5 Google searches to get press, views, and traffic for free

Hi 👋

I notice a lot of people here struggle with distribution. They have cool products but not enough people are seeing the magic. I guess that's the curse of the maker turned founder.

To give back to this awesome community I want to show you 5 Google searches that can help you get in front of your audience.

The best part?

They are free 🌈

Hopefully you know your audience well enough to think of 3-10 keywords related to your product + audience.

For example my product is interest free financial services for Muslims so places where people mention "halal", "riba", "Muslim", "Islam" are places where my audience hangs out.

For each of the 3-10 keywords, add them into one of these searches:

1. inurl:forum <keyword> to find webforums. They are going out of fashion but they can be great depending on your niche, especially ecommerce or technical topics. The nice thing about forums is that they tell you how many views each post has and how often people post.
2. inurl:blog <keyword> to find blogs. You can pitch blog owners your product and offer some kind of deal for their audience or you can offer to share a cool infographic, freebie, or something else in exchange for a link back to your site. Another idea is to share a guide for your niche.
3. inurl:news <keyword> for news sites. An easy way to try to get relevant press about your company. One trick I learned is to start with smaller publications first.
4. inurl:podcast <keyword> to find podcasts to get on.
5. inurl:reddit <keyword> or inurl:twitter <keyword> and of course, reddit + other social media.

Now do your research and note every relevant site in a spreadsheet. Take notes on

• what does well on each site,
• the topics they cover,
• possible ideas for how it relates to your product.

You should have hundreds of relevant sites now, unless your product is extremely niche.

You might start notice patterns in similar sites. If you can make an infographic or guide or listicle for multiple sites, that's awesome! Make high quality content and promote it to every site you can.

But this is the real protip: don't try to sell your product to these places. If you're learning as a maker, share what you learned. Have some insight? Share that.

The goal is to share resources that are relevant to what you do and very subtly at the end say, "hey btw if you enjoyed this resource, I make a product that does X"

If people upvote this and like this content, happy to share how to find contact information from authors who post on these sites, how to reach out, some email templates that work, etc.