

Ask HN: How do you build an audience? - rfnslyr

https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5903868<p>Was looking at the passive income thread that got so highly upvoted. How do you build an audience HN? I&#x27;m a complete noob and don&#x27;t know anything marketing.<p>Any good starting points, communities, references, de facto standards, etc?
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beat
Ah, you need to understand SEO (to optimize your site), metrics/analytics (to
understand your visitors and measure improvement), and most importantly,
interesting content that is connected to people who would be interested in it.

There are hundreds of Great American Novels lying around in drawers as
unpublished manuscripts. Many of them are truly great. Don't be one of them!
You need to find your audience, get product/market fit. That's about
marketing.

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alanchavez
I hope you didn't list that in order of importance.

First you have to find a niche. If your product/book/website/blog/whatever is
the only one out there, it's a red flag because it might mean that there's no
need for whatever you offer.

A product will never create a need, you create a product out of people's need.

Try to look for something that already exists, and you know you can make it
better, and pitch whatever you built to the your competitors dissatisfied
users, and there you go, you have an audience.

Then you can start looking into metrics/analytics and finally into SEO.

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beat
Well, I did say that interesting content was the most important thing (really,
interesting content that those who are interested in it would know about).

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smartwater
There's a farm who started posting pictures of their animals on websites like
Pinterest and Reddit. They have a pretty big following now, for a small farm.
I also noticed that they are outranking pretty big sites(like Petsmart) since
they started.

You just have to have something worth sharing.

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babuskov
It really depends what is your market? What kind of products do you make or
services do you offer? You would use very different approach if you're making
a game, car or bug-tracking software.

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lifeguard
It is all about OC -- original content.

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NovemberWest
That is a necessary but insufficient criteria. I have original content. I
still have no audience. I have more traffic than I used to, but I am still
trying to work out just what am I missing? Because an awful lot of pat answers
over the years have failed to solve my traffic problems.

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lifeguard
OK, good. I think these are excellent books on SEM:

"Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day" by Jennifer Grappone

"Getting Noticed on Google" by Ben Norman

And if it isn't measured, it isn't managed:

"Scientific Advertising" Claude C. Hopkins

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NovemberWest
Thanks! I will see what I can do, though e-books and websites are better for
me (for medical reasons -- I don't do so well with paper books).

