There are essentially four categories of promotion you need to do:
1) Inbound marketing. Have a solid blog and social media plan in place, which doesn't ignore SEO and link building. (My upcoming book for The Pragmatic Bookshelf is exactly for people in your position: http://technicalblogging.com. Sorry for the plug, but hey, we are talking about promotion :)
2) Hustling. Get in touch with as many bloggers and mailing list owners in your niche as possible, offer to guest blog, reach out to journalists with a compelling story, and so on. Do the heavy work so that all they have to do is say YES. This is at the core of hustling.
3) Paid advertising. Online and offline advertisement can be amazing tools to grow your business. You need to be careful though, and optimize your campaigns or it's very easy to bleed money.
4) Affiliates and rewarded referrals. Give an incentive to those who want to promote your app. You can give monetary compensation to your affiliates or provide some perks to your users (e.g., free premium account for you when you refer someone who buys a premium subscription).
I keep reading SEO, SEO, and more SEO. But what does that really entails? As a web developer, I thought that doing nothing (other than providing quality content) and not trying to skew search results is the best path to go?
I think it comes down to persistence. The methods you use will vary over time and depending on your app, but the key is to keep trying things and learning from each one.
When I launched Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) I was thinking I would get 1000+ sign-ups the first month. It was more like 100, but what I did do was keep publishing it each week and over time I kept trying things, making connections, and proving it was something serious. Now I'm approaching 6000 subscribers and growing each week.
I've reached the point where I don't distinguish between programming and writing -- to me they are both people being creative and trying to create scalable things people want.
I do a lot of micro-projects. Sometimes the projects are web apps. Sometimes the projects are simply essays. Lately I've been mixing them up some -- so, for instance, something like a social site for people interested in X, with a freemium model for an app that helps a lot with X.
So my advice is to not think of your webapp as simply a hunk of code that you are trying to get out to people. Instead, think of yourself as on a mission to care about/promote/help fix X, then mix and match various formats to reach out to people who might be interested. As part of reaching out and emotionally engaging with people, you'll promote and sell your webapp. My opinion, for what it's worth.
When I launched http://www.scribophile.com/, a site for writers, I made a list of 50 writing blogs. They didn't have to be big names; writers love to write so there's lots of writers' blogs out there. I sent them a friendly and business-speak-free invitation to try the site with a free premium upgrade. Not everyone took me up on it, but a subset of those who did ended up participating and blogging about the site. A few years later and I still get traffic from some of those blog posts. I also still continue reaching out to bloggers, but now offering a month's ad slot if they're interested in writing about us. Now that the site has significant traffic, it's a great incentive for them.
Make sure to reach out to people with a carrot of some sort--give them an extra reason to want to write about you. You'll never get a 100% success rate, but even a 10% success rate will be worth it.
http://SmallPayroll.ca was a one-man-in-his-spare-time project until recently. What I did was:
1. SEM - Google AdWords mostly. I spent a fair time on this, partially because my day job at the time was in the SEM field
2. Organic - I got a great domain that contained my primary keywords, got a landing page built, and it ended up driving a lot of organic traffic. I also set up a blog on the main site. The blog was good for traffic, but not that great for conversions.
3. Referrals - my app is mostly used by people that hire domestic help, so I tried talking to the agencies that help people find that help. Hard to measure that one.
4. Provide awesome customer service - I have been told by several of my customers that they have sent their friends.
5. Free trial - The app gives a 30 day free trial. Many customers have thanked me for that.
Nice work launching this on the side, I know how exhilarating it can feel when people pay you for what you made.
One comment – The orange and brown color combination on your landing page looks visually tiring to me, which was probably why someone else said that your site looks depressing.
Take color psychology into account, here's a link I googled that touches on that:
Have you written about your experiences with transitioning from "spare time project" to what it is now? I saw that there is a blog for smallpayroll.ca, but do you have a personal blog that covers the start of your business and beyond?
I'm very interested in transitioning spare-time projects into something real. Thanks for any info, and congratulations on smallpayroll.ca!
