5 ms·

Getting 60 thousand pageviews with 2 carefully constructed posts

45 points by azharcs 17y ago

snitko 17y ago
I'd like to know how would you get the world to know about your article unless you post it on HN and have small number of twitter followers?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  It depends on what you have to say and how well you go about saying it. A very few people reading your stuff can get the ball rolling. If one of the major aggregation sites picks up on you you could easily see a few thousand visitors from one article. And possibly much more than that. If a few of those put you in their reader the next post will get traction a bit quicker, assuming you keep the quality constant. It's a long process but the value of the kind of following you build up like that is likely a lot higher than from 'stunts'. If you build a solid reputation and you continue to treat your audience with some respect, they're likely to be loyal for a long time. edit: and if you're just writing to up your follower count in twitter then you have to stop and ask yourself what the actual goal is that you are trying to achieve. The number of people following you on social news sites does not automatically translate in to clout. It's just an abstract, a number. If it makes you happy to see a larger number then go for it, but other than that the question is: "what are you going to do with those followers?" Are you going to somehow harness the power of the people that receive your tweets / posts or is it just a numbers game? For some, it is apparently all about the numbers. Others, with far smaller 'followings' meanwhile (but with a good plan and some respect and serious intentions) will move mountains. If you want to achieve some goal it is unlikely that a simple increase in your follower count is going to help you to achieve that goal. It's just a (very small) tool that may help you along the way when used wisely. And when used badly it can cut you just as easily. Reputations are built up slowly and destroyed in a heartbeat.
  - tnote 17y ago
    Writing for the simple task of getting followers is redundant.Write your articles and landing pages first,and get everything ready for production, with NO followers.Then simply go to http://gdi.bz/twitterads http://gdi.bz/twitterads and follow the simple instructions for getting 10,000 followers in 60 to 90 days.(I'm not sellin' anything here,It is one hundred % free to do) These will be targeted followers for whatever niche you are writing about.Then,after you have your 10,000 followers.look on my twitter profile http://twitter.com/tristanginnett http://twitter.com/tristanginnett and look for the auto-post software in my updates, that will auto-post YOUR blog,affiliate,website link out 24 hours a day.
- maxklein 17y ago
  If you get to the frontpage of HN, then about 8 services willl link to it automatically on twitter. If your content is good, it will get retweeted, someone will post it on reddit and so on. The core point lies in your content - you can't force people to like shit they don't like.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    The core point lies in your content - you can't force people to like shit they don't like. Forget all the shit some people are trying to sling at you and stick to that maxim. It doesn't matter what your intentions are or your ultimate goal is - as long as you're providing people with things that they find interesting, you're getting it right in my book. I enjoyed your posts - well done.
wooster 17y ago
I once had a blog post get 100,000 uniques in a day: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h... That was back when Digg could still drive traffic. The Apple interns e-mail list liked my post, and they all upvoted it on Digg (there were a lot of interns).
- alexro 17y ago
  The point here is to be able to reproduce it on will
johns 17y ago
Max misappropriates value from follower count. He says that the new followers that were valuable were "real business men with high follower to followee counts" (um, spammers?) and that the second article got him followers that were "unimportant people with low follower counts" This is backwards. Get those first kind of people to follow you and they may retweet your stuff once in a blue moon but it's just noise amongst the rest of their noise. Get a lot of that second group to follow you and those people will GO TO BAT for you. They're real, engaged followers. Your tweets are far more likely to register with them (or even just be seen) and they can just as easily start network effects that reach the big boys anyway. As a whole they're far more valuable than 1000 of the 'real business men'.
- marilyn 17y ago
  Excellent point. Twitter accounts with moderate followers represent real people that are more likely to be engaged with your tweets. The "big boys" are more likely to be using Twitter as a broadcasting marketing tool. The former group are more likely to become your users/readers/customers.
  - maxklein 17y ago
    I think the most valuable twitter user is he who followers 100 people but is followed by 10.000 people. Do you disagree?
