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How do you get consistent traffic without an audience?

What are your strategies to get consistent traffic to your site without a pre-existing audience?

One thing I tend to repeatedly have some difficulty with is getting consistent traffic to my products. I tend to have decent conversion once visitors arrive, however the problem I always have is actually getting eye balls on my products in the first place.

I'll typically do the common tactics like sharing here, on relevant subreddits, HN, and PH, but that tends to bring traffic in for only a short period and there's a limit to how much I want to share so I don't come across as spammy. I'll also sometimes make a social media push if it makes sense for the product. Outside of that, I'm really at a loss in terms of how to grow traffic in a consistent way.

So my question is, what do all of you do outside of sharing your site to the regular channels? Would love to get some insight!

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    Consider the 19 Channels of Traction, try to choose 1 or 2 that are relevant to you. If you see something working, try to focus in on it.

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      @rosiesherry That's a good one. :)
      By any chance have you bookmarked that IH post/comment which gave a detailed step by step to increase followers on twitter. Had a step to make a Twitter list of key people and name it Snipe.

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        By any chance have you bookmarked that IH post/comment which gave a detailed step by step to increase followers on twitter. Had a step to make a Twitter list of key people and name it Snipe.

        Not sure what you are talking about. Was it something I wrote, or someone else? 🤷🏽‍♀️

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          Someone else. Been searching for it like crazy. It is gold.

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              Yes. 🙂. This is the reason IH rocks. This community just wants to help. 🙏👍

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      That's really helpful, thank you!

  2. 3

    SEO is the definition of "consistent traffic without a pre-existing audience"

    If you already have high conversions once you have visitors, then SEO is definitely the channel you need to look into.

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    We've focused on SEO for organic traffic. We're unbundling pinterest/instagram for the medical community and our traffic has tripled in the past 6 months. Unclear what exactly we've done except not die and google continues to give us slow 5-10% traffic increases monthly.

  4. 3

    Writing answers on Quora and eventually SEO has helped me in this.

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      judging by my experience, it takes ages to get traffic from Quora :(

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        It depends a lot on target keywords. It took me 10+ months to see results.
        No harm in putting some time on that. :)
        Tools like answerthepublic.com can get you questions to prepare the answers.

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      I've read a couple times that Quora can be valuable in that regard, I'll have to look more into it. Thanks!

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    I think content marketing if relevant and not just vacuous guff could be helpful: I had no following at all but I wrote a single blog post on how to create typography using our tool (Archetype) on Medium which was picked up and published by UX Collective the next day (https://uxdesign.cc/a-better-way-to-create-typography-design-systems-689c851dc616). They have quite a big audience and to this day (some 2 years later) most of our traffic comes from that post. It's lead to other features too, for example I was contacted out of the blue by another company who asked if they could re-publish it 2 months ago and instead we've actually created a new one which is teed up for their blog (which has some 900K followers!). I think there are a lot of places looking for decent content out there and if you tag it correctly etc it may get picked up with surprisingly little effort as mine did on medium. (I've managed to get a couple of posts published by companies with bigger medium audiences that way - although they made changes to paid access to content now so not sure if it has the same effect). Also I just listened to the IH podcast #169 last night and the guy was giving some great tips for tracking down topics journalists want content for on twitter etc - worth a listen. I'd certainly try creating some content your audience would find genuinely valuable though.

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      Wow, that's amazing, I definitely need to start putting more emphasis on content marketing. Do you do anything special when tagging posts to get picked up by other blogs?

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        Well for those Medium posts I had no idea it would get picked up so I wasn't trying anything to appeal to them directly. I just tagged it with the relevant topics I thought the audience would be interested in and would use to find it such as #UX design, #typography, #design systems etc. I had done a couple of posts without tagging in that way and the tagged ones got picked up by other publishers so I'm assuming they are combing through or have filters set up to pick up on interesting stuff related to their field. You could try submitting directly to relevant publications also as I think they post so much they are always on the lookout. Another tip that worked I got from an indiehacker interview (can't recall which) was that it's ok to share the same content more than once (CB insights newsletter does that a lot). For example I posted a link to the article on Designer News but in the 'show' category for new products where it didn't get much traffic. About 6 months later I posted the same article but this time in the 'Typography' section and it got loads of views and sent over a shedload of traffic.

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    You may publish a newsletter to grow a loyal and interested audience you can eventually announce new products to.

  7. 1

    Write articles that are meant for users to find you

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    For me the biggest thing is consistency, people and search engines expect a pattern.
    You can tell by my domain: https://daily-dev-tips.com/ it's a daily frequency. And it's working!

    The numbers are growing in a curve as you would expect.

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    This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

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      Thanks for the shoutout @dsilwal! Good luck @rfizzy, hope it helps! 🚀

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        This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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