And how likely is someone to find your site through search instead of word of mouth?
I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.
I can answer that question with actual numbers: 90% of my traffic comes from search engines. The remaining 10% is much more time-consuming to acquire. It doesn’t help that external links are downranked by most social media sites.
I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.