
Websites That Boost Your Traffic For Free - charlieirish
http://bondero.com/boost-startup-traffic-free
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nathancahill
These are terrible! The only traffic you'll get from these are curious
clickers and bounces (unless you're targeting entrepreneurs). I'd argue that
these sites have a negative effect, since you're skewing your numbers without
getting any meaningful stats (where people are dropping out of the funnel, why
people are bouncing).

Instead, get featured on small industry blogs and build up from there. A
little press goes a long ways. In my experience, I haven't even had to pitch
larger new sites after getting a couple articles on smaller blogs. They see
the smaller posts getting mentioned on Twitter and reach out to write their
spiel.

~~~
somewhatjustin
What's your process to finding these smaller blogs?

~~~
nathancahill
Alltop [0] is great. BlogRank [1] is good too. Look at the sources that bigger
news sites get their leads from (the via link at the bottom of articles).

Spend more time than you think necessary writing really great emails for the
editors of the smaller blogs. Include a press kit with the stuff they'd need
to write a nice looking post: generally a couple photos/large logo and a
bullet point description of your pitch and company story.

[0] [http://alltop.com/](http://alltop.com/)

[1] [http://www.blogmetrics.org/](http://www.blogmetrics.org/)

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PaulHoule
Crunchbase? Really? (I have a number of projects mentioned in Crunchbase and
the number of hits I get in a year from that source can be counted on one
hand)

~~~
nader
Crunchbase is included as it is pretty much a standard if you want to have a
startup profile for possible investors, PR people, etc. But you're right. It
doesn't drive much traffic.

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duiker101
The problem with most of this websites is always that you might get a spike of
traffic but the actual conversion to regular users is extremely low, it's
better to find your specific public instead of such a generic one. Not saying
that they are bad, just they might not be the best for getting good traffic.

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iamdev
Unless your ideal customer is a tech-entrepreneur, this is all very
misleading. It's going to amount to very little lasting growth.

------
SmileyKeith
AppStorm announced they were closing before this post.
[http://mac.appstorm.net/general/appstorm-news/appstorm-
closi...](http://mac.appstorm.net/general/appstorm-news/appstorm-closing-
shop/)

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rgrau
When I saw HN in the list, I was afraid to enter an infinite loop if I clicked
the link

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reillyse
you forgot the New York Times, L.A. Times, Time Magazine & the Huffington
Post... they publish for free all you need is a good story.

~~~
nader
I was looking more into "early adopters", etc. :) but yeah.

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mkr-hn
Free traffic is a lot like a gridlocked city. It looks impressive in pictures,
but it takes you nowhere.

~~~
PaulHoule
Yes and no.

Paid traffic is expensive. The issue is that you're competing with two things:
(i) people who pay $X per click and get a solid $Y in revenue per click, where
$X>$Y, and (ii) people/organizations who pay too much for ads. (To take an
example of how you have to compete with deep-pocketed ad buyers who have the
lights on and nobody home, if you search for

[https://www.google.com/#q=bing](https://www.google.com/#q=bing)

you get an ad for bing; another phenomenon is that many businesses buy ads on
local radio, cable, or the newspaper just because they get pleasure in hearing
or seeing their name.)

If you've got a type (i) business model, then paid traffic may be good for
you. If you want to create a content business supported by advertising (i.e.
put w3schools out of business) or create something social, you can't afford to
pay for traffic unless you can afford to cut a check to Google for a few
million dollars with a high risk of not getting any payback.

Thus, if you want to create _that_ kind of business you really do need some
source of free traffic which is 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the stuff
mentioned on that site.

~~~
mkr-hn
I'm distinguishing between qualified free traffic (search/viral) and spaghetti
at the wall free traffic like StumbleUpon or one of those skeevy pageview
buying services. I didn't actually read the post before commenting (!), and I
see that it describes some good traffic sources.

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adventured
Is Firespotting on the list because it's related to the author or what? It
doesn't appear to actually have any traffic (a strong per-requisite to being
able to promote other sites).

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JoeCortopassi
"Where do I find a site to promote my app/website/service?"

^ Number one indicator that you didn't spend the time upfront to understand
your audience and develop your customers

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sireat
Those are not the traffic sources you would usually want to get actual paying
users.

However, patio11 will tell you that some of those might be good for SEO
though, which helps in the long run..

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kentwistle
I have had success with StumbleUpon
[https://www.stumbleupon.com](https://www.stumbleupon.com)

~~~
SimpleXYZ
Free or paid?

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JetSpiegel
So, what of those 10 sites did they wanted to boost traffic for, by posting
this on HN?

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nader
Hi, Nader from bondero here. I didn't want to boost any site mentioned. In the
discussion thread on the site I even included more sites. I have a startup
myself and know how tedious it is to find sites to submit to / generate
initial traffic.

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zerop
reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/startups](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups)

