How do you guys promote your landing page and get subscribers?
So, say you have an idea and created a simple landing page with the subscription form on it. The product is gonna be paid so it's hard to come to some interests groups with it. What are the next steps?
What I know they are:
- betalist.com - but you have wait 2 months or so, or pay (-)
- facebook - create an app, create a post and boost it for $20 (well, okay but there is still not guarantee that you will have any subscribers...)
What else?
Thanks!!
My friend, there are literally 1001 ways. None of them are guaranteed.
And the list goes on...
Quora is slowly becoming the humble brag network + ads.
Agreed, that's annoying. I have the impression that most of the "questions" nowadays are from business owners who just want to promote their products.
I also feel like Quora is being dragged down by the self-promotion. More than half the answers are people who want to promote their site/service, the rest are people who just tell the person who asked the question whatever they want to hear, rather than a real answer. And then there's the ask for ask circles, where people just ask a question so someone else can build their contact backlist and repay the favor.
It almost makes me feel filthy to be part of the problem, so I've mostly stopped contributing.
I give it another three years, and then Quora will be nothing but marginally successful would be marketers repeating questions to each other over and over, without anyone else reading the answers.
A new site will come up where people can go to actually ask questions they want answers to.
Haha, well the humblebrag is real.
I feel they balance the delivery of their ads well. They’re not to obtrusive. Though I’ve clicked on one or two by mistake.
Thanks, but I can't completely agree. First of all, as I said, I have only landing page. No any other content, video etc. What means slideshare, pinterest, linkedin, youtube, podcasting, press releases can go. It's only a landing page, so hacker news and probably growthhackers can go too. What left are:
Well, not too bad. Thanks!
You may need to expand the website a bit. You don’t need any other pages for any of those platforms (slideshare, YouTube, Pinterest, etc)
They’re third party platforms so you creat content there that directs people back to your landing page.
Flipboard is a content curation platform that is pretty good at sending referral traffic.
Viral content bee is a points based community that helps you get the word out about your content.
Stumbleupon let’s you submit pages to their platform to be found by their users.
Thanks a lot for the information!
There are no pre-defined "next steps". That's what makes entrepreneurship so fun :)
Betalist is NOT the #1 step in marketing/selling a new product. Facebook might work... if that is where your potential customer hang out.
You need to know who your target customer is. Who are they? Where do they spend time online? How do they prefer to communicate?
If you don't know this, get out a piece of paper and write down 20 people that could use your product and spend 20 minutes grouping them into different personas and figure it out.
You need to do more work figuring out who would actually buy your product and try to sell it to them.
Thanks for the response.
As for customers, they are just regular people from 18 to 70, both males and females, may be not techies. They probably use facebook and email as main way to communicate.
For my another project I would like to verify too, they are companies (IT and non-IT) and developers.
So, how can it help?
Your target audience includes probably half of the internet... Is there any way you can niche down and focus on a smaller target?
I hate it when people do this... but think about Facebook: It's used by EVERYONE but they started at just one college campus.
Also, save your $20 for a boosted post and pay yourself $20 to spend 2 hours researching potential customers, building a list, and sending out manual emails asking for people to take a look.
It is spam if you just send the email without personalized it to the person you are sending to. For example, on HN many users inform their email on the profile. Send the email only if you see a good fit reading their profile, submits and comments. Write the email for s/he individually. This is a lot of time, but it is the right thing to do on this situation. Don't spam a lot of people with the same dummy email.
Hmmm I thought any email without asking permission to use it could be considered as a spam. If I'm wrong, it sounds cool and I definitely know how to gather emails! Thanks!
This is a different category called "cold email", but of course, some people could be bothered by this type of unsolicited email as well, but it is much less invasive because you invested time and effort to personalize it, and a lot of people will appreciate that. I know I would.
I wrote about this on medium [1] a while ago, when I was launching coindatax.com
Here's the summary:
Here's what I learned AFTER posting that article:
In summary, instead of looking for a way to talk to 1000 people, find a way to talk to 100 real users. That is, know where your users are and how to reach them.
[1] https://medium.com/@aviggiano/how-coindatax-got-its-first-users-from-betalist-78701f68405f
Thanks!
There are a multitude of ways. It's also important to know what it is you're gonna do with the subscribers, eg. some sort of validation, or if you're passed that point build an engaged audience.
If the latter: something I haven't seen mentioned, is creating helpful and useful content for small "pains" you're audience is experiencing. These blogs need to be shared in a way too, but it will make you "an authority" in the field. The real sell is done more easily after this.
A bit easier to do is share content useful for your audience (and try to find people with big followings):
https://twitter.com/munahq_/status/998806940120702976
I just shared this. Was retweeted by Jason—which brought a small spike to my app and in return a smaller spike in new sign ups. Though I can't 100% track if it's really only due this retweet.
That's interesting, thanks!