I think it's funny that this is so high on the front page, yet there are no comments yet. Seems everyone is hoping to find the magic bullet.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a one-size-fits all solution. You might cover a college campus in stickers, pair up with a local organization to use you app at a function, visit businesses and pitch it, hound tech bloggers, etc.
Do you have a web app? If you do, this would have been a nice opportunity. Tell us what it is, and ask for advice on how you might promote this specific kind of web app.
Hi. When we first released http://limelightapp.com/ the only thing we did was post it on Hacker News. It made the first page for a few hours. In addition to generating really great feedback from the community, it also generated a decent amount of traffic (about 6000 unique visitors.) Later that day, our app got picked up on http://www.thenextweb.com/ and a few Chinese sites. The article on TNW generated about 200 tweets. Within about a week or two we had enough paid subscribers to cover all our recurring expenses. Everything since then has been profit.
Since then we've started a blog and we've got some of the other promotional ideas in the works as well. But at least initially I think we really benefited not just from the discussion on HN, but the traffic. There is a large overlap between the community here and our product's target audience.
Just FYI, TripLingo has been featured on Mashable, TNW, RWW, etc., and each of those posts generated between 200-1k tweets. Problem is, most of them are just bots that auto-tweet stuff from those sites. Probably got 10-15 legit tweets off of each. But be wary of tweets off of sites like that, I doubt anyone legit follows the people auto-tweeting.
Which isn't to say we didn't see a lot of traffic from those articles, just not from Twitter.
Hopefully you had a pre-launch page where you collected email addresses, then you can email these people upon launch.
Facebook or Google cpc ads.
Submit your site to business/product directories.
Post about your web app on relevant forums (ie. if it is an app to help accountants, find some accountant forums to post on).
Join linkedIn groups and post about your app in there.
Create a facebook page/twitter and post updates regularly. Include these on your webpage, in your email signature and try to get as many likes/followers as you can.
Cold call/Cold email anyone you can find that are potential customers.
If you can find news and other interesting items related to the web app, set up a Twitter, Facebook group, blog, Tumblr, etc. and shovel a couple pieces of content on there a day. Search Twitter and follow everyone talking about that niche, retweet their stuff, do the follow Friday posts, etc. (Take a look at http://challenge.co for more ideas on testing the market first, which you can then use to promote your app.)
Hopefully you had a pre-launch page where you collected email addresses, then you can email these people upon launch.
Typically this is a pre-development page, whereby you're basically tricking people into thinking you already have something, just to gauge the viability of what you're thinking of building.
For http://www.hearts-cardgame.com/ I wait until you are into your second game and then I slide down a little, uh, top banner (what are those things called?) which has the text
"Hi there! Looks like you're enjoying the game. That's great! We'd love it if you could help us out by sharing it with your friends:"
And then has the usual facebook/twitter/etc buttons. There is also a discreet "Share with your friends" link that makes the banner pop down, I like that more than having all those ugly buttons visible the whole time. I wait until you're into your second game because I figure by that point you must like the game, otherwise you'd have left, and then it's maybe more likely that you'll help me promote it.
All my online card games (3 of them) also have a "Also try our other games: X and Y" links, which drive a fair bit of traffic between them.
That's interesting. It's similar technique to all those iphone apps/games that ask you to rate them in appstore after playing for a while.
Did you measure the conversion rate of this rollover (that's how I call that stuff on websites)? How many people actually use it among those who seen it? And maybe what percent of people exits your game when you show them the rollover?
A cost effective way of getting users (I'm guessing this is ultimately what you want) at the same time as getting decent feedback is to use a crowdsourcing solution to get educated / computer using people to review your site. Ask them to sign up and use the product and go through a number of steps. Pay a thousand people to do this. If you have a good product they will keep using it.
These are things that have worked for me on a tiny budget / evenings+weekend projects.
1. Depending on resources you have, target a niche where those resources will have an impact (focus in on blocks of 5% to 10% of your demographic) - facebook is ideal for this sort of targeting.
