Sugar high traffic

I used to be all about increasing traffic to my site. I would write articles on Medium about topics like startups and entrepreneurship that I knew had the potential to take off, with then the hope that the success of those posts would filter over to my business' site. I had a similar approach with Twitter, sharing my thoughts about startups, experimenting with different forms of building in public and in general engaging with other solopreneurs and indie hackers.

After a while, I realized this was all basically a waste of time. Any traffic that came from a hit post or tweet was very brief and it generated nothing in terms of conversions. If you think about it, it makes sense, these topics don't overlap with my products enough to bring in qualified traffic that wants to buy. In order to do that, you need to build free things that are useful, talk about how to use them, explain how to do other related things that are valuable, and finally offer up your paid product with lots of support materials on how to use that.

It might not be as fun or interesting as tweeting about your daily ups and downs as a startup founder and it is most definitely a grind, but that is where you build your business. All the other stuff is just a sugar high that distracts from the real work.