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Front Page of HN Gave me 21k Views and 10 New Twitter Followers. That’s Right,10 (robbieabed.com)
10 points by robbiea on Aug 2, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


1. I haven't seen any indication that a majority of the HN population are also sincere twitter users.

2. Your social media call to action is in the same old place everyone else's is; top right sidebar.

I sometimes read posts on Yoast.com. If you look at the bottom of his posts (http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/) you'll see a a social media call to action. That's where the reader ends up, at the end of the article. So right before they click the X, ask them if they'd like to subscribe for more content.


thanks for the input, I'll take a look at yoast.


Count quality not quantity. People come here for the former not the latter.

Also, you'll get more Twitter followers if you tweet stuff that gets retweeted.


Good point & I'm not complaining, but it just seemed a little odd to me. The people that did follow me were definitely quality follows.


Of all the things you can measure yourself by, I think twitter followers should probably pretty far down on the list.

Your profile on HN says you've founded a mobile consulting company but doesn't give URL. Most of your blog posts are 'pearls of wisdom' types but there isn't a whole lot about you, so people really can't evaluate your advice within their own personal value analysis.

21 of 30 of the latest submissions you've made here are to your own blog,

Please don't misunderstand this statement, you are not 'real' yet.

If you look at any one of the leaders here, or the folks in the tech industry, you will find a strong correlation with people for whom celebrity is an artifact of their execution against their goals, it has nothing to do with 'them' per se.

Here is a sure fire plan to having a million twitter followers:

1) Build a company from nothing to a multi-million dollar exit where you personally take home at least $10M. This will instantly get you 1 million followers of the 'shallow, gosh I wish I were rich like you, I've got this killer idea but just need a few thousand to get if off the ground' types.

This takes no time to go from 0 to a million followers, post big payday.

2) Take a job in broadcast journalism, and then take an extreme political view (right, left it doesn't matter just tailor it to the folks on that side who thing the media is an opposite-wing conspiracy to keep the truth from coming out.)

This takes probably 6 months from the time you accept the position to the time the number of real journalists complaining about you reaches into the hives of conspiracy enclaves.

3) Find your passion and devote all your time and energy to it, share your joy of discovery and your passion in your writing and your friends.

This will take years, maybe even decades.

HN is not a place to do #1 or #2, perhaps another site can help you out there.


I personally believe that "Site X gave me %Y increase in traffic" articles are what kill social websites, essentially because increasing numbers of people try to game the site to help drive traffic, and the publishers, rather than the readers, become the customers (see Digg v4).

So hurrah! Fewer followers would be even better.



awesome, thanks.




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