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      That depends on the 10,000 people. If they're all outside the demographic that I'm interested in or if the person that follows me never retweets stuff that interests my demographic then it's useless. In general though, assuming there is some bond between you and the person that follows 100 people and the 10,000 people that follow him in turn contain some real live bodies that are in the right demographic he/she will be a useful follower. Personally I have not seen much action on twitter from people with 10's of thousands of followers, they are usually fairly reluctant to re-tweet unless it suits them perfectly, exactly because of their large following, and also because people with that many followers usually have those for their own glorification and not specifically as a tool to communicate with people with who they have a strong (2 way) bond.
jacquesm 17y ago
So, essentially we've been social engineered :) Congratulations! Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.
- rinich 17y ago
  I don't know who downvoted you. You're right. Perhaps mine is a niche view here — certainly it is — but if your goal is simply to get eyes then writing blog posts is the wrong way to go about it. People react to programs, photographs, and music more than they do to writing. I've seen my writing consistently hit the front of Hacker News. It provides exciting spikes, yes, but when you launch a single webapp you see a vastly greater traffic from the same sources. So, which is the goal? Is it popularity, or is it craft? If you want popularity, blogging's the wrong game. If it's craft, posts like this are self-defeating and lose you face in the eyes of the people who might be interested.
- maxklein 17y ago
  You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was personalised for you. I don´t write to gain twitter followers - I really don´t care - but in order to test my theory, I needed some type of metric, and that seemed like a relevant one. My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner -- well, till I think of something interesting to try out again. The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site does is that I explained afterwards. (Sorry about the weird apostrophe, I got a new macbook and it has a strange keyboard).
  - rinich 17y ago
    You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was personalised for you. It was personalized for us? So you're saying: In the process of creating the post, you designed it in ways that would appeal to the sorts of individuals that frequent Hacker News? That sounds... a little like... social... engineering. Wikipedia: Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions. We can get pedantic, but Jacques accused you of doing exactly what you're doing.
devicenull 17y ago
Did anyone else not want to click that, just based on the title?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Exactly, that was my feeling. He is clever though, you have to hand him that. But by showing his hand and how 'clever' he's been the author has possibly completely undone the effect. There is an unwritten social contract between content creators and audiences, they don't mind being duped (if it isn't blatantly obvious), but don't rub it in.
  - alexro 17y ago
    Isn't it a hackers' website? Also, isn't there a question on the YC application form asking how one hacked something non-computer?
ErrantX 17y ago
I wrote the articles to test my theories on what captures attention on the internet I don't have any analytics installed on this site That seems counter-intuitive? To me this reads purely like deliberate controversy to get some notoriety. The posts you mention I actually read (both I think) and found one of the 2 to be of interest. To suggest they were some sort of trick just seems weird.
pmorici 17y ago
Shocker, the topic of your blog post determines reader interest and demographic. Isn't most writing for public consumption carefully constructed? One of the tenants of a good author is knowing your audience and writing for them.
ramchip 17y ago
While we're on the topic, am I the only one who noticed that posts starting like "Am I the only one to think that..." or "I'll probably get downvoted for this but..." tend to get upvoted a lot? I cringe whenever I see this. Usually, the poster's opinion is somewhat obvious and would definitely not get downvoted if it were just stated. But adding the "lone sane person" spin to it seems to get a lot more upvotes anyway.
- gjm11 17y ago
  I have a personal policy of always downvoting such comments when I see them, (1) to reduce the distortion caused by the effect you mentioned and (2) in the hope of slightly discouraging them.
- alexro 17y ago
  Couldn't be said better
ThomPete 17y ago
This article was as informative as someone who would write "Getting 60K pageviews by a carefully constructed competition" It's not hard to get page views. I have approx 30K page views per post and great discussions around them and re-tweets up the yazoo, but it's based on what I find interesting, what I want to spend my time on. Not on writing content that isn't important to me. The real metrics you should look for is average time spent on site, number of page views per visit unique visitors, what kind of discussion you can generate around it, if people start contacting you for your input. That's worth something and it's solid.
scorpion032 17y ago
Nothing so special in here. Thats exactly the ways movies have worked, from times immemorial.

