Ask HN: How to drive traffic to a side project

[hess]

I started 300dayweekend.com as a side project for myself and other travelers to share short travel stories. Friends and a few random visitors have given me great feedback on the content, but I'm struggling to drive traffic. I've had some success on Reddit, but submitting too many links to the same base URL gets posts hidden. I'm open to other thoughts?

[boyter]

From a pure SEO perspective...

Your meta descriptions aren't useful. You are just repeating the title. Adding some descriptive descriptions less then 140 characters in length with help. You appear to be using Wordpress so install SEO Ultimate to help with this.

Its hard to find content on your site. I thought you only had a few stories since it took me scrolling to the bottom and clicking left to find more. I guess the tags help with this but you are missing all of the extra links to find content. Your sitemap will help overcome this for Google, but not for users.

Your domain and title are at odds. Not sure what you are looking to target in terms of keywords, but assuming its "1 minute travel stories" you are going to find it hard to compete with http://giveme1minute.wordpress.com/ without getting http://1minutetravelstories.com/ or http://oneminutetravelstories.com/ etc....

Otherwise,

Move your subscription submit higher. I'm going to assume you want people to subscribe so make it prominent. I would do the same with the twitter link. I liked the stories so started looking for twitter so I could follow and get more of them and it wasn't obvious to find.

You need more content to get more traffic. No idea what your goals are but I would be using http://www.hittail.com/ (try it for a month for free) to work out what sort of keywords you should be targeting. This should land you on the first page of Google/Bing for those keywords.

The design isn't fantastic (may or may not be an issue) which made me think this was just someone's personal blog at first. Maybe you should look into spending $10 or so for a nicer looking theme. Nothing fancy, just something more modern and clean to appeal to your audience.

I say this as someone with a side project pulling in 4,000 unique's a day, and having targeted keywords to get No 1 on Google/Bing successfully quite a few times.

Looks like an interesting project. I added your feed to my newsblur and will follow what's going on so long as the content remains interesting.

[johnmurch]

Think about your ideal visitor: What would that be? Where do they hangout online, what do they read?

It seems to me you want to focus on travelers - Go through Alltop (http://travel.alltop.com/) as they already get traffic. Try to leverage that by outreaching and interacting.

Leverage Twitter by going through https://twitter.com/search?q=travel%20blogs&src=typd&f=realt... finding people who travel and favoriting a tweet from there. Put your URL in ur byline and slowly gaining traffic.

Just some thoughts :) Good Luck!

[mooreds]

I'm not sure what your traffic goals are, but there are a lots of ways to skin this cat (no cats were harmed in the making of this comment).

Have you:

  * looked in google webmaster tools (and the others, sure, why not) and made sure the googlebot likes what it is seeing
  * considered PPC/adwords?  How about facebook ads?
  * created a facebook page or instagram/twitter account (depending on your demo) and followed people that are interesting to you w/r/t this area?
  * joined communities that are interested in what you are doing--and contributed to them?  (It's not enough to just drop in, leave a link and go.)  Email list, facebook group, web forum, wherever.  I've had success with this, and just a signature block.
  * reached out to bloggers in the same space and offered to do a guest post
  * sent emails to travel writers with helpful info that refers back to your site
  * started a tumblr/linkblog/real blog that can point to this

(I have a side project that gets ~2k visits a month: http://coloradocsas.info/ -- couldn't resist putting that in.)

[hess]

Thanks! Thanks for the ideas. Many are good, my favorite is the guest blogging idea.

[mooreds]

No worries. Pick something and do it consistently for a while--all of these take time in our attention scarce world--well, all of them except the advertising, which is trading money for time.

[lauradhamilton]

I would suggest:

1. Change the color scheme. The white text on blue is jarring and looks old.

2. More detail to your content. If you write posts that are 2,000 words each that contain multiple links (internal and external) as well as multiple images, that will be much more engaging. I think your posts are too short, both from an SEO perspective and an engagement perspective.

[wsieroci]

You can check my project: http://metrics11.com It could help increase search traffic to your website. It finds profitable keywords niches you can use on your site to get free traffic from Google.

[digitalmaster]

like this: Checkout my side project https://github.com/digitalmaster/MongoCMS

It's a MongoDb client :)