HN is one of several traffic sources we are using to build an audience for Referly. The company is evolving really quickly to be much more than a tool for smal

HN is one of several traffic sources we are using to build an audience for Referly. The company is evolving really quickly to be much more than a tool for small-time affiliates. It's becoming a blogging platform/magazine/paid content site - and in a lot of cases there is no monetization of any kind in the article. HN readers are smart, give thoughtful product feedback and have even offered technical help when we've had issues. I try to find or make content that I think will be broadly valuable to the community here - I've been here a long time and think I have a general feel for what people like to read. Check out my submissions to get a sense of the kind of stuff I write about: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmor http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmor I try to stay around 50/50 on submitting my own original content and submitting other people's content. There are also plenty of things I submit that don't make the front page, or even get any votes, and that's fine. My feeling is that if you start clicking through Referly links regularly and finding interesting content on the other side, then we are winning. I'm still figuring out exactly what that is - breaking some design paradigms in blogging to create something new is sort of painful right now (like the ugly headers on that dark background of my article) but worth it. Let me think about this a bit more, it might be interesting to write a longer blog post about content strategy (we also use StumbleUpon, Quora, Digg, etc...) to grow audience, if you'd be interested in reading that.