45 points by azharcs 17y ago

I'd like to know how would you get the world to know about your article unless you post it on HN and have small number of twitter followers?

jacquesm 17y ago
It depends on what you have to say and how well you go about saying it. A very few people reading your stuff can get the ball rolling. If one of the major aggregation sites picks up on you you could easily see a few thousand visitors from one article. And possibly much more than that. If a few of those put you in their reader the next post will get traction a bit quicker, assuming you keep the quality constant. It's a long process but the value of the kind of following you build up like that is likely a lot higher than from 'stunts'. If you build a solid reputation and you continue to treat your audience with some respect, they're likely to be loyal for a long time. edit: and if you're just writing to up your follower count in twitter then you have to stop and ask yourself what the actual goal is that you are trying to achieve. The number of people following you on social news sites does not automatically translate in to clout. It's just an abstract, a number. If it makes you happy to see a larger number then go for it, but other than that the question is: "what are you going to do with those followers?" Are you going to somehow harness the power of the people that receive your tweets / posts or is it just a numbers game? For some, it is apparently all about the numbers. Others, with far smaller 'followings' meanwhile (but with a good plan and some respect and serious intentions) will move mountains. If you want to achieve some goal it is unlikely that a simple increase in your follower count is going to help you to achieve that goal. It's just a (very small) tool that may help you along the way when used wisely. And when used badly it can cut you just as easily. Reputations are built up slowly and destroyed in a heartbeat.
- tnote 17y ago
  Writing for the simple task of getting followers is redundant.Write your articles and landing pages first,and get everything ready for production, with NO followers.Then simply go to http://gdi.bz/twitterads http://gdi.bz/twitterads and follow the simple instructions for getting 10,000 followers in 60 to 90 days.(I'm not sellin' anything here,It is one hundred % free to do) These will be targeted followers for whatever niche you are writing about.Then,after you have your 10,000 followers.look on my twitter profile http://twitter.com/tristanginnett http://twitter.com/tristanginnett and look for the auto-post software in my updates, that will auto-post YOUR blog,affiliate,website link out 24 hours a day.
maxklein 17y ago
If you get to the frontpage of HN, then about 8 services willl link to it automatically on twitter. If your content is good, it will get retweeted, someone will post it on reddit and so on. The core point lies in your content - you can't force people to like shit they don't like.
- petercooper 17y ago
  The core point lies in your content - you can't force people to like shit they don't like. Forget all the shit some people are trying to sling at you and stick to that maxim. It doesn't matter what your intentions are or your ultimate goal is - as long as you're providing people with things that they find interesting, you're getting it right in my book. I enjoyed your posts - well done.

wooster 17y ago

I once had a blog post get 100,000 uniques in a day: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h... That was back when Digg could still drive traffic. The Apple interns e-mail list liked my post, and they all upvoted it on Digg (there were a lot of interns).

alexro 17y ago
The point here is to be able to reproduce it on will

johns 17y ago

Max misappropriates value from follower count. He says that the new followers that were valuable were "real business men with high follower to followee counts" (um, spammers?) and that the second article got him followers that were "unimportant people with low follower counts" This is backwards. Get those first kind of people to follow you and they may retweet your stuff once in a blue moon but it's just noise amongst the rest of their noise. Get a lot of that second group to follow you and those people will GO TO BAT for you. They're real, engaged followers. Your tweets are far more likely to register with them (or even just be seen) and they can just as easily start network effects that reach the big boys anyway. As a whole they're far more valuable than 1000 of the 'real business men'.

marilyn 17y ago
Excellent point. Twitter accounts with moderate followers represent real people that are more likely to be engaged with your tweets. The "big boys" are more likely to be using Twitter as a broadcasting marketing tool. The former group are more likely to become your users/readers/customers.
- maxklein 17y ago
  I think the most valuable twitter user is he who followers 100 people but is followed by 10.000 people. Do you disagree?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    That depends on the 10,000 people. If they're all outside the demographic that I'm interested in or if the person that follows me never retweets stuff that interests my demographic then it's useless. In general though, assuming there is some bond between you and the person that follows 100 people and the 10,000 people that follow him in turn contain some real live bodies that are in the right demographic he/she will be a useful follower. Personally I have not seen much action on twitter from people with 10's of thousands of followers, they are usually fairly reluctant to re-tweet unless it suits them perfectly, exactly because of their large following, and also because people with that many followers usually have those for their own glorification and not specifically as a tool to communicate with people with who they have a strong (2 way) bond.

