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11 Comments

What's your favorite approach to getting free traffic?

Traffic is crucial to the success of any indie business.

What sources and approaches have worked best for you to getting traffic?

  1. 4

    Several years back I made a useful how-to video with descriptive titles, a link to buy the pdf on gumroad, and posted it to youtube and forgot about it. In about a month I started getting 8-10 sales a month just from that video alone. Good money for a student at the time.

    I guess my answer is to show people how you can help them. People like visual walk-through videos and YouTube is still untapped. If you have a SaaS make a short video demoing a popular feature and post it to youtube with good titles and descriptions. You will get small but steady traffic.

  2. 3

    Being featured on Product Hunt has driven over $200K for me thus far for my side project, Hue. That promotion alone has sustained my business for 2.5 years running.

    1. 1

      I love Hue (or at least the idea of it, no real-life need for its service until now).

      Why did you rebrand it? On another note: That g in your current logo confuses the hell out of me. I read DesionJoy all the time.

  3. 3

    ORGANIC. SEARCH. TRAFFIC. That's the only thing that will scale long-term for free! After just 3 months of thegoodstartup.com, we already have 40% of traffic coming from search on most days!

    1. 2

      Was SEO your goto? Or did you do something else?

      1. 1

        It was always on my mind (since my background is in content marketing and SEO), but I didn't expect it to be that effective from scratch that early on :) most of our other traffic comes from social media and email campaigns, so SEO has really helped bring in new readers

  4. 2

    ProductHunt launch was the best one so far but that's only a first few days, I don't know how it will turn out in the long run.
    And since my project is open source, I'm getting some traffic from GitHub

  5. 1

    I aimed for a double win on Quora when I started working on the side hustle:

    1. Practice my writing skills
    2. Connect like-minded people (eventually became by early users)

    It took me ard. two months to become the most viewed writer on 2 topics that relevant to my project. Quora still bringing me sustainable traffic nowadays.

  6. 1

    Traffic is crucial to the success of any indie business.

    free traffic should not be part of your business.

    getting free traffic got 1000x harder than 10years ago. rather tweak your business model that buying user doesnt hurt you (high margins! or just a bigger LTV than CAC). even tiktok still buys traffic like crazy.

    the only black swan i know of which grew without buying traffic is duckduckgo. check the book of its founder, he shows 18 ways to get free traffic but again it's the wrong mindset. you cant scale if your bizmodel requires free traffic because free traffic does not scale

  7. 1
    • SEO is the best free traffic source for one of my websites. I am getting daily 5000 unique visitors.
    • And then I have the power to promote my new products through this website.
    • And I get at least 500 unique users daily just by promoting my new project in the old one.

    But the starting point is SEO and it is really very valuable.

  8. 1

    Here's a few that I've tried:

    1. FB groups that have a close community like IH have worked very well for me. I can recommend, "SaaS Products & Marketing", "Pushstart", "SaaS Growth Hacks".
    2. Posting answers to questions on Reddit and Quora, not so much.
    3. Startup listing pages, like betalist.com and 10words.io
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