Best strategy to increase traffic?

Heey! As a game developer, I love your models! These are hella cool 🔥Great job!

In my opinion, I think your best strategy would be to go where your audience already lives. In the case of game development/design that's going to be places like:

https://itch.io - Very popular indie game dev site where people upload assets and games. You could list some of your assets here for free or pay-what-you-want. Include a link to your website in your description and in a text file that comes with the download.

https://assetstore.unity.com - Unity's Market place.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace - Unreal Engine's Market place.

Like @GrwthPartner suggested, join some active game dev discord servers and share some of the assets directly with no signup required. This will get people interested and feel more authentic then dropping links that go to signup forums and the like.

When you're in these game dev/design servers I highly recommend offering advice, getting to know people, and answering questions. This will get you more rapport in these groups and in turn make driving traffic to your site easier.

I also highly recommend writing blog posts that teach users what they can do with your assets, how to use them, etc. Educational posts work extremely well in this niche. If you have time, I'd also suggest making YouTube videos showing the assets being used. Game dev tutorials are a pretty niche (but BIG) thing on YouTube and they drive a decent amount of traffic.

The nice thing about doing YouTube is you can record a video (screen record even), edit it, and from this one video you can easily create content for TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You could even transcribe the video and you have your blog post. Allowing you to make more content, with less work. :)

Lastly, once you have 3 - 5 blog posts up and you have some social proof, reach out to game dev blogs, influencers, and websites. Plenty of these places will do guest posts. You will also find sites that review assets, you can ask to be put on these lists (or use Ahrefs to find their keywords and rank for them too).

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any questions :)

I used Ahrefs to find the keywords with high volume (above 200/mth) that my website already ranked on page 3 or 4, then build more backlinks to make them rank higher (at least to page 2) to get more traffic.

Blog posts might struggle to rank - I'd follow @treychong 's method.

Alternatively, I know 3D people are pretty active in forums - why not 'launch' there? Quantity of traffic is just a vanity metric if you ignore how many people actually can use or want to use your models.

Alternatively, creating a cool project with your models and then releasing that to an online publication or even Twitter with a how-to tutorial attached might be a cool way to generate hype.

First of all - congrats on your product! I am a founder of Lordicon.com, the animated icon library. We have grown by putting huge effort into organic SEO reach. Each and every of 2000+ icons has its very own subpage, which is scanned by Google bots. Each icon subpage has a unique, two-sentence description, with "animated icon" or "Lottie animation" keywords repeating in every icon description.

The other channel of growth was random tiktok/youtube videos created by influencers from the design & web dev industry.

In Lordicon's case, putting too much effort into blog posts didn't pay off. In general, this blog posts (either the one hosted on Lordicon blog or guest blogposts) generated around 0.3% clicks, when compared to Instagram, Tiktok or Youtube videos.

Hola,

I'am e newbie on Indiehackers but have over 9+ years of experience in SEO. According to my experience you should create short and long term strategies to achieve your traffic goals.

Once you have created your website well-designed infrastructure, then you should create short term based strategy with quick gained traffic that you can direct from related forums, using social media organically or paid ads, using Google Ads etc.

When it comes to long term strategies, SEO comes into play. Steadily, you should orchestrate well-written blog posts informationally, and optimize commercial side to achieve your awaiting traffic goals in the long run. You can leverage from a Profesional SEO experience and skills you guide you and your roadmaps.

Hope this will help, and I am here to answer all of your Q's related SEO :)

I see many folks start out blogging a bit here and there and they end up spending a fair amount of time (and money) and don’t really get anywhere.

It’s because they don’t have a clear strategy and plan.

SEO does work, if you have a plan from the start.

Strategy is a set of intentional decisions you make to reach a goal. That’s it. Blogging or backlinks are great as tactics, but they are not a strategy in themselves.

I like to break strategy down into 4 key decisions. This is the same framework I use one:one and teach in groups and it’s led to 1000% increases in traffic from Google:

1. What is your goal?

Not just more traffic, but how much do you want to increase traffic by and in what timeframe? Going further from there, what do you want that traffic to do on your website? In marketing we call these SMART goals, which means they are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Good goals help you stay accountable and keep you on track.

