For kicks and giggles (and honestly to keep my mind sharp), I built a memetracker. It is a good mental vacation from the day job.<p>It leveraged a lot of my technical interests in algorithms and machine learning. I put the result on the web, and am watching my statcounter flat line. Well, I get some hiccups when my gf visits.<p>So I guess the internet isn't a "build it and they will come" kind of place. Reality Checks are hard.<p>I'm not sure what I should be doing next to get the word out. Is there some magic I should be doing. Any veterans out there know what I should do?<p>Advice and pointers would help.
The site itself doesn't have content, it has a content aggregation service. That makes it hard to spread in a viral fashion, especially when it's an untargeted service spread amongst many verticals. It's useful, but the "wow check this out" factor is missing.<p>One improvement would be to add a comment system and rely on UGC to keep people around. But then you have to devise a way to populate stories and make the site look livelier than it is, which may require some kind of comment bot.<p>Another thing you could do is start drilling down to smaller and smaller niches and try to become a top search result in those, and then work your way back to the huge verticals you currently have. As it is, you are basically competing head-to-head with Google News.