How to get 30k Hacker News visitors to your website

@adriaanvanrossum runs a privacy-focused analytics platform called Simple Analytics. Since he launched Hacker News has been the number one source of traffic pulling in more than 30,000 total visitors! 60% of total traffic.

How is he doing this? Well, all Simple Analytics traffic is open so it was possible to figure it out.

The full case study has four lessons, but to keep this short as possible I'm just going to focus on one. And that is, how underrated comments are!

On Hacker News, comments:

• Can get several thousands of views.
• Allow clickable links to be included (unlike text posts)

This makes them a great alcove for self-promotion. Adriaan's reply to someone who made a simple log-based analytics is the textbook example (see image). He finds a post relevant to his domain, offers thoughtful advice, and then links his own product. The result: 590 Hacker News users check out his website.

Funnily enough, as I write this, the full case study is on the front page of Hacker News HNCeption 😂😂

Now I've got this out I can get cracking with the marketing advice I promised over here