Hacker News, Reddit and Product Hunt are community based sites that have the ability to drive tons of traffic to your site.
Here’s what my traffic looked like after an article got up-voted on a sub-reddit (not even on the front page).
In this post Nathan Barry says that he got 50,000+ hits to his site when it was posted to Hacker News.
So obviously being featured on these sites can drive a lot of traffic.
But how do you make the most of it?
After all, a day or two after it’s featured your traffic levels will drop back to about where they were.
Here’s how to maximize a Hacker News or Product Hunt traffic spike:
1. Have your site and host ready. Nothing is worse then having your site featured and it going down because it can’t handle the traffic volume.
If you’re on an economy hosting plan like BlueHost, this is more likely.
If you’re on something a little more powerful, like WPEngine, you can sleep a little easier. You should also make sure any small design issues or bugs are taken care of. WP curve is great for that.
2. Have email opt-in set up and optimized. A great way to take advantage of a traffic spike is to gather email addresses.
That way you still have a way to communicate with these visitors over the following days, weeks and months. Sumo Me has great tools for this.
3. Have retargeting set up. Since only a small percentage of visitors will enter their email (less than 5% typically), you’ll want a way to stay in contact with the remaining 95%.
Retargeting ads are great at this.
4. Have dedicated landing pages or offers for the community. You can either have special discounts or promo codes on these pages or simply just have copy that is more tailored to each audience.
The above is an example from Mott + Bow.
5. Dive into the comments: If you’re going to try and promote your company in these communities, it goes over better if you stick around in the comments to answer any questions or offer any backstory or more information.
Product Hunt even puts a little M icon next to posts where the maker of the product has joined the comments.
What questions do you have about Product Hunt, Reddit or Hacker News?
Ben creates + optimizes advertising campaigns on social networks to drive leads, sales and downloads.
