Do you have any tips on how I can market my side project to get some real users to my site?

If you’re not sure how, try this: ask a question or share what you are currently building/learning. If you have very few followers add the most relevant hashtag or two.

If it's anything that relates to software development or what I write about feel free to dm me the post and I'll add a like and comment if I have anything constructive to add.

The best ways for growing a product are organic:

1. Word of mouth - This is why it's so important to build something that you yourself can use and/or your close friends and family.
2. SEO - For a website, this means showing up in Google searches. There's a lot of tactical coding things to do here. I quickly went through some SEO articles, and this one seems decent: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/04/30/seo-basics

For more manual methods (usually marketing), I recommend:

1. Reddit - There is r/SideProject (117k followers). I also recommend sharing your side project in web-dev specific subreddits and walking through your code. Better yet, open-source your code!
2. LinkedIn - You can even do a #100daysofcode type thing, but it's with side project updates.

To go more in-depth here, check out our side projects playlist: [Taro Top 10] Building Impressive Side Projects

I have seen a lot of indie makers utilizing reddit and X (twitter) for promoting side projects. For X or any other social network, you'd need a following but you can use some popular hashtags to get initial attention. Another way is to start sharing your journey / progress on the side project on the X (twitter) to get people interested.

Building in public is great for this, so posting demos, status updates, user interviews, etc. on public People get value from seeing how build things I get practice pitching/posting, and you grow a user base as you build instead of having to get it all at the end.

A welcoming community for this is indie hackers, https://www.indiehackers.com/. They have tons for great resources and an active community, so you can post updates there (there's a whole section and culture around it). Also, the community is super supportive so you automatically have some people willing to check out your product.

The best way is always talking to users early and often. So, if you have outreach to people in your relevant vertical who are interested in the idea, they give you useful feedback early and have incentive to try out your product.

Building in public is huge, especially when part of a community where others are doing it as well such as https://buildspace.so/ will organically get you a lot of traction, but also exposure to the work of others.

Taking the time to find private Discords and Slack communities is a great return on your time.

Of course there is doing warm outreach and putting it in the hands of family and friends, which is a great way to start. I would suggest taking a few hours to put together a consolidated list (almost build a small CRM on a spreadsheet) vs. reaching out ad-hoc when a person comes to mind.