SitePiyango.com Free traffic driver to your website.

Birth Year: 2010, Lifespan: 24, Story by: @mirat

Project Description

SitePiyango (lit. "Website Lottery") was a traffic-lottery for the Turkish blogging community. Each day at 00:00, one blog became the homepage feature—shown in a full-screen iframe—earning a burst of free traffic and visibility. To enter, blogs added a backlink to SitePiyango; every unique visitor they sent counted as a ticket. At day’s end, a random ticket was drawn to pick the next day’s winner. Simple mechanic, strong discovery loop.

Where the idea came from?

I really don't remember.

What was the tech & stack?

Python, Django, HTML, CSS

What went right?

• Bright idea, strong appeal: bloggers immediately saw the value and wanted to be early adopters.
• Onboarding worked: although it required some explanation, I managed to convince bloggers and get them on board.
• Real traffic tracking: I actually implemented unique visitor counting at the backend with a mix of user agent + IP + cookie logic.
• Proven impact: the system delivered ~1,500 unique visitors to participating blogs.

Why did it fail? What went wrong?

• Nothing for visitors: People arriving through backlinks had no reason to stay. They glanced at the homepage for a few seconds and left. I focused entirely on sending traffic, but ignored its quality. A better approach would have been to land them on a blog directory or a discovery feed, so they could actually explore blogs that matched their interests.
• Underestimating social media: I didn't build social media integrations or sharing mechanics into the product. My only effort was setting up a basic Facebook page, which wasn't enough to spark organic growth.
• The killing blow: A famous blogger once won the lottery. The next day, he wrote that while he got traffic, the bounce rate was sky-high and it actually hurt his SEO. That public post drained credibility from the project and became the beginning of the end.

Key lessons & advice

• Traffic without retention is worthless: The number of visitors doesn’t matter if they don't stay or return. Traffic without lasting value can even harm the blogs themselves. Because of my weak knowledge of SEO, I didn’t foresee this. It taught me that every angle a project touches — technical, content, marketing, SEO — needs to be examined holistically.
• Think beyond the mechanic: The “lottery” idea was catchy, but the visitor experience was missing. Without a blog directory, categories, or recommendations, the product created value only for participants, not for the audience.
• Don't quit too early: I shut it down too soon. It could have evolved into a “blog directory” or discovery platform that was genuinely interesting for visitors, not just bloggers.
• Distribution matters as much as the product: Without social media integrations or community sharing mechanics, organic growth was almost impossible. These channels should have been planned from the start.
• One negative signal can kill momentum: A single influential blogger’s review — “the bounce rate was sky-high and hurt my SEO” — drained the project’s credibility. Managing perception and preparing for negative signals is part of product design too.