Ask HN: Tips on how to drive traffic to my content?

[thomaaas]

Hi HN!

About three weeks ago I build my first blog. I started with 0 article and 0 audience. Now I have 4 articles, 300+ followers on twitter, 200+ emails subscribers, and a lot of positive feedback in my inbox.

But I have a really hard time to make people discover my blog. How can I drive traffic to my content?

To make things worst, my website is about trading, so: - SEO: seems impossible because too much competition from top players. - Guest posts on blogs: really hard, since most blogs are scams. - Social sharing: most people don't share this stuff on social networks.

Any advice? Thanks! :-)

[Gaurav322]

Thomas, I have a blog papablogger.org (9 months older) which is in SEO and blogging field niche.

For your situation, I have to share my experience that when i started my blog, then I also have the same thinking about SEO that there are many high competitor in my niche and it is impossible for me to fight it.

But one thing, I knew that I have to start working on SEO... Otherwise, I was never going to start and i never experienced the power of SEO. SEO does not mean that only authority sites get a best position for a particular keyword. SEO means that a relevant and worthy content deserves the first position in Google SERPs.

So, I started my blog with an article of "Best Free CDN provider for your Blog spot Blog?"

In this article, i took "Free CDN" and "best CDN" as a high competitive keywords and "Free CDN provider", "Best CDN provider" and "Free Best CDN" as a low competitive keywords.

And when i published my article in the web, then i got an astonishing result for all my keywords. I got the 1-5 positions for all my keywords.

So, the moral of this story is that Google is working for users... Not for Authority sites.

Just make your site SEO friendly and see the results.

[kellros]

What's the link to your blog?

Even if your blog is 3 weeks old, it generally takes a few months for a domain name to gain reputation. Organic SEO (self-discovery via search terms) requires quality and quantity - you might have the quality right considering you got so much traffic already, but 4 articles is still a long way from 'quantity'.

The trick is to consistently create good quality content for a long period of time (ex. once a week/forever).

What's your motivation for the blog? Hobby? Interest? Work related?

[thomaaas]

Thanks for the answer!

I'm doing this as a hobby/challenge. The blog: www.21pips.com

Yes I plan to write new articles weekly, however if I don't see an increase in traffic I might not have the motivation to continue.

I'm not an expert in SEO, but it seems impossible to me to get a decent SERP (even for long tail search) in this industry. I'm competing against huge banks or websites with crazy pageranks.

[webstartupper]

Register at the top 5 forex forums and start contributing there. Put your website in the signature (Most forums allow this only when you have been there a while and have a large number of posts). Initially, this might just lead to a trickle of traffic, but over time the more you contribute, this will lead to a stable amount of targeted traffic.

[NicoJuicy]

Get links from influential blogs / newssites and your ranking goes up.

The quantity doesn't count, but the quality of their sites.

Eg. there is a site that got immediatly on rank #1, why? A lot of respected universities (.edu) linked to it before they really launched.