jacquesm 17y ago

So, essentially we've been social engineered :) Congratulations! Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.

rinich 17y ago
I don't know who downvoted you. You're right. Perhaps mine is a niche view here — certainly it is — but if your goal is simply to get eyes then writing blog posts is the wrong way to go about it. People react to programs, photographs, and music more than they do to writing. I've seen my writing consistently hit the front of Hacker News. It provides exciting spikes, yes, but when you launch a single webapp you see a vastly greater traffic from the same sources. So, which is the goal? Is it popularity, or is it craft? If you want popularity, blogging's the wrong game. If it's craft, posts like this are self-defeating and lose you face in the eyes of the people who might be interested.
maxklein 17y ago
You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was personalised for you. I don´t write to gain twitter followers - I really don´t care - but in order to test my theory, I needed some type of metric, and that seemed like a relevant one. My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner -- well, till I think of something interesting to try out again. The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site does is that I explained afterwards. (Sorry about the weird apostrophe, I got a new macbook and it has a strange keyboard).
- rinich 17y ago
  You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was personalised for you. It was personalized for us? So you're saying: In the process of creating the post, you designed it in ways that would appeal to the sorts of individuals that frequent Hacker News? That sounds... a little like... social... engineering. Wikipedia: Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions. We can get pedantic, but Jacques accused you of doing exactly what you're doing.

devicenull 17y ago

Did anyone else not want to click that, just based on the title?

jacquesm 17y ago
Exactly, that was my feeling. He is clever though, you have to hand him that. But by showing his hand and how 'clever' he's been the author has possibly completely undone the effect. There is an unwritten social contract between content creators and audiences, they don't mind being duped (if it isn't blatantly obvious), but don't rub it in.
- alexro 17y ago
  Isn't it a hackers' website? Also, isn't there a question on the YC application form asking how one hacked something non-computer?

ErrantX 17y ago

I wrote the articles to test my theories on what captures attention on the internet I don't have any analytics installed on this site That seems counter-intuitive? To me this reads purely like deliberate controversy to get some notoriety. The posts you mention I actually read (both I think) and found one of the 2 to be of interest. To suggest they were some sort of trick just seems weird.

pmorici 17y ago

Shocker, the topic of your blog post determines reader interest and demographic. Isn't most writing for public consumption carefully constructed? One of the tenants of a good author is knowing your audience and writing for them.

ramchip 17y ago

While we're on the topic, am I the only one who noticed that posts starting like "Am I the only one to think that..." or "I'll probably get downvoted for this but..." tend to get upvoted a lot? I cringe whenever I see this. Usually, the poster's opinion is somewhat obvious and would definitely not get downvoted if it were just stated. But adding the "lone sane person" spin to it seems to get a lot more upvotes anyway.

gjm11 17y ago
I have a personal policy of always downvoting such comments when I see them, (1) to reduce the distortion caused by the effect you mentioned and (2) in the hope of slightly discouraging them.
alexro 17y ago
Couldn't be said better

ThomPete 17y ago

This article was as informative as someone who would write "Getting 60K pageviews by a carefully constructed competition" It's not hard to get page views. I have approx 30K page views per post and great discussions around them and re-tweets up the yazoo, but it's based on what I find interesting, what I want to spend my time on. Not on writing content that isn't important to me. The real metrics you should look for is average time spent on site, number of page views per visit unique visitors, what kind of discussion you can generate around it, if people start contacting you for your input. That's worth something and it's solid.

scorpion032 17y ago

Nothing so special in here. Thats exactly the ways movies have worked, from times immemorial.