Hacker News (HN) is currently my favorite community. It’s smaller than Reddit, but it’s growing quickly and tends to be much more friendly than communities such as /r/programming. If you hit its front page, you’ll still receive several thousand visitors (and quality ones at that).
On Hacker News, you can submit any story that’s relevant to programming, technology, business, and the world of startups. War stories about your entrepreneurship or development experiences are particularly loved by this community. The audience tends to be smart, so the standard for your sub- missions is higher than the average site.
Stories that the community sees as fluff, off topic, or devoid of real content are routinely killed by users who flag them. Politics is also another no-no. Take a look at the existing stories on the front page and their comments to help you figure out the type of content and headlines that are appreciated on 140
•
Chapter 7. Promoting Your BlogHacker News. Then read their guidelines in full at ycombinator.com/newsguide- lines.html.
If your link receives several upvotes, it will also be converted from nofollow to a regular link that receives PageRank juice (but the real value is in the instant referral traffic potential). For the record, Hacker News’s home page is currently a PageRank 8 page.
It’s extremely important that you spend some time understanding the site before you make your first submission. If you submit your blog for the first time and your story is flagged and killed, your blog’s submissions will auto- matically be killed from there on out. Not being able to promote your quality content on Hacker News would be a great shame that translates to the loss of several thousand valuable visitors each month.
Your first submissions from your blog must categorically be very high quality to ensure that the community welcomes your blog and doesn’t flag it. If you are even remotely in doubt, don’t submit your own blog posts yet. Submit other relevant stories you find interesting.
Just like StumbleUpon and other social sites, you should avoid gaming the system by having all your friends upvote your stories. And if you send a link to your submission to a friend on Twitter or elsewhere, know that direct visits to item pages are valued less than organic votes obtained in the “new” page by HN’s ranking algorithm.10 (Yeah, this can be easily worked around by pointing your friends to the new page instead of to your submission. But don’t do it.)
DZone
DZone is the smallest community of the three and will only give you a few hundred hits on average, if you make its home page. It’s exclusively dedicated to programming, so if your posts are not about programming, you should not take advantage of this channel.
One of the advantages of DZone is that it’s relatively easy to have one of your submissions become a popular link on that site.
While you shouldn’t expect grandiose traffic from it, it would be foolish not to pursue this community if it’s relevant to what you’re blogging about. Sub- mitting a story takes a couple of minutes because you are required to provide a short description of your article. I don’t know about you, but I’ll gladly trade two minutes of my time for a few hundred visitors any day.
7.12 Case Study: ProgrammingZen.com’s Referral Traffic
In order to provide you with a more realistic idea of how much all these social media sites respectively contribute to a blog about programming, I have included the top ten referral traffic sources over the past year for my own programming blog.
The percentages are based on the total referral traffic only (i.e., link traffic), and not on organic traffic or other sources.
Percentage (%) Referral Site Rank 49.29 Reddit 1 10.79 Hacker News 2 6.83 Slashdot 3 2.73 DZone 4 2.57 StumbleUpon 5 1.79 RubyFlow 6 1.74 Twitter 7 1.46 Facebook 8 0.60 StackOverflow 9 0.25 Delicious 10
As you may recall, the referral traffic distribution here is quite different from that outlined for Math-Blog.com in Chapter 5, Creating Remarkable Content, on page 83. The most striking difference is StumbleUpon, which copiously provided traffic for Math-Blog.com but nowhere near as much for Program- mingZen.com. That community demographic tends to be more interested in math than programming, and my long essays on programming certainly didn’t capture the short attention span of most Stumblers.
You’ll also notice how Reddit was crucial for the promotion of my program- ming-related blog, with nearly half the referral traffic coming from it. In total, all traffic sources considered, one in five visitors came from Reddit in the past year.
7.13 What’s Next
Use the techniques outlined in this chapter, and you’ll no doubt promote your blog well into the realm of being successful.
An important step after promoting your content—and submitting your blog to the various social media sites discussed—is to measure your results. This way you’ll be able to concentrate on what works and ignore or adjust your strategy for what doesn’t.
The next short chapter is entirely dedicated to the subject of analyzing the traffic resulting from your link building and your social media promotion.