2. If you have a holding page, make joining your Facebook page / twitter acct the next step after submitting email. e.g. "Follow our Facebook page for early access beta codes"
3. Get chatting in forums that are related to your business.
This should be among your first steps: Reach out to the bloggers. Tell them about your app and if they are interested, they'll make your app reach out to several hundred or thousands of people.
Not strictly a webapp, but I love what Balsamiq did with Mockups - gave copies away to anyone who blogged a review. Great for spreading the word and a fantastic way of legitimate link-building.
At Social Tables - seating charts for events made easy - we picked a very early group of people to market to who could benefit from our app: brides. Today, we have over 1,000 users (we've been quiet for the past 1 month as we contemplate our future). Here's what worked:
1) Guerrilla Marketing - We found real life events that catered toward brides. For example, the Running of the Brides is an annual wedding dress sale hosted by Filene's Basement, so we showed up really early in the morning to talk to brides waiting in line.
2) Social Media Targeting - We monitored specific keywords "wedding & seating chart" and "just got engaged" and replied to each of those users telling them there was an easier way to create seating charts. We also participated in Twitter chats (here's a list of chats: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnV...) and people got intrigued. Finally, we actively tweeted using conference hashtags during conferences that had our target audience.
1. Referrals, referrals, referrals. People loving the product has been by far the best way to promote it. I don't mean affiliate sales (where people are incented to refer), just the garden variety friend telling a friend kind. Nothing wrong with affiliates, of course, just a different thing.
2. SEO, to a smaller degree. When people say "SEO", I usually roll my eyes, cause it's often a non-answer. "Get lots of traffic by writing great viral content". Which is essentially a harder problem than promoting your web app. But having said that, at least from a search engine standpoint, it's something that pays dividends slowly, over time.
3. Banner ads/Google Ads - not particlarly effective, and something of a negative ROI investment, but this was good early on to get a feel for what kind of messaging worked best, and what sort of conversion rates were likely from direct ads. So I'd suggest using these to learn, not as a sustainable customer acquisition strategy, unless your price point supports it.
4. Press/bloggers - we got some writeups by a few bloggers, which generated some short term traffic (usually a week or so), then fell off dramatically. Again, good for SEO, and nice to get written about, but this hasn't been a consistent or reliable traffic source.
5. Web app directory/startup directory sites - good for short term launch traffic, generating awareness, etc., but these directories seem more noisy and less relevant over time.
2)SEO. I think you're confusing SEO with content marketing. Content marketing, like having a blog with great content, is only a portion of SEO, albeit the hardest portion.
We are in the consumer-social space (http://boothchat.com) so we need to go out in the wild and find our customers. I'll talk about the first 2-3 weeks of starting up.
At the very beginning you'll need to do direct "sales". Apart from any ongoing efforts to attract press, SEO, SEM, etc, at the beginning you'll have to go out there and beg.
Locate your target audience and create campaigns. These campaigns should create you leads, which you'll have to turn into accounts and then customers... I'm talking like a salesperson here because the principle is the same. Were i mention 'accounts' imagine visitors to your website, where i mention 'customers' imagine those visitors converting to users.
E.g. specific search for relevant to your startup keywords on Twitter. Then engage with these users both from your personal and company twitter account. Never "sell" directly, rather try to get into the conversation.
Do that in a systematic way for a couple of weeks and soon you'll have your first hundred users. Of course this method does not scale, but by the time you're done with it hopefully your other efforts (press, SEO, etc) will start to kick in and you'll move to a whole new game...
A friend of mine took out an ad on The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/) when he launched his app. It produced quality traffic that converted into active users. It also opened some doors with people who could help him promote the app reaching out to him, including his app in a bundle, etc. I thought the cost was steep (~$8000 or so) but it seemed to pay off.
2) SEM - we buy keywords on AdWords, and, the critical part, we monitor signups as conversions to be able to track those clicks that actually convert. What we learnt in our case after spending hundreds of dollars: the clicks from the content network were cheaper but we never got a conversion from them, while those on the search pages performed quite well. We also zoomed into several other characteristics of converting clicks, which lowered our price per conversion (i.e. Thursday was from a long shoot our lowest performing day so we stopped advertising during this day etc).
