're trying to build up traffic, that's really building up a community of people (who are the source of good traffic) so you need to approach that in the same way you'd build up a community offline: be interesting, be a good community citizen, and give without asking much in return.
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.
We've only soft launched StartupVitality [1] but if you've just launched your side project and are looking to get some early, targeted traffic, it's a problem we know about.
We're going to release a list of our submission sites so that bootstrappers who have more time than money do it for free but those who have some cash or are funded might find our service useful.
The very first thing that comes to mind when reading your front page is "SEO spammer", and reading the rest of the site does nothing to dispel that impression. You might want to give some specific portfolios of what you've done in the past for specific sites, to reinforce that you're not (for instance) comment/forum/blog spammers.
Hi Josh, thanks for the comment. We don't and will never do unsolicited comment/forum/blog spamming.
We weren't really going to post on HN because most of the audience will think this is SEO spam. It's not and we would never do that. We're only interested in promoting your startup to sites that are interested.
Firstly, we reject and refund low quality sites that don't meet our criteria.
Secondly, to give you a few examples, if your site has a great design, we will post to DesignerNews. If SEO is your thing, we'll make sure it gets exposure on Inbound.org. However, it starts to get more interesting when we move outside of the 'known niches'. So, if your startup/site is doing innovative things with data, we'll post to DataTau; if it's food related, we'll post to FoodNews (hypertexthero); if it's travel related, we'll post to outbounding.org.
We also promote on paid, premium sites such as betali.st, erlibird and KillerStartups.
I built https://OpenTokRTC.com to make it super easy for people to go and video chat with each other using WebRTC. It gets a steady 2000 visits every week. After I built the site, I set up google search notifications so I get notified whenever new content relevant to my app shows up ( webrtc posts, articles about video chat, etc ). Then I'd visit each site, read it, and leave a comment about my thoughts and plug in OpenTokRTC.
One of my side projects (www.twitteraudit.com) happens to get the most traffic of anything I've ever built on my own :) It gets 50k+ uniques per month and all the traffic has grown organically (mostly via tweets and blog posts). It's been up for just over a year, and I've started spending some more time (on the side) monetizing it. If anyone is interested in helping, send me an email!
oops: spoke to soon. It doesnt (yet) have much monthly revenue :(
Why do I need to authorize a connection to my Twitter account in order to audit someone else's? What are you using it for, and could you either make that more clear up front or drop the requirement, preferably the latter?
Getting traffic by participating only on reddit (subreddits about litecoin and litecoint mining) and just by helping people, I'm getting new members and very interesting organic search results. (+1000 new visits from Google on keywords related to the topics).
I launched my web app development service Built from Ideas (http://BuiltFromIdeas.com) a couple months ago. I've experimented with Facebook ads, but saw no real result. Then I wrote guest articles for Bootstrappist (http://www.bootstrappist.com) and a couple other small, targeted newsletters and saw immediately results. Inbound marketing for the win!
Write about it. Make it so your articles explain useful stuff for people not necessarily interested in your niche: what general learning can you extract from your experience so far? What did you try? What did and didn't work? This will drive high quality content to your article, which will in turn build up links and percolate to your site. This is what's worked for http://greaterskies.com. Nothing else I've tried has had any impact.
The traffic driving methods used are much more useful if you know the site/market they're being used for. I'd much rather people included the project URL than not.
I've built a successful side business (http://www.mohawkapps.com) and was even featured in an e-book: http://www.sideprojectbook.com/ - by creating iPhone apps for niche markets and marketing heavily to them through facebook and in-person tradeshows. I gross about $2k-$4k a month but I haven't quit my day job yet.
Apple does a lot of my marketing for me but I also rely heavily on word of mouth. I make sure to have a screen in all my apps that allow users to tell their friends through texting and email about the app. I'm also an apple affiliate so all the traffic that goes to the app store through my site nets me another 7% of all that user's purchases during the session... it makes up for the gigantic chunk of change that Apple takes from my sales.
Recently, I've started branching out into more generic apps that are useful to a wider market, but my niche apps make way more money than the broad-audience apps.
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.
As an active runner/triathlete, I can't stress enough how f*cked-up online registration processes for races are, and this app almost seems solve this. All I can wish you is the best of luck and I hope to signup to races via your app soon.
my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option to do so during registration, but not before). This sector needs an Eventbrite for sport events. Best of luck.
Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly my goal. I currently have it so you can create a race w/o signing up. Shoot me an email (link on the bottom of the website) if you don't mind chatting a bit more? Thanks!
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.
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?
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:
Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.
Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?
One idea would be to pay the race facilities directly, rather than paying the organizers. Now someone trying to rob you will need to set up 2 identities to do it...
For Twiddla, I make a point of giving free accounts to teachers and students (or basically anybody who bothers to write an email and ask for one).
