How to attract traffic to a Lightning routing node

Question

We have a lightning node and are searching for some educated advice on how to attract more traffic to our routing node.

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A short explanation of what we have been experiencing.

We have a small node with about 60 million sats that currently has six channels. We recently closed a few channels that did not seem to be doing very much (over a long period of time)to assist our node's routing figures and soon after that we opened a few much larger sat channels with big Lightning nodes like LNBig, Nicehash, etc... things only got worse and not better. So we lowered the fees considerably in hopes of improving things but as of yet we have not had much luck with little or no routing coming in and then out again and a lot of difficulty rebalancing using RTL. Which prior to closing these long held channels worked significanlty better that at the present time.

We took advice from a few contacts we have made over the last year but we must have misinterpreted this information because it has not worked that well for us. One of the main things we would like to know is how to gain more than one or two nodes that appear to start the ball rolling to route sats in to our node, as that seems to be the key here. If we do not have at least one node routing sats into our node then nothing seems to happen.

Any ideas on how to create a more widely used routing node?

Answer 1

The lightning network can be thought of as a graph, where the nodes are vertices and the channels are edges.
A transaction starts at a vertex (node) and travels through one or more edges to get to its final destination.
What you want is for your node to be on the path of those transactions.
In general this means the following.
Be well connected, be well balanced, and have sufficient liquidity (balance) to route transactions.
Have connections to some of the busy nodes, but also to some of the edge nodes that need liquidity.
In the past i have used https://lightningnetwork.plus/ to swap channels with people. That seemed to have a good effect on transaction volume through my node.
My LN knowledge is a bit stale (i am working on something else now) so perhaps there are better tools now to swap channels, optimize traffic and keep channels balanced.
Hope this helps