The key to all those channels is to go through a 3-step cycle continuously: implement, measure and learn. Implement the traffic acquisition channels you can imagine, measure the effort and the results you get (clicks, conversions), compute the relevant acquisition price for each channel, learn from your data and zoom into (segment) those well-performing channels hoping to find an even-better performing niche. And repeat.
When i launched http://www.mizu-voip.com/ I have spent ~2 days on forums to mention about it, i wrote 2 blog entry and nothing more. Since then (a few years ago) we haven't made any new effort and we have just enough customers.
So my vote is on: useful content
[+] [-] acangiano|14 years ago|reply
1) Inbound marketing. Have a solid blog and social media plan in place, which doesn't ignore SEO and link building. (My upcoming book for The Pragmatic Bookshelf is exactly for people in your position: http://technicalblogging.com. Sorry for the plug, but hey, we are talking about promotion :)
2) Hustling. Get in touch with as many bloggers and mailing list owners in your niche as possible, offer to guest blog, reach out to journalists with a compelling story, and so on. Do the heavy work so that all they have to do is say YES. This is at the core of hustling.
3) Paid advertising. Online and offline advertisement can be amazing tools to grow your business. You need to be careful though, and optimize your campaigns or it's very easy to bleed money.
4) Affiliates and rewarded referrals. Give an incentive to those who want to promote your app. You can give monetary compensation to your affiliates or provide some perks to your users (e.g., free premium account for you when you refer someone who buys a premium subscription).
[+] [-] nubela|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|14 years ago|reply
When I launched Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) I was thinking I would get 1000+ sign-ups the first month. It was more like 100, but what I did do was keep publishing it each week and over time I kept trying things, making connections, and proving it was something serious. Now I'm approaching 6000 subscribers and growing each week.
[+] [-] tsycho|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
I do a lot of micro-projects. Sometimes the projects are web apps. Sometimes the projects are simply essays. Lately I've been mixing them up some -- so, for instance, something like a social site for people interested in X, with a freemium model for an app that helps a lot with X.
So my advice is to not think of your webapp as simply a hunk of code that you are trying to get out to people. Instead, think of yourself as on a mission to care about/promote/help fix X, then mix and match various formats to reach out to people who might be interested. As part of reaching out and emotionally engaging with people, you'll promote and sell your webapp. My opinion, for what it's worth.
[+] [-] acabal|14 years ago|reply
When I launched http://www.scribophile.com/, a site for writers, I made a list of 50 writing blogs. They didn't have to be big names; writers love to write so there's lots of writers' blogs out there. I sent them a friendly and business-speak-free invitation to try the site with a free premium upgrade. Not everyone took me up on it, but a subset of those who did ended up participating and blogging about the site. A few years later and I still get traffic from some of those blog posts. I also still continue reaching out to bloggers, but now offering a month's ad slot if they're interested in writing about us. Now that the site has significant traffic, it's a great incentive for them.
Make sure to reach out to people with a carrot of some sort--give them an extra reason to want to write about you. You'll never get a 100% success rate, but even a 10% success rate will be worth it.
[+] [-] swalberg|14 years ago|reply
1. SEM - Google AdWords mostly. I spent a fair time on this, partially because my day job at the time was in the SEM field
2. Organic - I got a great domain that contained my primary keywords, got a landing page built, and it ended up driving a lot of organic traffic. I also set up a blog on the main site. The blog was good for traffic, but not that great for conversions.
3. Referrals - my app is mostly used by people that hire domestic help, so I tried talking to the agencies that help people find that help. Hard to measure that one.
4. Provide awesome customer service - I have been told by several of my customers that they have sent their friends.
5. Free trial - The app gives a 30 day free trial. Many customers have thanked me for that.
[+] [-] freshlog|14 years ago|reply
One comment – The orange and brown color combination on your landing page looks visually tiring to me, which was probably why someone else said that your site looks depressing.
