
Ask HN: How do I get to that next level of traffic? - handhold
I run a social music website that is getting a steady stream of visitors (1,000) each day. We've been on the front page of Reddit (several times), featured in newspapers, blogs, podcasts etc. while these help us grow, our growth rate of active users isn't tremendously high.  We have recently created a Facebook app to help spread the word about our site.  Is there anything else that can be done to increase growth other than wait for positive word of mouth?
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jchor
I have a few theories and quick ideas on this..

For starters, are you partnering with any other companies? I think the synergy
of having working relationships with other companies are a great asset since
they will actively promote you while you promote them and so on.

Secondly, do you have any viral aspects / proposition for your site? I haven't
seen it so I can't tell.. But if you positioned yourself such that a small
niche group must have and use your site then I think that's a great start
since the group will be self-replicated the newly spawned groups will self-
replicate more, hence viral.

Thirdly, have you looked at the discoverability of your site? Look for
patterns of how your users are finding you and how they are not.

Last, SEO is the hot term for these days and I think for a good reason.
Imagine if I did a google search for something related to music and your
social website always shows up as #1 / #2 in the search results? I have a lot
of ideas on how this can be done.. but I guess I'll try it out on our stealthy
startup first.. and if it works and we become widly successful then I will
defintely blog and share about it. =).

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TobiasCassell
I joined and roamed around a bit, its really beautiful. I very much admire the
minimalist style. But I think it is possible the very thing that makes the
site such a joy is what makes it hard to gain traction, and that is the lack
of content/information outside of the actual music. Users need to be getting a
constant stream of info to hold their attention. If a site doesn't do this it
sends a subliminal message to the user "nothing new here, I'm never coming
back"- they may not even be aware of this and they may have nothing but great
things to say about your site but they might not return either. I feel you may
need more emotional branding of the artists to hold everyones attention, and
more intimate connection to the music industry. In a perfect world you would
not have to clutter up your site with any of the following suggestions but
maybe there is a way to incorporate some new elements without sacrificing the
gorgeousness of it all.

1)Video content never fails to resonate with users, it would be great for
artists to embed their existing online video content somewhere on your site.
2) Do any of the artists have their own groups on Ning? Can you create a loop
somehow? 3)Do the artists have flickr groups? Are they on tour, can you
integrate their Dopplr profiles if they have them? 4)Geographical info mashup?
Where is the music coming from? Where do the artists live? Can you figure out
how to provide information regarding gigs? 5)Take the blog more seriously.
Maybe don't hide it? Blog more often, mention music related links and stuff
that may not directly concern the site. Maybe you should think of the blog as
the marketing? (feedback loop again)

I could continue but I'm not sure if I'm on the right track here. I look at
everything with a marketing/social engineering prospective, I don't write
code. Let me know HackerNewsCommunity and I'll give it some more thought.

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netcan
This is a post about tracking the increase of active blog readers. I think it
can be taken as a broad parallel to active users.

[http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-
reco...](http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-
recommendations-for-measuring-your-success.html)

By measuring well you may find some insight that'll help.

The jist of the examples is that readers (apply to users) are acquired one at
a time. Digg, stumble & such are not going to give you a massive spike in
users. Nothing probably will. Its about momentum.

Anyway, maybe you will find some answers in analytics.

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wwsculley
I think the question you need to ask yourself before - How can I increase the
net traffic to my site? - is: Why do I want to increase traffic?

Building out a customer base for the sake of increasing numbers leaves too
many open questions. Building one for a specific purpose, however, (e.g.
increase ad revenue, subscriptions, user-relationships) can help shape the
direction of the site's development. It is much easier to increase the volume
and stickiness of your audience if you can give them a purpose to look forward
to.

That said, the nature of your product should dictate this direction. If you
are selling a specific product, consider what modifications and accessories
will complement the original product, and to what extent that will draw back
loyal users.

Why should I buy an iPod? Because I am confident that I will enjoy engaging
with it, look forward to the next model, and that I will be able to relate
with my friends about it (consequently encouraging friends without one to get
one). Engagement is more important than ownership.

In terms of social music networking, consider what ways that you can allow
your users to engage with one another through the product, and to give them
some agency over the process.

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icey
Well, if your site is technically solid and you aren't spending a ton of time
writing the software any more, you should be spending your time talking about
it every chance you get, everywhere you go.

You should start by putting your website in your profile at the very least.

~~~
handhold
It's <http://cherrypeel.com>. I was trying to start a general discussion and
not spam HN.

~~~
scotth
I'm cherrypeel.com's developer. thought i should put in a warning that the
site plays music immediately.

~~~
kylec
And you wonder why you're losing traffic. As someone who browses the internet,
if my computer starts playing music (in this case, loudly) without my consent,
I go on safari to hunt and kill the infringing tab. I strongly recommend
against this 'feature'. Display something that says "play now!" and even load
the song if you want, but don't actually play it until I consent. Please.

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papa
In some ways, building the product is the easy part. Getting traction is the
really dicey problem.

Check out some of the SEO/SEM sites like seomoz. SEO is very important. Link-
building is also important. Look at getting some reciprocal links or at
focusing on a specific niche within your site and really trying to develop a
core audience around a few musicians/genres in order to get that "critical
mass" of interest. Contact other sites in your space and figure out how you
can get them to write about and/or drive audience to you. Hold contests. Build
widgets. There's no silver bullet (for most of us).

Knowing the type of user that is attracted to your site is also very
important. That will really help you narrow down what kinds of sites and
techniques you should be using to capture more audience. Do you have a lot of
kids on your site? If so, seek out affinity sites. It will be much easier for
you to convert that audience to your product. Use sites like Quantcast to
discover sites like yours that have traffic. Learn from the successful sites
and employ their tricks (are you asking every user to invite their friends
when they sign up? if not, you might be missing out on new users).

And, as always, be patient. My website is a little more than 2 years old and
we've gone from 1000 visitors/day to 100k+/day. And even now it's still one of
my primary tasks every day (figuring out new ways to get word out and
encourage inbound traffic). You should be spending several hours a day working
on this stuff.