This leads to tons of word-of-mouth referrals, and I'll sometimes watch as an entire school comes on board, one class at a time, over the course of a few weeks.
People tend to write about this (and they like the product), so it finds its way onto the radar of companies who do Online Tutoring. We have an API they can use to create and embed our whiteboards for use as online classrooms. That's the bit that costs money. It's a tiny fraction of our userbase, but it accounts for nearly all the revenue.
My side project is gaining users slowly everyday.
It's called noteshred and it allows to you send people self shredding, encrypted notes with unique URLs, https://www.noteshred.com. I'm curious to know how you guys transitioned from a free tool to something that generated income.
I can't imagine advertisements wouldn't bring in much revenue, so how did you go about introducing a paid model?
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.
Hey I'm building a user-generated content site and I'm trying to slowly crawl my way up organic search but I'm really struggling. I don't really expect you to take time out of your life to look at my stuff, but if you do have time / want to I'd love to hear what you think!
I accidentally Panda'd myself I'm pretty sure. When I put my site up I had thousands of stub pages that got indexed with the thinnest possible content.
I removed (they now 404) a bunch of pages and added 'noindex' meta tags to most others so eventually Google will hopefully only be indexing hundreds of my pages instead of 70,000. So hopefully I won't have Panda penalty / thin content.
Do you think having keywords actually influences SEO these days? I thought that Google and others just extracted keywords themselves and ignores ones you define yourself?
By the way, if anyone is interested in a nice, but small and very focused (NO POLITICS) forum for those of us working on bootstrapped companies, I've been enjoying this one, so far: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/
For LiberWriter, I've found that the right forums can drive a lot of traffic. Any old traffic is useless - I've got the site up on the front page of HN before, with 0 conversions. HN readers are not our target market at all. Forums also put you in contact with people to just chat about what you offer, which might give you some ideas... Don't let naysayers get you down, either. There's bound to be someone who says they would never pay for that, could build it in a weekend, or whatever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Wouldn't the front page of HN would be more about the readers sharing / promoting the site than direct conversions? Maybe coders don't tweet as much as I thought.
101 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadAlmost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as an effective means of marketing so I'm planning on blogging much more often this year. Hopefully that will help too...
the most traffic I got were from giving signs away as prizes on crafting blogs. It seems obvious in hindsight, but you have to be careful when cold emailing with "free" and "prize" in the body, I think more than half of my emails were filtered out as spam.
* I had also tried adwords. It did give me a bunch of clickthroughs, but was not cost effective in the end.
I read a lot on this topic (SEO) at the moment but never heard about your spp. So you probably should reach out to top SEO blogs and post on forums. I'm sure they will be thrilled :)
I am building more SEO tools to sell with a freemium SaaS model. The existing tools will remain free.
I have reached out to many blogs, some has written about us but many haven't. The SEO community is also spreading the word about RankSignals on SEO & webmaster forums.
I bet there are a lot of other up and coming products that just get drowned out/fail to get traction, yet these are the ones that are really trying to innovate.
I have been able to get very good traction with it, and my app has not been featured on any main stream tech blogs yet.
I would say engaging with communities that might be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.
It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset
I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.
With RPM's around a few dollars for AdSense isn't that the most he would be looking at in revenue, or am I missing something ?
1. Filter by color. Allow users to pick a color on a palette, and select all the images with that primary color.
2. Categories. A simple dropdown in the navigation to select nature, architecture, water, abstract, etc.
Lastly, why don't you branch this concept out into other areas? This would be a beautiful showcase for general photography. Allow users to upload their work, 'like' photos, and display the best on the homepage. Mix in profiles, and the ability to comment on images you select, and it would be an interesting site. Somewhat of a behance, pinterest, logopond mix geared towards photographers.
Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.
I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.
As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)
I'm currently messing with d3js for some data I have on my F150 for the past year. (Fuel, mpg, odometer, fuel price, etc).
EDIT: I would recommend a "browse/explore" feature. I don't know audio equipment so I don't know what to search for. Your initial hint helps but doesn't keep a non audio expert around very long.
The dirty little secret why the UI is so sparse: this is a purely static site generated once a day by a Haskell program. The is no real browse feature, although you can click to some other "random" pages from actual price pages (e.g. http://kruipen.com/wyred-4-sound-dac-2-5.html). But those links are more intended for search engine crawlers than humans - that's why they appear "random" <g>.
Although it's not recurring revenue, the income from the book advance is way more than I could have ever hoped to generate by placing ads on the site.
One unorthodox way I've driven traffic to the site is by including it in an iframe at the bottom of a little Excel-to-HTML converter I whipped up a few years ago:
http://pressbin.com/tools/excel_to_html_table/
I use a similar technique here:
http://intellicaps.correlated.org/
It's a service that allows you to convert ALL CAPS text to mixed case, and it includes a sidebar that promotes Correlated by pulling in the most recently published statistic.