Take color psychology into account, here's a link I googled that touches on that:
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/color-psychology-websit...
And all the best!
- Alvin Lai
[+] [-] samf|14 years ago|reply
I'm very interested in transitioning spare-time projects into something real. Thanks for any info, and congratulations on smallpayroll.ca!
[+] [-] cheez|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markkat|14 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a one-size-fits all solution. You might cover a college campus in stickers, pair up with a local organization to use you app at a function, visit businesses and pitch it, hound tech bloggers, etc.
Do you have a web app? If you do, this would have been a nice opportunity. Tell us what it is, and ask for advice on how you might promote this specific kind of web app.
[+] [-] aculver|14 years ago|reply
Since then we've started a blog and we've got some of the other promotional ideas in the works as well. But at least initially I think we really benefited not just from the discussion on HN, but the traffic. There is a large overlap between the community here and our product's target audience.
[+] [-] onwardly|14 years ago|reply
Which isn't to say we didn't see a lot of traffic from those articles, just not from Twitter.
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redguava|14 years ago|reply
Facebook or Google cpc ads.
Submit your site to business/product directories.
Post about your web app on relevant forums (ie. if it is an app to help accountants, find some accountant forums to post on).
Join linkedIn groups and post about your app in there.
Create a facebook page/twitter and post updates regularly. Include these on your webpage, in your email signature and try to get as many likes/followers as you can.
Cold call/Cold email anyone you can find that are potential customers.
[+] [-] ja27|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] white_devil|14 years ago|reply
Typically this is a pre-development page, whereby you're basically tricking people into thinking you already have something, just to gauge the viability of what you're thinking of building.
In other words, it's a sleazy practise.
[+] [-] einaregilsson|14 years ago|reply
"Hi there! Looks like you're enjoying the game. That's great! We'd love it if you could help us out by sharing it with your friends:"
And then has the usual facebook/twitter/etc buttons. There is also a discreet "Share with your friends" link that makes the banner pop down, I like that more than having all those ugly buttons visible the whole time. I wait until you're into your second game because I figure by that point you must like the game, otherwise you'd have left, and then it's maybe more likely that you'll help me promote it.
All my online card games (3 of them) also have a "Also try our other games: X and Y" links, which drive a fair bit of traffic between them.
[+] [-] grzaks|14 years ago|reply
Did you measure the conversion rate of this rollover (that's how I call that stuff on websites)? How many people actually use it among those who seen it? And maybe what percent of people exits your game when you show them the rollover?
I would really like to see some numbers :)
[+] [-] chunkyslink|14 years ago|reply
A cost effective way of getting users (I'm guessing this is ultimately what you want) at the same time as getting decent feedback is to use a crowdsourcing solution to get educated / computer using people to review your site. Ask them to sign up and use the product and go through a number of steps. Pay a thousand people to do this. If you have a good product they will keep using it.
[+] [-] davedx|14 years ago|reply
Whaa....t? You'd need a lot of money!
[+] [-] ed209|14 years ago|reply
1. Depending on resources you have, target a niche where those resources will have an impact (focus in on blocks of 5% to 10% of your demographic) - facebook is ideal for this sort of targeting.
2. If you have a holding page, make joining your Facebook page / twitter acct the next step after submitting email. e.g. "Follow our Facebook page for early access beta codes"
3. Get chatting in forums that are related to your business.
4. Compile lists of resources for your target market. Like a list of useful blogs (e.g http://soopsee.com.tadalist.com/lists/1830681/public) and attach your business to it in some way
[+] [-] davidedicillo|14 years ago|reply
2) Try to get free press: For SyncPad (not technically a web app) we always tried to do things worth writing like that video with 40 iPads in drawing in sync (http://blog.mysyncpad.com/post/4293113601/syncpad-on-40-ipad...).
3) Care about your customers: You'd be surprise how quickly the word spread about your product if you offer awesome customer support.
[+] [-] Saketme|14 years ago|reply
P.S.: I'm a blogger as well.
