• great idea
• MVP / landing-page

But what’s missing and is hard to get? The users. 

So read on to learn about 10 ways to drive that first 1k users to your site.

1.) Quora
The saying goes “Teaching is the best marketing” so make sure to find relevant discussions on Quora and give people advice on the topic. And occasionally link to your site if appropriate.

2.) Hacker News
YCombinator-News aka HackerNews is a bit harder to crack as all articles are submitted into one big list of articles. Important points to maximize the clicks on your link:

• start your submission title with “Show HN:” so readers know instantly that you have built something
• a good structure for your title is “Show HN: productname – tagline”
• assist people in the comments with your product and additional questions
• especially pay attention to the timing of your submission. Early mornings (US-time) are good as there a probably not that many submissions in the US.  Always check the “New” page of HackerNews before submitting.

3.) Twitter / Facebook
Make sure to send your links out through your social profiles and think of these points:

• use a link-shortener like bit.ly to shorten the links to your site in order to evaluate importance of this traffic-source
• explicitly asking for a retweet / share brings as a FACT more retweets & share. So make sure to include “please RT”

4.) Reddit
Reddit is a great source of high traffic if approached right. The important points to pay attention to:

• inform people – don’t spam
• go as targeted as possible, for startups e.g. /r/startups
• leave a personal note in your submission
• answer to people in the comments

Also pay attention to the timing of submitting your links. Look under “New” in the specific reddit how many articles are being submitted and choose a point in time when it is realistic for people to find you.

5.) Stumbleupon
Add your site to stumbleupon, e.g. by liking it through a browser-extension and fill out the questions about your site:

• safety
• topic
• language
• comment

6.) Digg
Also submit your site do Digg but pay attention that Digg will often not accept sites in the format of yoursite.com. So make sure to do something like this yoursite.com/index.html

7.) Blog-Comments
Commenting on blogs can also be a huge traffic-source:

• identify relevant blogs in your niche (see also point 10 for links to blogs)
• comment thoughtfully on related posts (no spamming!) and provide a link to your site

8.) Facebook-Fanpage-Comments
Another source of high traffic is commenting on relevant Facebook-Fan-pages:

• go to the Facebook-Search and limit the results to “Pages”
• look for communities with a strong member-base: 100k+
• look for active-communities (comments within the last day)
• also comment thoughtfully relating to the value your product has for the readers
• don’t overuse this to post similiar posts to dozens of different fanpages or facebook might suppose you are spamming

9.) Beta List / StartupLi.st
Promote your startup on these pages with a nice image and a targeted description so people can figure out your value-proposition upfront.

10.) Submit/connect to bloggers
Targeting and following influencial bloggers in your niche can be really helpful in product-promotion and guest-blogging for getting the word out. The following list has a whopping 600+ links to blogs sorted by different areas such as marketing, financial, productivity, lifehacks:
600+ Places to Share Your Content and Get MORE Traffic

If you have an advertising-budget the following companies are handy tools to drive targeted traffic to your landing-page as well:
1.) Facebook-Ads
2.) Twitter-Ads
3.) Stumbleupon Discovery
4.) Google-Adwords

Anything you’d like to add about getting your startup off the ground in terms of traffic? Put it in the comments. I look forward to a good conversation about quite a tough topic!

Photo credit: ausnahmezustand