I guess the general technique could be summed up as: Make something useful (even if it's boring), get traffic, promote something completely useless but fun, and hope that it piques their interest.
Memes As A Service http://maas.rohits.me/
The example linked at the top works, but when I try to construct one, I get a "We're sorry, but something went wrong." error. For instance: http://maas.rohits.me/boromir/One%20does%20not%20simply/serv...
How much traffic does it cost? If you put ads on it to pay for the traffic, and added some usage statistics and "top N served" (by traffic and by unique referrer) to get people to browse the site directly, you could probably keep it going pretty easily. It'd be handy.
Also, have you considered directly serving the image in response to the request? That way, people could use your URLs directly in the img tags rather than the imgur URLs, which would let you get the traffic statistics for the images, and promote the use of your service.
Code: https://github.com/jkupferman/meme-creator
However, I'm assuming what you really want is users/conversions. In that case, you need to think about your project/site/business as a relationship between 2 parties with the internet simply being a more scalable medium for communication between you.
To get people interested in a product/service, it has to fix a pain point, be really interesting, or you have to be the best. You can "be the best" by showcasing your knowledge of the problem with blog posts, interviews, helping people out on forums, and becoming involved in communities that would be in your target demographic (forums, meet ups, irc groups, etc).
Fixing a pain point or being really interesting is a product /market fit problem so if you've shown your site/product/service to a lot of people and it's not sticking, you need to do in-person interviews to figure out what's not good enough.
In general, if you're trying to build up traffic, that's really building up a community of people (who are the source of good traffic) so you need to approach that in the same way you'd build up a community offline: be interesting, be a good community citizen, and give without asking much in return.
We're going to release a list of our submission sites so that bootstrappers who have more time than money do it for free but those who have some cash or are funded might find our service useful.
[1] https://startupvitality.com/
We weren't really going to post on HN because most of the audience will think this is SEO spam. It's not and we would never do that. We're only interested in promoting your startup to sites that are interested.
Firstly, we reject and refund low quality sites that don't meet our criteria.
Secondly, to give you a few examples, if your site has a great design, we will post to DesignerNews. If SEO is your thing, we'll make sure it gets exposure on Inbound.org. However, it starts to get more interesting when we move outside of the 'known niches'. So, if your startup/site is doing innovative things with data, we'll post to DataTau; if it's food related, we'll post to FoodNews (hypertexthero); if it's travel related, we'll post to outbounding.org.
We also promote on paid, premium sites such as betali.st, erlibird and KillerStartups.
Happy to provide more information if you like.
oops: spoke to soon. It doesnt (yet) have much monthly revenue :(
Getting traffic by participating only on reddit (subreddits about litecoin and litecoint mining) and just by helping people, I'm getting new members and very interesting organic search results. (+1000 new visits from Google on keywords related to the topics).
Apple does a lot of my marketing for me but I also rely heavily on word of mouth. I make sure to have a screen in all my apps that allow users to tell their friends through texting and email about the app. I'm also an apple affiliate so all the traffic that goes to the app store through my site nets me another 7% of all that user's purchases during the session... it makes up for the gigantic chunk of change that Apple takes from my sales.
Recently, I've started branching out into more generic apps that are useful to a wider market, but my niche apps make way more money than the broad-audience apps.
my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option to do so during registration, but not before). This sector needs an Eventbrite for sport events. Best of luck.
Any commentary on making your SAAS with Haskell, where you thought it helped, where you thought it hurt?
Thanks!
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
Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?
This leads to tons of word-of-mouth referrals, and I'll sometimes watch as an entire school comes on board, one class at a time, over the course of a few weeks.
People tend to write about this (and they like the product), so it finds its way onto the radar of companies who do Online Tutoring. We have an API they can use to create and embed our whiteboards for use as online classrooms. That's the bit that costs money. It's a tiny fraction of our userbase, but it accounts for nearly all the revenue.
http://isitnormal.com
Great Ask HN. Thanks for posting.
This is the site: http://www.istorical.com
I accidentally Panda'd myself I'm pretty sure. When I put my site up I had thousands of stub pages that got indexed with the thinnest possible content.
I removed (they now 404) a bunch of pages and added 'noindex' meta tags to most others so eventually Google will hopefully only be indexing hundreds of my pages instead of 70,000. So hopefully I won't have Panda penalty / thin content.
Beyond that though, do you have any advice for SEO on user-generated content like this: http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/141
Do you think having keywords actually influences SEO these days? I thought that Google and others just extracted keywords themselves and ignores ones you define yourself?
For LiberWriter, I've found that the right forums can drive a lot of traffic. Any old traffic is useless - I've got the site up on the front page of HN before, with 0 conversions. HN readers are not our target market at all. Forums also put you in contact with people to just chat about what you offer, which might give you some ideas... Don't let naysayers get you down, either. There's bound to be someone who says they would never pay for that, could build it in a weekend, or whatever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863