Are you a one-person team? How do you manage time for promotions?
Hey there! I've been an avid lurker of IH for a couple of months now whilst working on my progressing marketing resource for independent game developers (https://gamefeatured.com).
What I've come to quickly realise is that your work almost means nothing without anyone taking notice of it.
Seeing as Facebook and Twitter are basically 'pay-to-play' platforms, it's a real struggle to get very few clicks through to your site without forking out hundreds for maybe a few subscribers (if lucky).
My approach has been to schedule my posts for all hours of the day, 7 days a week - but it's seriously tiring and 90% of the posts get 0 traction.
I'm wondering how others are coping with promoting their product/service via social media and other platforms without wasting too much time on it?
I just want to keep building on top of my product but 80-90% of my time is spent on promoting.
Thanks again, you're all super. :)
-Luke
I understand where you're coming from. If you're not good at promoting, or even worse, you hate it, this could end your business and take your sanity with you. Pretty much happened to me.
In the initial launch, most of the time spent on business will be on promoting your product. If you don't have the money to outsource it properly, you're going to have to do it yourself. Just no way around that.
If you haven't already, you need to learn SEO. It's a process like anything else and when you do it enough times it gets easy. The hard part is laying out the proper habits from the beginning.
In the beginning, after studying SEO, I use to spend maybe 4-days a month (20-hours total) writing content for my site's blog, facebook, twitter and other social media platforms. Then, I'd schedule the auto-posting accordingly. I used analytics and tools to maximize engagement. If someone sent me a message on social media, I'd respond as soon as possible. As I got better it became 4-10 hours a month, then less, and less.
When I had enough customers, I outsourced the social media and support to some good people who were very affordable. I figured if I could spend under 10-hours a month making all the posts, then outsourcing it to someone doing 40-hours a week would yield great results. It proved correct.
My latest project, I'm hiring some people from the beginning. $400 a month per person, for 40-hours of of good social media posting, responding to support emails, respond to sales emails, and more. To me, that's worth my time and sanity, and that expensive considering what you get.
Great convo, Luke and Samuel. I'm totally in the same camp.
How did you find and screen the people who work for $10/hr at those jobs? Is it a challenge quality- and education-wise?
Outsourcing to countries where your currency has more purchasing power, or there is higher unemployment is a way to do it. In my case, I outsourced to a few Eastern European countries.
I found everyone while travelling from networking with people I met locally. My minimum requirements were simple for support and social media: fluent reading/writing English, and a moderate understanding of tech. Screening them was pretty easy, just read their resume and look at their social media activity. I did use a local temp agency to do local background checks on them, just to be sure there was no documented history of criminality.
I recently started to outsource to the Philippines. Since I've never visited the country, I used https://www.onlinejobs.ph/ which is a pretty great service, but I also screened using the aforementioned (no background checks though).
With both situations, I gave small tasks to be completed, and then increased the level of difficulty and frequency for each task to be completed. I used this to filter some people out, and keep the ones I wanted.
That's smart. Thanks for sharing Samuel!
What's your preferred method to pay them, when you contract with them directly? International wire transfer could be costly if you pay often, and I wonder if you know other cost-saving methods.
I use PayPal before they're long-term, and Transferwise for long-term. I've also used Western Union for the Philippines, which near free.
Perfect. Never used Western Union personally but it sounds great. Thanks again!
Sure.
I just noticed something in what you previously stated, "...who work for $10/hr" It's not $400 a week ($10 per hour), but $400 a month.
You mentioned:
so I figured 10/hr, or 1.6hr/business day. Am I missing something?
Sorry for throwing you off. I previously mentioned, "...then outsourcing it to someone doing 40-hours a week would yield great results. It proved correct." but forgot to re-mentioned 40-hours was a week. Seems like with the double 'of' I was editing but forgot to edit before posting.
$400 a month for 40-hour weeks. So it's more like $2.30 per hour.
Hey thanks for providing such detail about your success with this issue Samuel! Kenn, I loved reading the discussion between you two as it answered future questions of mine. :)
Funnily enough I remember listening to an IH podcast a few weeks back that mentioned a similar issue: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/010-laura-roeder-of-meetedgar (start at 0h 48m 5s).
I re-read through the transcript and Laura Roeder perfectly explains the task and mentality of outsourcing your PR/social marketing whilst meeting the needs of your product/business.
