Where do you write content to generate quality visitors to your site?
Just had a February goals meeting for Scribbl.co. A big focus was generating more landing page visitors through writing content.
We currently receive traffic from Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Quora, Reddit.
Where do you write content to generate quality visitors to your site?
We write almost everything on Indie Hackers itself, then link to it on other sites.
Twitter is okay, but not a major source of traffic for us. It accounts for about 5% of our monthly traffic, so about 20k sessions from 6k uniques. I'm fairly certain their algorithm punishes you if you spend too much time sharing links instead of simply conversing. Followers don't like that kind of Twitter account, either. That said, if you're tweeting educational tips, people appreciate relevant links mixed in, but we haven't historically done lots of educational tips.
Hacker News is bigger for us. We tend to get 1 story on the front page per month, resulting in about 17k sessions from around 9k uniques.
Our newsletters are our biggest external source of traffic, resulting in 64k sessions from 11k uniques each month.
60% of our traffic is just direct visitors or people Googling "Indie Hackers."
Another 7% is search, and then we have a long tail of small numbers of visitors from all sorts of websites.
In the near future we might do more collaboration with influencers in various niches. I'm spending some time looking at YouTube and other podcasts today.
@csallen We've only been really driving people at our landing page for about a month now, but I've definitely found twitter to be a poor source as well. Coincidentally, referrals from Indie Hackers started outperforming Twitter. That's actually what drove this question.
What are your thoughts behind collaborating with influencers? Would that be to bring more content to Indie Hackers?
Yeah I'd really like for there to be a bit more instructional content posted to IH — how-to, tips, guides, advice, etc — and I'd like it to come from reputable sources. I think that'd make the site more valuable for people who come here just to read and learn rather than post, which is the vast majority of visitors.
How do you decide what topics to post about?
We don't do a lot of mixed blogging or posting. Rather, we create series that consistently put out the same kind of content. Each of the series was conceived of by working backwards from a combination of (a) having a target audience in mind, (b) trying to help solve one of their major problems, and (c) thinking about a specific distribution channel where we can reach them.
The interviews were intended to be distributed on Hacker News and help fledgling IHers gain some confidence and get a handle on how this all works.
The podcast was identical, but through a different channel, since not everyone wants to sit down and read 20-minute emails.
The growth bites are a newish experiment to help people who struggle with sales and marketing, which more advanced IHers have said (via surveys) is their #1 challenge. They're tiny case studies that are designed to be easily digestible via email, but that also work well as forum posts. The landing page will eventually have its own tags and filters, and should be something we can launch as a standalone thing on Product Hunt. We could also potentially organize related growth bites into pages that do well on SEO. So lots of potential distribution channels for this series.
We're also working on a round table series that @channingallen has been posting on the forum for a few months now. We don't have a landing page for it yet, and the series is still very much a work in progress, but we've had 3 or 4 hit the front page of HN since we started.
This is really helpful! What type of content via what distribution channel are you seeing the most engagement?
I try to write weekly at a minimum on the blog on our website - blogging is hands down one of the best ways to increase traffic and improve your visibility in search engines (the more pages on your site, especially around a core topic to your business, the better your chances at appearing in a search and the more favorable Google will view you). It's about quality though not quantity, if all you can do is post once a month but it's good in-depth content then I'd recommend that.
We share everything we write to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn - Facebook has been killing organic reach for pages so we invest more into Twitter and LinkedIn (but that's just our demographic it may differ for you).
Once per month or so I try to post something to IndieHackers or Medium just to build brand awareness outside of our site.
Cool. That's really helpful. We've talked about hosting a blog on our site. I know there's a ton of content of the subject, but was there any SEO magic you had to do on top of writing and sharing? SEO is a black box to me atm, so I have this assumption in my head that we'd have to figure out SEO to do a blog.
No problem!
Totally hear you on SEO - it gets a reputation for being complicated, it can be but it doesn't have to be when you're starting out.
It helps me to always take a step back and remember that Google's success depends on how good they are at answering questions. When someone types a search into Google, Google's job is to return the best articles and resources for that query.
Before diving into keywords, competitor data, and domain authority take a step back to try and pick 3-5 topics you want to be seen as an expert on.
From those topics, dig into the common questions folks have - knowing your target audience is very helpful here to make sure they are the right questions to focus on (are those questions asked on IndieHackers? Reddit? Social media?). Then, run searches on Google for those questions and see who comes up first - can you write anything original or better than what is already on the first 1-2 pages of Google? If not, toss that out but if so then you've got yourself a blog post to write. There's no magic word count to focus on, try to get a feel for the quality of content on the first two pages and use that as a benchmark. It could be 500 words, or it could be 5000.
Build up a list till you've got enough blog topics to last you 3-6 months and that's your strategy to commit to, it'll give you a good amount of time to look back and see what's working to drive traffic to your site.
Oh and blog on your own site, not Medium. I call that out because there's been a trend lately to blog on Medium but if you only write there it does nothing to help your domain authority.
Really useful feedback. Thanks.
This is a phenomenal answer. Much much appreciated! Going to try this out and will more than likely report back to Indie Hackers.
No problem happy it helps!
Similar. Quora, LinkedIn and IH are the major traffic drivers for my side project, the downside is I need to trade my time.
Any suggestion to optimize that? @msallese31
Dev.to
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