A reader submitted a Customer.io blog post to Hacker News; a modest 10 upvotes still produced the largest single traffic share for that article.

“It received just 10 votes on Hacker News. This resulted in 45% of uniques visits to the article.”

The team ran their own blog and newsletter as a content-marketing channel, experimenting with full-content-in-email versus teaser links.

“sending the full content by email with a link to the blog post is a great experience for your reader”

Adding share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ barely moved traffic compared to email and Hacker News, to the point Colin considered removing the share links entirely.

“social sharing (only) accounted for about 4-5% of traffic to the article”

Existing customers referring other customers became one of the strongest ongoing sources of new business, though not one they specifically targeted.

“Some of our best customers have come from word of mouth.”