I think my step forward is to definitely find 1-2 people to take over this job while I can build on top of my current product. :)
Duh! It's a full time position then! Impressive...
Hey Samuel, thanks for your detailed response - I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this.
All SEO techniques are up to scratch, it's more that people won't really search for this product if they're not sure what they're looking for.
I guess my concern is that if I outsource the social media job I'm wasting money and authenticity on the personalised posts (transparency is pretty important to me), yet if I do it myself I won't have much time for anything else.
I may have to experiment with outsourcing (or find a better automation technique) to keep the quality the same and under my control...
Thanks for sharing your experience. :)
"I guess my concern is that if I outsource the social media job I'm wasting money and authenticity on the personalised posts (transparency is pretty important to me), yet if I do it myself I won't have much time for anything else."
I had the same opinion to micromanage business earlier in life, and found it to be a complete misuse of my time and potential.
If you want to build a house, most people hire a contractor or buy an already made home. Most people do this because they don't want to spend years learning how to build a house, when they can do things they're better at or enjoy more. The same should go for business.
This is just the advice I needed to hear, thanks for sharing your experience - so the rest of us can learn from people like yourself!
Didn't read everyone's comment so pardon the repetition:
@luke there are tons of ways to market and they don't all require you to be constantly tweeting. As an avid twitter user, I land up just bookmarking half the tweets --- then forget about it. I won't be reading pdfs from my tweets.
If your audience is game developers, you can try creating some good content/ contents marketing on what they would be looking for. I've found unless you're a large brands ads are really expensive. I used to work in a content marketing team in a content marketing company and organic searches go beyond anything else.
Another great tactic is to partner with sites that sell products and services to game developers. , for instance, 'Kiip' (http://www.kiip.me/) does mobile advertising via gamification -- they have tons of developers show up on their site to use their API. Maybe do a podcast with them and cross post it on their site. Go on interviews with podcasts catered to mobile developers that are really niche. Find agencies that make games, and see if they'd cross post your stuff. B/c gamer developers will go on these sites to see what agencies are up to.
Find many distribution channels -- better to hit 100 channels and then slowly trickle down to few that work well. Only saying this b/c I'm not a gamer and I don't hang on gamer sites. I think fb/twitter are too much noise so niche game developer podcasts, a coding academy that teaches how to build games -- are all ripe for marketing.
Now for the final point, a shift in mindset -- rather than looking at marketing as a side thing I'd look at it as 50% of the product. Every feature has a launch date, educating users is as vital as the product itself. So if you spend 10 hrs building something are you spending 10hrs marketing it?
Also if you don't like doing this kind of work, tons of people do -- find a marketing student in college who wants to help. They will graduate with a much better understanding of marketing, have them become a partner if they do well and they'll have a portfolio to show their employers.
DM me on @artivilla if you need any help :)
Hi @artivilla, thanks for your large response.
I do realise that organic is much more powerful than social, though it doesn't create 'stickyness' for return users unless x% of that traffic subscribes or follows on social.
I see your point about working with another service such as 'kiip' but I'm not trying to distract my users away from my core product which is all free.
Though it's a good idea to look over other similar related niche's and see what posts of theirs get the best engagement. :)
"I think fb/twitter are too much noise so niche game developer podcasts, a coding academy that teaches how to build games -- are all ripe for marketing."
That's a great idea, though 90% of my audience is on Twitter so I can't dodge that bullet.
With your last point I think it's highly valuable for me to find an assistant to manage the social side of the business, as I can't find enough time in each day to keep up with the tasks while also trying to focus on improving the product.
Thanks again for your advice, I really appreciate you and everyone else that has helped me find clarity with this tricky issue.
Marketing is a skill just like development. As a one person army, you have to force yourself to allocate 50% of your time to marketing and 50% of your time to product development.
This is a time management skill.
I feel like marketing is inherently social and development is inherently cerebral, so I like to make sure that they are scheduled in separate blocks.
Also, try to add a more scientific/technical/numerical/measurable spin to your marketing: you're going to make 100 social media posts/replies/tweets/whatever per week (rather than "spend a bunch of time on social media").
Hey there, thanks for the tip! I see it more as a gut wrenching task at the moment but I guess if I aim towards specific goals with a different aim towards my time and social content it may actually work better for me. :)