~~~
brentb
papa, this is off-topic, but your site's "ajax_updates_iframe" architecture
needs some serious attention. As it stands now, each time it's updated (every
few seconds) it creates a new entry in the browser's history (at least Firefox
3's... haven't tested others).

This totally mangles a user's history... after just a few minutes, every entry
in my history was fanpop, which I was not at all happy about. I'm sure this
upsets others too and there are ways around it (iframe within an iframe, for
example, which doesn't affect history). Just FYI.

------
mahipal
Well, I think I know exactly the site you're talking about, but I won't blow
your cover for you. I saw it on Reddit just a few days ago and there's a
suspicious Facebook icon in the corner that wasn't there a little while ago...
so if this is your site, shoot me an email (in my profile) because I found a
few small HTML bugs and such. It would probably be to your benefit to share
the link here though.

The SEO point is a very a good one, especially for a site that is (probably)
very JavaScript-heavy. More than just your site's own tagline, you can
optimize for keywords such as "social music," "music sharing," "music
community," etc. I just pulled these off the top of my head -- I recommend
spending some time with the Google Keyword Tool (
<https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal> ) if you haven't
already.

With a social music site that's based on upvoting, you also have a tremendous
resource that sites like Last.fm don't have. Beyond just allowing people to
friend each other like all the social networking sites do, you could introduce
a feature along the lines of "Other people who upvoted this song also
liked..." as a good way to add immediate value for a new user who has just
joined and voted up a few songs, but hasn't added any friends yet.

~~~
handhold
That's me, cherrypeel.com The icon is fixed;)

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ConradHex
It sounds like the problem isn't "getting enough traffic", it's getting people
to stay, or to come back. Are you focusing on that?

~~~
handhold
We have started to focus on that, trying to get people more involved and
giving them reasons to come back to the site. It is a weakness of ours at this
point but something that is solvable.

~~~
apgwoz
Survey your users.

------
petercooper
_our growth rate of active users isn't tremendously high_

You have two options. Work on more traffic or, and this is FAR easier, work on
your _conversion rate._ Get more of those fewer visitors to sign up and you
get the same result.

------
grag
You could work on integrating with the twitter api. Look how much linkage
blip.fm is getting on twitter: <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=blip.fm>

------
mattmaroon
What does your Facebook app do? Does it have a strong viral component? Those
almost never are able to direct much traffic back to your site, but they can
often do what your site does, possibly better, and spread faster.

~~~
handhold
A user can send a song from Cherrypeel to any friend (on their wall or in a
private message) and they can vote on the song directly in facebook. They
don't need to sign up for the app to listen to the song but will need to sign
up tosend the app on to another friend. <http://apps.facebook.com/cherrypeel/>

~~~
mattmaroon
So is your app meant to be standalone at all? Or just to interface with the
site?

This app feels like something I'd just skip by, though maybe the experience
would be much better if I were sent a song. But just getting there directly,
there isn't much to do. There's one song to play, which is cool, but how do I
find more?

~~~
mattmaroon
Ah, I messed with it a bit. Ability to post to walls is pretty sweet. Definite
virality there. If only I could find some songs I knew.

------
rokhayakebe
Can you share the site URL?

~~~
handhold
cherrypeel.com

~~~
rokhayakebe
Here is the solution: Organic Traffic. I am not technical so excuse it if I
sound naive. Ajax is beautiful, but if you have a content site and want
traffic, you are going to hurt your search engine results, and that counts
because sooner or later that should be your main traffic source. You need to
turn those categories into more pages meaning whenever someone plays a song or
creates a list, that becomes a page with a neat URL that the search engine can
actually spyde. Think about it, if someone searches on Google for one of the
songs you have in your DB your page can actually show up on the first page.
Start indexing those playlists/channels/users pages and you will double your
traffic.

~~~
apgwoz
I don't think you want a page for every song played, but you might want to
have a detail page about every song in your database, which links to profiles
that have played it recently. That's basically the same thing, but not as
spammy.

What about band bios, or something similar to increase the amount of unique
content?

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siong1987
The first thing to do is at least tell us your link here in HN, please.

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ujj
you could try using Google friend connect launched recently. Definitely adds
viral functionality as people can invite their friends and you can push their
activities on your site to open social containers to which they belong. For
example id love if you could push my reviews on your site as my updates on
Orkut (sorry am from india not a big FB fam:))

------
enomar
What about apps for the iPhone and Android?

~~~
handhold
we were thinking about that to get it out in time for Christmas. Do you think
these apps would help us gain traffic or just give our existing users another
way to interact with the site?

~~~
enomar
This is anecdotal, but I found out about imeem through their android app. I
know Pandora has gained a lot of users through their iPhone app too.