[+] [-] rahoulb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danberger|14 years ago|reply
1) Guerrilla Marketing - We found real life events that catered toward brides. For example, the Running of the Brides is an annual wedding dress sale hosted by Filene's Basement, so we showed up really early in the morning to talk to brides waiting in line.
Here's the write-up: http://blog.socialtables.com/post/6147037160/social-tables-f...
2) Social Media Targeting - We monitored specific keywords "wedding & seating chart" and "just got engaged" and replied to each of those users telling them there was an easier way to create seating charts. We also participated in Twitter chats (here's a list of chats: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnV...) and people got intrigued. Finally, we actively tweeted using conference hashtags during conferences that had our target audience.
I hope these two out of the box approaches help!
[+] [-] dchurchv|14 years ago|reply
1. Referrals, referrals, referrals. People loving the product has been by far the best way to promote it. I don't mean affiliate sales (where people are incented to refer), just the garden variety friend telling a friend kind. Nothing wrong with affiliates, of course, just a different thing.
2. SEO, to a smaller degree. When people say "SEO", I usually roll my eyes, cause it's often a non-answer. "Get lots of traffic by writing great viral content". Which is essentially a harder problem than promoting your web app. But having said that, at least from a search engine standpoint, it's something that pays dividends slowly, over time.
3. Banner ads/Google Ads - not particlarly effective, and something of a negative ROI investment, but this was good early on to get a feel for what kind of messaging worked best, and what sort of conversion rates were likely from direct ads. So I'd suggest using these to learn, not as a sustainable customer acquisition strategy, unless your price point supports it.
4. Press/bloggers - we got some writeups by a few bloggers, which generated some short term traffic (usually a week or so), then fell off dramatically. Again, good for SEO, and nice to get written about, but this hasn't been a consistent or reliable traffic source.
5. Web app directory/startup directory sites - good for short term launch traffic, generating awareness, etc., but these directories seem more noisy and less relevant over time.
Hope that helps.
[+] [-] jimlast|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanasisp|14 years ago|reply
At the very beginning you'll need to do direct "sales". Apart from any ongoing efforts to attract press, SEO, SEM, etc, at the beginning you'll have to go out there and beg.
Locate your target audience and create campaigns. These campaigns should create you leads, which you'll have to turn into accounts and then customers... I'm talking like a salesperson here because the principle is the same. Were i mention 'accounts' imagine visitors to your website, where i mention 'customers' imagine those visitors converting to users.
E.g. specific search for relevant to your startup keywords on Twitter. Then engage with these users both from your personal and company twitter account. Never "sell" directly, rather try to get into the conversation.
Do that in a systematic way for a couple of weeks and soon you'll have your first hundred users. Of course this method does not scale, but by the time you're done with it hopefully your other efforts (press, SEO, etc) will start to kick in and you'll move to a whole new game...
[+] [-] aculver|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vladd|14 years ago|reply
1) SEO - We follow the mantra of segmenting by personnas, not features: imagine classes of users for the webapp and present the product to them based on each segment's needs. See for example http://www.erbix.com/eris-form-creator/collect-feedback/ or http://www.erbix.com/pluto-team-organizer/to-do-lists/ for how we did that with 2 of our most popular apps.
2) SEM - we buy keywords on AdWords, and, the critical part, we monitor signups as conversions to be able to track those clicks that actually convert. What we learnt in our case after spending hundreds of dollars: the clicks from the content network were cheaper but we never got a conversion from them, while those on the search pages performed quite well. We also zoomed into several other characteristics of converting clicks, which lowered our price per conversion (i.e. Thursday was from a long shoot our lowest performing day so we stopped advertising during this day etc).
3) Blogging - see http://www.erbix.com/blogs/erbix/view for recent posts.
The key to all those channels is to go through a 3-step cycle continuously: implement, measure and learn. Implement the traffic acquisition channels you can imagine, measure the effort and the results you get (clicks, conversions), compute the relevant acquisition price for each channel, learn from your data and zoom into (segment) those well-performing channels hoping to find an even-better performing niche. And repeat.
[+] [-] fenesiistvan|14 years ago|reply