
Ask HN: My website is better than my competitor's, how do I bring traffic? - redxblood
I don&#x27;t know how many of you have heard of blahtherapy. It&#x27;s a site where you go and vent your problems or listen to other people&#x27;s problems.<p>The site is pretty bad. Ads everywhere, backspace exits the chat suddenly, reconnection is non-existant, poor design.. So I decided to make a worthy alternative, rainychat.com. However, even though I KNOW my site is better in pretty much all ways, I have no idea how to make people realize it exists.<p>Do i have to pay for advertisement in google? Is reposting my site on facebook and twitter over and over again the only way? How do you promote your sites?<p>In my case, I have no email lists or followers already made, i&#x27;m starting from scratch - and honestly, i&#x27;m lost. What would you do, HN?
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skewart
I'd suggest you post questions on various forums sites asking for advice while
also being sure to mention your site name and why it's better than the
competition. Lots of people will see your ad, and you might even get some good
advice if people respond.

I'm just teasing. :-) I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

How do people find your competitor? Is it through Google searches, word of
mouth, advertising? Are you planning to get the same users to go to your site
instead? Or are you hoping to grow the market for this kind of product? Do you
have a hypothesis about who your typical user is, and how they use your site?
Are you planning to generate revenue from the site? If so, do you have an idea
about what the lifetime value of your user might be? Answering those questions
will give you a lot of clarify on what user acquisition strategies to purse.

Buying ads might be effective, but it can also get expensive quickly if it's
not translating into enough revenue (or strategically valuable growth). Maybe
SEO would be better. Or maybe tweaking the product to give it slightly more
viral functionality would be best (I don't know how you would do that for the
product you described).

If it's just a side project site, and you're not looking to put much work or
money into it, well, good luck.

~~~
redxblood
Thank you for the input! I'll be sure to try going for a more SEO approach, as
i don't have much money to invest in advertising, it'll all have to be by word
of mouth - so good luck to me, hm? :)

~~~
skewart
No problem! I think it's a really interesting product, and the general problem
of giving people a way to vent about their problems has a ton of potential.

There's a lot of good advice and ideas in other comments in the thread. Good
luck with it!

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Gustomaximus
I work in marketing with a focus on customer acquisition and have gotten
something like 300+ million purchases/downloads/signups etc over ~10 years
etc. So I should know what I'm doing by now... really I would say people cant
really answer this for you without knowing more. And if you want general
anecdotes there is a bunch of online material that will give better general
answers than here. You need specifics for your business. You can narrow down a
bunch of option for you business specifics these questions;

\- Would you prefer to use time or money?

\- For time/money, how much are you willing to spend/invest?

\- How many users do you want in what time frame? I'm guessing with this
service you need to hit some level of minimum mass to be viable to users.

\- Do you have a particular audience you want to attract? \- Can you give a
best guess on LTV of a new user?

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adventured
Before I'd run advertisements on Google - which is very expensive - I'd look
at alternatives like StumbleUpon and several other sites with plenty of real
users and decent targeting.

I would consider reaching out to help groups around the US. There are zillions
of them, large and small. I'd enable groups to set up their own subs on the
site, which they can control and utilize for their own purposes (perhaps with
some customization and branding). I'd print up promotion fliers perhaps and
mail them out to help groups. Help groups are very easy to contact and find;
if you're smart about it, they're an extremely inexpensive user base to get
started with.

I'd also do something about this:

(my first experience waiting to talk to someone as a listener)

them: hey

them: hows it going?

them: are you there?

them: want to have sex with me?

