I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people.
Another way to get a lot of traffic is getting the top reply to the top comment on the top hacker news post. Speaking of which... https://github.com/SpyC0der77
https://carolina.codes