Accidentally getting on the front page of Hacker News
I submitted my new blog post to Hacker News on Wednesday when I released it. It completely and utterly flopped.
Yesterday (Friday), I cold emailed a blogging idol of mine to share the post and ask for advice on growing a blogging audience. He ended up posting it to HN, where it got traction and made it as far as the 17th spot!
The main explanation is likely better timing. Another reason is that my account is only a few months old, which may have harmed my own post.
Results
So what did the front page of HN do for me?
The pic above is the GA stats.
- 2000 page views
- 3 new Twitter followers (unclear if related)
- 0 new mailing list subscribers
How does this compare to your experiences with HN?
It just fell off the front page, so we can expect the trend to go back to 0.
I guess I have some work to do with those conversions. I have a CTA with my Twitter and mailing list at the bottom of the post, and also a link to my twitter in the top blog menu. I also have the mailing list signup in the sidebar and on the about me page. I intentionally did not put a mailing list sign up in the middle of the post, as I personally don't care for how that feels.
Takeaways
- Resubmitting to HN is important.
- The time you submit matters (Evening Friday ET USA worked well. Wednesday noon ET did not.)
- Age of account may matter.
- You never know what might come of sending a cold email!
- You can expect on the other of thousands of page views from the bottom of the front page HN.
My setup
I'm running a Wordpress blog on EasyWP's cheapest plan, and it appeared to handle the traffic well, although seemed a little sluggish at times. May be worth looking into performance optimization. I'm glad I had Jetpack installed, which enables a CDN for images.