You've got a huge challenge in keeping that site from becoming a cesspool.

~~~
redxblood
Definitely agree with you! I tried stumbleupon and similar sites already, i'll
probably get a user a day from them or similar, not the best way to promote
the site, but it helps.

As for trolls and people looking for sexual talks, there's a report button
when you end a conversation which actually works - contrary to most sites.
Thanks for the advice, i'll definitely appreciate it!

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tinco
There's basically three options.

You spend an outrageous amount of money to expose your site to an outrageous
amount of money (think a superbowl ad) so when they feel like sharing our
browsing sad stories they'll think of your site.

You find out a way to specifically reach your target market by finding out
what they like to do and show up there. This is (usually) less costly but more
work since you'll have to find out where they are and what they're doing (i.e.
google queries, visiting blogs, being in communities (forums), behaviour
patterns for targetting by facebook or google, being in specific physical
locations, etc.).

You think of something ridiculously witty that spreads through communities and
exposes your name to many people by word of mouth.

I'd say if you're short on cash option 2 is the only affordable option. If you
play it right the only significant cost can be time (i.e. visit all colleges
in your area and hang up posters).

Note that your question is exactly the reason people apply to HN and try to
get VC money. All three options are significantly more powerful with large
amounts of money and in most cases make or break your startup.

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cakrawala
One thing that you can do is to examine the backlink profile of your
competitor's site. Look at the sites linking in and see if you can get links
there as well. You can also get a decent idea of what ancillary social media
work that they're doing and try to mimic that as well.

I would be looking to get mentions on high traffic places with user generated
content like huffington post and forbes.com.

There are plenty of backlink checkers around just do a google search. I
recommend that you try at least two as not every site catches every link.
You've got a post on hacker news already so maybe you know more about it than
me.

The preceding information is by no means a comprehensive guide but it has
worked for me in the past.

~~~
redxblood
I like your ideas! I will definitely try to get mentions, i think you are
right, that's what really drives high movements of people from site to site.
And am right now checking for backlink exposure :) Thank you!

------
dragonbonheur
Find out how they are linking. There are several paid and free tools available
to do that: Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk.

Find out how they promote on social media. Search for social media analytics
tools and use them.

Find out how inbound marketing and modern SEO work - there are several free
resources on Moz.com and other similar sites.

Finally this question might be better answered by the Hackernews equivalent
for SEO - inbound.org You will find useful tools at
[https://inbound.org/view/tools](https://inbound.org/view/tools)

~~~
T2_t2
SEO is not really the best bet.

SEO is for when you have a clear way to find something - e.g. "buy iphone 6".
I don't many people search for a site like this.

The traffic landscape has changed. I have a client that generates 40% of their
traffic from Mobile Facebook - as in m.facbook.com not the usually, desktop
version - essentially from public transport pre/post work and at lunch.

For a site without a clear SEO term, the best bet is Social Media. That takes
time, and luck more than anything, but without a clear SEO hook, is
unfortunately the best option. Thankfully, a lot of eh work for SEO is the
same as for SM. what you need to make it work is:

1\. Actual content - currently you have virtually none. Get a blog, summarise
the best rants of the day.

2\. Some sort of validation - karma is a good example of a means of
encouraging people to come back, and a leaderboard is really helpful.

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mdotk
Plug the competitor into semrush and/or other seo tools and find out where its
traffic comes from. start there with your efforts too/alternatives ones of the
same kind/niche.

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thesmileyone
Blahtherapy has 850 backlinks.

They have 0 Adword traffic - so if they are using paid traffic for advertising
it is not at Google.

They monetize their site via Google Adsense though.

My thoughts lead to the conclusion they use organic and maybe blackhat SEO and
probably did the old trick of leaving their domain on comments before people
got wise to this.

On the plus side they get A LOT of traffic so the demand is there.

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mbreedlove
I think most people that would want to "Vent" on the site would need prior
knowledge of your site. This isn't something they will go search out when they
need it.

I think you should target various Facebook groups and just get the word out. I
think a lot of people would be supportive of the site and you could get some
viral marketing out of it. Emotional support is in vogue.

There's dozens of niche support websites that would love to know about this.
Think forums that offer support for cutters, compulsive eaters, etc.

~~~
redxblood
Hm.. i'll definitely try to target facebook/tumblr/twitter groups, thanks for
the idea! You're right, simply spreading the word out is the best way to get
people to know my site, advertising itself can do only so much. Thank you
again :)

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homeslice
Welcome to creating a me-too product. It's some of the most difficult and
expensive marketing possible.

Imagine creating a cola that's exactly like coca-cola except it's 20% better
tasting (in your option). Well good luck beating out Coca cola - even though
your product is better.

And you have to be very careful about assuming that your product is better in
a way that people actually care about. For example, I visit the site FML every
now and then --- and I never, ever post there...I just got to read other
people's misfortunes to feel better about myself..

So be careful about your assumption that yours is better in a way that people
care about.

~~~
thesmileyone
To be fair, Blahtherapy is not the cola cola of the internet. I had never
heard of it before this post.

It is more like creating a cola that is exactly like "Richmond Cola" but 20%
better.

Also there are hundreds of brands of better tasting beers out there yet they
have to compete with Stella Artois and they manage..