2. Who are you going after and what are they asking online?

Google search results are an intersection of 2 things: who is doing the searching and what are they searching for. The better you can understand your ideal customer profile and the questions they ask online, the more targeted your content will be. I start with a buyer persona and then use a mix of Quora, Reddit, and keyword research tools to understand how their questions change throughout the buyer’s journey. This sets you up for content that will support your ideal customer throughout the funnel.

3. What unique content resource are you going to create for your ideal customer profile

Once you have all the questions mapped out you’ll likely spot trends and be able to identify content opportunities - blog posts, landing pages, articles, or other resources you can create that will serve your customer better than your competitors. It doesn’t always have to be blogging though, I’ve seen dramatic increases in traffic from creating landing pages and articles. Get creative and think about your website like a product, this will allow you to create content that serves your ideal customer better than your competitors.

4. How are you going to measure the effectiveness of this?

Google Analytics and Google Search Console give you 99% of what you need here to track how your content appears in search results, how much traffic you are generating, and what that traffic is doing on your website to build your business.

And that’s it. 4 key decision and you’re well on your way to an SEO and content strategy that is intentional and targeted. This will give you a HUGE advantage over your competition, especially if they are only writing a few blog posts here and there and call it a day.

I would also continue to hammer into where your audience lives online. Chances are good they are using Google to answer their questions but they are also on Reddit (as you cited that is where most of your traffic comes from) and might be on Discord or Twitter as well.

Try reaching out to gamer communities in discord communities: https://top.gg/servers/tag/gaming?page=2 and get feedback on your models.
My Two cents: Blogging needs consistent time and effort from your end. Think about how you will bring in all the traffic required to read your blog.

That was helpful. Thanks!

There are already some great comments, especially the one asking you to define your goal, your target audience, and the measurement of effectiveness. I second those!

I want to add in a couple of other resources:

• Have you read the Twitter thread by ConvertKit CEO on how he scaled his MRR? I loved this thread. Especially the takeaway on defining a niched audience and saturating it with a lot of manual work in the beginning. https://twitter.com/nathanbarry/status/1482374302414426116

• I work with tech founders in my coaching business. My expertise is in helping them problem-solve better. Here are some questions I ask my clients: what do you already know about your current GTM strategies? What are your problems? What did you do to create those problems? What's the starting point to solve these problems? What else do you need to find out?

Hey,
I instantly loved the style of your work. I would suggest you show what can be done with it.
Like do some videos /blog postsor tutorials on that. Keep it going.
I could even imagine playing an indie title made with that style. With proper lighting it would make a great atmosphere!

If you're on twitter, you can tweet with #indiedev and #gamedev and some bots will pick it up to retweet, should get you some visits from game developers. When Saturday rolls around, you could post screenshots with your 3D models and use #screenshotsaturday. Good luck!

Are here media buyers? I think these guys know all about traffic. I am interesed listen about best strategy in 2022 from them

here is how CG Cookie (3D assets marketplace - $88K MRR) has seen early traction:

1. Content marketing
2. Social media
3. Email newsletter

Content marketing was their first and biggest growth lever, interviewing famous artists and pitching their products within the content

Another channel that is working for them is sharing 3D assets and composition on social media

Growing their email newsletter is key, both in driving traffic and also paying users - not pitching their products but rather building their brand as an authority in this space

They're doing a couple of things in order to keep their community engaged - host contests, travel to relevant conferences, or host a live stream

What's your real goal though? Cause if it's just traffic, try with Meta ads targeted for India, that gives a lot of traffic for very little money ;) Since I'm a fan of organic reach, because it's well-targeted and intentional, I'll suggest you my favourite "Niche communities" tactic: https://app.digitalfirst.ai/tactics/preview/p/300. Feel free to check other tactics in the library - you should find something for you by filtering "start up". Let me know if that helped :)

By far, the thing that drives traffic the most for me is blog posts. Nothing else even remotely compares. At least for organic traffic.

Try Investing in Google ads to bring in traffic. Of course there are other ways but it's worth a shot.

Good Post 👍🔥

Engaging in relevant communities would be a good way to start. I recently created this free datbase of rapidly-growing communities you might find useful.

Where are you currently getting traffic from?