

Ask HN: How to drive traffic to a side project - hess

I started 300dayweekend.com as a side project for myself and other travelers to share short travel stories. Friends and a few random visitors have given me great feedback on the content, but I&#x27;m struggling to drive traffic. I&#x27;ve had some success on Reddit, but submitting too many links to the same base URL gets posts hidden.  I&#x27;m open to other thoughts?
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boyter
From a pure SEO perspective...

Your meta descriptions aren't useful. You are just repeating the title. Adding
some descriptive descriptions less then 140 characters in length with help.
You appear to be using Wordpress so install SEO Ultimate to help with this.

Its hard to find content on your site. I thought you only had a few stories
since it took me scrolling to the bottom and clicking left to find more. I
guess the tags help with this but you are missing all of the extra links to
find content. Your sitemap will help overcome this for Google, but not for
users.

Your domain and title are at odds. Not sure what you are looking to target in
terms of keywords, but assuming its "1 minute travel stories" you are going to
find it hard to compete with
[http://giveme1minute.wordpress.com/](http://giveme1minute.wordpress.com/)
without getting
[http://1minutetravelstories.com/](http://1minutetravelstories.com/) or
[http://oneminutetravelstories.com/](http://oneminutetravelstories.com/)
etc....

Otherwise,

Move your subscription submit higher. I'm going to assume you want people to
subscribe so make it prominent. I would do the same with the twitter link. I
liked the stories so started looking for twitter so I could follow and get
more of them and it wasn't obvious to find.

You need more content to get more traffic. No idea what your goals are but I
would be using [http://www.hittail.com/](http://www.hittail.com/) (try it for
a month for free) to work out what sort of keywords you should be targeting.
This should land you on the first page of Google/Bing for those keywords.

The design isn't fantastic (may or may not be an issue) which made me think
this was just someone's personal blog at first. Maybe you should look into
spending $10 or so for a nicer looking theme. Nothing fancy, just something
more modern and clean to appeal to your audience.

I say this as someone with a side project pulling in 4,000 unique's a day, and
having targeted keywords to get No 1 on Google/Bing successfully quite a few
times.

Looks like an interesting project. I added your feed to my newsblur and will
follow what's going on so long as the content remains interesting.

------
johnmurch
Think about your ideal visitor: What would that be? Where do they hangout
online, what do they read?

It seems to me you want to focus on travelers - Go through Alltop
([http://travel.alltop.com/](http://travel.alltop.com/)) as they already get
traffic. Try to leverage that by outreaching and interacting.

Leverage Twitter by going through
[https://twitter.com/search?q=travel%20blogs&src=typd&f=realt...](https://twitter.com/search?q=travel%20blogs&src=typd&f=realtime)
finding people who travel and favoriting a tweet from there. Put your URL in
ur byline and slowly gaining traffic.

Just some thoughts :) Good Luck!

------
mooreds
I'm not sure what your traffic goals are, but there are a lots of ways to skin
this cat (no cats were harmed in the making of this comment).

Have you:

    
    
      * looked in google webmaster tools (and the others, sure, why not) and made sure the googlebot likes what it is seeing
      * considered PPC/adwords?  How about facebook ads?
      * created a facebook page or instagram/twitter account (depending on your demo) and followed people that are interesting to you w/r/t this area?
      * joined communities that are interested in what you are doing--and contributed to them?  (It's not enough to just drop in, leave a link and go.)  Email list, facebook group, web forum, wherever.  I've had success with this, and just a signature block.
      * reached out to bloggers in the same space and offered to do a guest post
      * sent emails to travel writers with helpful info that refers back to your site
      * started a tumblr/linkblog/real blog that can point to this
    

(I have a side project that gets ~2k visits a month:
[http://coloradocsas.info/](http://coloradocsas.info/) \-- couldn't resist
putting that in.)

~~~
hess
Thanks! Thanks for the ideas. Many are good, my favorite is the guest blogging
idea.

~~~
mooreds
No worries. Pick something and do it consistently for a while--all of these
take time in our attention scarce world--well, all of them except the
advertising, which is trading money for time.

------
lauradhamilton
I would suggest:

1\. Change the color scheme. The white text on blue is jarring and looks old.

2\. More detail to your content. If you write posts that are 2,000 words each
that contain multiple links (internal and external) as well as multiple
images, that will be much more engaging. I think your posts are too short,
both from an SEO perspective and an engagement perspective.

------
wsieroci
You can check my project: [http://metrics11.com](http://metrics11.com) It
could help increase search traffic to your website. It finds profitable
keywords niches you can use on your site to get free traffic from Google.

------
digitalmaster
like this: Checkout my side project
[https://github.com/digitalmaster/MongoCMS](https://github.com/digitalmaster/MongoCMS)

It's a MongoDb client :)

