How to drive traffic to your site?

We had an interesting discussion at Hacker News about “How to spread the word about your product/service?” Complete discussion available at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947614. I will just summarize this discussion for the benefit of my busy readers. Following are some proven techniques about bringing in traffic to your site.

1. Google Adwords – Most of the people feel that it brings you traffic in the early days. Later it won’t make significant difference to your bottom line.
2. Review from bloggers – Find good bloggers who are experts in the niche of your product. Email them asking for review of your service. It brings in significant traffic and best technique rated by everybody.
3. Snail Mail Bloggers – This is an interesting technique. Snail mail bloggers which certainly would be more effective than just emailing them. It worked very well for some entrepreneurs.
4. Post good comments – Post good comments citing your service where a related discussion going on. It trickles some traffic to your site.
5. Bookmarking Sites – Ask your friends to bookmark your site on delicious or digg. If it goes viral can bring some considerable amount of traffic to your site.
6. Participate in product showcases promoting your product
7. Give away some free goodies for early bird signups

I have used 2,4 and 5. So far they have given good results for me. Planning to for 1 now. Lets see how it goes. Will post the results soon about that experiment as well.

There is a very good video about marketing your service – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KNkqgq3eo&feature=player_embedded.
The most important thing I learned from this video is your site’s title should contain the same words that your potential users will use it to search on Google.

I made this mistake. roorky.com has site title “iPUBS – Interactive Publication Works”. Nobody searched for these words. Rather than I changed my site title to “Programming for Beginners”. It made a considerable difference in the traffic. Title of your site sends a very strong signal to search engines regarding what your site is about. Use it very effectively. Choose the same words that your potential users will use it for searching.

Your product should solve a problem.

Your product/service will get sustainable success if it solves a problem. If it solves that problem better than anybody else it will become huge success. If the problem is of millions’ of people it can be the next big thing on the Planet.

Solving a problem can be as simple as answering to a question. Following are some successful companies(understatement) which answers a very simple question –

• Google – Where can I find information about these words
• Facebook – What are my friends upto?
• Digg – Whats interesting happening in the world

Another kind of successful start ups help in getting things done.

• 37 Signals – Get project management done
• Fresh Books – Get invoice reporting done

They are successful because they do it better than anybody else. When you are going on to implement your next great idea remember this – “It should answer a question or help users in getting things done”. Do it better than anybody else you are on your way to “Becoming next big thing on the Internet”.

Why iPUB is needed?

Thanks a lot to Swaroop for mentioning about Roorky on his blog post Interactive Python Book. Its interesting to see that there is a mixed feeling about the product.

One of the major motivation for coming up with iPUB is to reducing “Copy, Paste, Run and See” cycle is to just “Execute”. Whenever I am reading a programming book usually I copy the code seen in the eBook. Paste it in some code editor, run it and see the output. After few chapters/sections in the book this process becomes tedious and boring. Apart from that because of plain laziness not add additional files per snippet the original code snippet will be in horrible shape as lots things gets commented, changed etc., When reading a programming book I am just interested in seeing whether the code works or not? If I change something in the sample code listing how the output will change? Going through the phase is quite tedious many a times as all human beings do – I skip some of the experimentation. Later point of time I figure out things in hard way.

One of the things from my experience is that – “Easier you make try out the things, users will use those features more and experiment with it more”. Major motivation for iPUBs is to make trying out the contents of “programming books” a lot easier and less painful. The purpose was never to replace IDE and compete with it. iPUBReader will never become an IDE. But it will do everything to provide “Hassle free reading and experimentation experience” to its readers.

In the next post I will explain what are plans to improve the learning and sharing experience that lacks when you are reading an eBook.

Got 50 downloads for iPUBReader

It has been quite busy few days since launching of http://roorky.com. We got 50 downloads of iPUBReader within a very short frame of time. Kudos.. That’s wonderful. Thanks to all of our readers for their support and encouragement.

We know that our product is far from being perfect. This is beta version of our product and we launched soon so that we can have our conversation with our readers going on. Please write to us what you feel about the idea and product at support@roorky.com We are desperate to hear from you. We will do our best to improve the product to serve our readers better.

Once again thanks to all our readers for downloading iPUBReader. Keep writing to us.

Cheers
– Roorky

Launching iPUBReader

We launched beta version of our site http://roorky.com. It revolves around our new format “iPUB” – Interactive Publication Format. We came up with a new format “iPUB” to make absorbing digital content easier, fun and interactive. With iPUB most of the things that you do independently as you read book will become part of the reading experience. With iPUB you can -

• Execute code or circuits while reading
• Change code/ciruits and see its effect
• Change input and observe output
• Make and share notes at any point
• Discuss/comment on each page of the book

iPUBReader needed to read iPUBs. iPUBReader is available on mac, windows and linux platforms. You can download it from http://roorky.com/book/ibr_install.

See iPUBReader in action at Take a Tour. Checkout please let us know what do you think about the idea and the product.