
How thathigh.com solved the chicken and egg and grew to 1M views/mo with no SEO - joeyespo
http://blog.mixrank.com/how-thathighcom-solved-the-chicken-and-egg-pr
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endlessvoid94
I run thathigh.com.

This is an old post, and I'm sure HN will take down the site, since my app
engine quota levels are way lower than they used to be. Just to fill you in,
I've gone to other projects and haven't had time to keep thathigh up to date.

I had some pretty notable twitter followers, including lindsay lohan, snoop
dog, bill maher, doug benson, sarah silverman, and a few others. Still hanging
in there at 12k followers, and I absolutely must give a shout out to
CrowdBooster (I used them a lot to get so many followers).

At the peak, the site was paying my rent in SF. It doesn't really make any
money anymore since I've neglected it.

~~~
ZanderEarth32
I'd be interested in hearing about how you used CrowdBooster to build a
following. Care to elaborate?

~~~
endlessvoid94
i found their tweet scheduling to be dead accurate, and it was really helpful
since most of the most valuable tweets would've happened on the east coast in
the morning (or late at night) when I am asleep in CA.

I like crowdbooster because it's simple.

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ZanderEarth32
"I've done almost zero SEO."

"I changed the title tags to match each page's content"

That's SEO

"I submitted a site map to Google Webmaster Tools"

That's SEO

"I added the relevant meta tags."

That's SEO.

Sites like this don't tend to grow with SEO, they grow because of a community
and social sharing.

~~~
lopatin
Yea I think he means link building, which is by far the most time consuming
and daunting task of SEO.

~~~
autophil
What do you think linkbaiting on reddit etc is? That's linkbuilding too.

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alexkearns
I have found StumbleUpon to be by far the best way of generating traffic. It
won't work for everyone. Don't bother using it for B2B stuff. But if you
create quirky fun content aimed at consumers, it can bring a lot of eyeballs
to your site. And you don't even have to pay for ads. Bulk-standard link
submissions can work very well.

I have a blog that I have not updated for more than a year that still pulls in
100,000+ unique visitors a month via StumbleUpon.

One of the tricks is that once you have a viral article on StumbleUpon, you
can use that article to promote other articles, in the hope that they too will
be voted up and become viral in turn.

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jonathanjaeger
I'm not saying 1M/mo isn't great and something to aspire to for a site without
any prior visibility. But.. I read that title quickly and was thinking 1
million uniques.

Since it's more of a niche site than fmylife, I'm wondering if the Google
Adsense will get a higher CTR.

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baby
This is the 2nd time an article from thathigh makes it to the frontpage.

I still don't get why it gets upvoted. It is not a high traffic website. I
doubt the guy behind makes any money from it.

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abailin
It made enough to cover his rent in SF for one year.

~~~
baby
that's not a lot.

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Mizza
Isn't this the site that stole all of their content from an existing
competitor (HighDeas), slapped more advertising on it, then did SEO?

Lame as fuck.

~~~
endlessvoid94
This has been a recurring accusation, and it's pretty much 100% BS. Sorry that
we can't be enemies, though.

But you should read the article :-)

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mthoms
I'm not trying to be combative as I'm genuinely curious:

The interview does imply that you scraped your initial content from other
sites though. True or False?

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endlessvoid94
Sure, I found some funny stories from different places across the internet to
seed the content. Search for "stoner stories" or "funny high ideas" or "weed
thoughts" or any remotely similar phrase and you'll find some stuff.

The idea that I targeted a specific site with the intention of ripping them
off is absurd, though. That wouldn't even be the right approach to getting
something like this off the ground.

