No External Traffic to Be Found — the Hub It Is
A week of hunting for external traffic: a directory where I'm 144th in the list of alternatives, and Reddit, where the first post is a month of karma-building away. The conclusion — the only channel that depends on me alone is my own hub.
By Georg Malahov
Last week I tried to work on bringing external traffic to my products. Everyone has always told me: write a couple of articles, buy a spot in the comparison posts — done. My quick search found not a single proven place where you can just go and buy a link next to your competitors.
What I tried — I mentioned it briefly already, but the details matter here. I signed up for AlternativeTo — a directory where services list themselves as alternatives to one another. I added my extension Call Copilot — it transcribes calls right in the browser — to the comparisons and ended up 144th in the list of alternatives — nobody will ever find me there. You can climb with likes, but only registered users can like, and the people who register there are, by all appearances, service owners themselves: a normal person who drops by to compare and leave has no need for an account.
Reddit, by my small bit of research, is the best of the external sources, but everything there comes with a catch: several weeks of building up an account, growing karma with reasonable comments, and self-promotion at no more than ten percent of your posts. My first useful post there is roughly a month of work away. And writing articles by hand — I'm too lazy for that and don't have the time: I'm not going to show up at work and, instead of the work and the projects, sit there composing little articles and figuring out where to slip in a comment.
The conclusion from this run: the simplest path, the one that can be automated and that depends only on me, is to finally finish the hub. The content there is mine, the products are mine, the comparisons I can write myself. The calculation is this: the hub gets indexed by Google, starts pulling at least some search traffic to malahov.io — and redistributes it across my products. Back in June I decided to move people from the extension over to the hub; now search gets added to that channel. One place everything flows into — and everything gets handed out from.
The bureaucracy has finally come together too: the Gewerbe — the German sole-trader registration I had been putting off for weeks — is open. Which means I can calmly finish the legal texts and start taking payments for real.
On quality I made the call back at the start of the month: release as is. Let it sit there a little rough around the edges for a couple of months, no harm done — I'll polish it once it's published. Indexing has its own pace: a search engine needs months to warm up to a new site, and every week the site sits behind a password is a week the timer isn't even running.
The plan for this week and the next: release the hub, submit everything for indexing — and go on vacation. By September, when I'm back, it will be clear what got indexed and whether anything took off.
If you are reading this on malahov.io — the timer is running.