I focus on content marketing. Writing technical blog posts on my blog https://pawelurbanek.com/ and mentioning/linking my landing pages whenever it makes sense.
https://abot.apki.io/
https://selfcontrol.apki.io/
So far there is no any content. I would like to verify a landing pages before anything else is created.
But thanks anyway
Yeah, it seems that if you have a product geared towards techies, developers, and that sort of crowd, it's real easy to find them online on Reddit and places like ProductHunt, BetaList, and Hacker News.
But if you have a product geared towards, say, parents of teenagers, well, you're gonna have to join some parent Facebook groups or manually reach out to them by yourself? Tricky stuff.
One of my products I would like to verify, really gears towards techies. But I don't like the idea to gather their emails because it will be considered as a spam :(
There are no pre-defined "next steps". That's what makes entrepreneurship so fun :)
Betalist is NOT the #1 step in marketing/selling a new product. Facebook might work... if that is where your potential customer hang out.
You need to know who your target customer is. Who are they? Where do they spend time online? How do they prefer to communicate?
If you don't know this, get out a piece of paper and write down 20 people that could use your product and spend 20 minutes grouping them into different personas and figure it out.
You need to do more work figuring out who would actually buy your product and try to sell it to them.
Every product has its own tailored corners of the internet. I like the idea of getting listed on a product directory because it's a continuous stream of free traffic. Are you building an analytics platform? Get listed on Segment! BOOM! Other directories: Heroku, Github, Stripe.
Thanks for the ideas.
Does heroku have a list?
I can't use Github because the product is not open source.
Didn't get what about Stripe.
The idea is that if you provide a tool/add-on usable with these providers, they have a directory in which your product will be listed and discoverable.
https://elements.heroku.com/addons
When you configure Segment as a user, you are given a list of apps to which you can send your data. For example, you can click on analytics > heatmaps and see a list of heatmap tools. I'm sure those tools love the free inbound clicks.
https://github.com/marketplace -> No need for your tool to be open source. It just has to provide functionality to Github users.
Stripe has a directory of tools that can work with Stripe: https://stripe.com/works-with
Thanks a lot for the ideas! Now it's clear :)
Sometimes you can advertise on related community websites. You can write articles about a related topic and leave a CTA somewhere in the article or after it. If you don't own a blog you can post on medium.
Or even add your CTA on other articles you share using tools like http://mycta.cf
#biased
Sorry what is CTA?
CTA = ‘Call To Action’
It’s usually a link or button to get someone to take action, like fill out a form to download content, sign up to a mailing list or a trial etc etc
Ah, okay, I just didn't know what this abbreviation means. Yeah, but the problem is people are very sensitive to any sign of promo and usually resist, or delete such articles very quickly.
This is where progressive profiling comes in. Don't ask for a lot. Once you get a cookie on their system, you know who they are. Each time you can ask different things. As an example, I usually have the form ask email only the first time. The second time, prefill in the email and then ask their title, or their location etc. Each time they go to another piece of content, the form asks them a different question. If they download 3 to 5 pieces of content, I usually have a great profile of who they are, and if they are the right prospect for me. I then lead score that... giving higher ranking to people with the right title, and interest. Cross reference that with retargeting cookies that let me know which pages they have been too, and you can know a lot about the prospect without them feeling like you are trying to sell them anything.
Earn each piece of the profile with compelling content. They usually will bite.... and help you learn more about them... piece by piece.
HTH.
Thanks!
Thanks, I thought about Medium. I actually wrote some articles there for my past products. But the problem was nobody really noticed my articles (maybe be cause they were not pieces of art :( )
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Will definitely use this, i hate waiting two months, totally dont see the point of waiting two months since i dont advertise a cheese or wine business that ages better with time lol.
You don't have to wait if you pay for it.
True, compared to instaaa, it offers way less value. Please correct me if i am wrong.
Haven't used instaaa, but I guess it's for lazy people. I didn't find any review online, but I just read some product hunt posts where people were not that happy.
Why you can actually submit your website yourself?
I've personally used Betalist and I was happy with the results.
I have tried betalist (the free version) and certainly wasn't pleased about it. I guess if you pay you would have a different experience.
You are right, instaaa is for lazy people, but so is many SaaS out there. You either buy time or knowledge. We can't just do everything by ourselves.
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How do you handle products that are country specific?
Well, thanks, I looked into your list and see the same problems I meet.
For example, you have Show HN. But it's impossible to submit the project there because it's only a landing page (from their rules: "If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then.").
Also, there are a lot of resources that definitely are too early to use (like Wired or Popular Science).
Anyway, your service looks very useful for projects in a little bit later stage.
Your service sounds absolutely amazing! I'm a little skeptical, though. Do the majority of "startups" paying $39 end up receiving any worthwhile results?
I guess it really depends on just how "good" the startup is. Do you guys have any vetting process on what startups you work with? Like, if I just whipped up a really awful-looking site with an email sign-up form and handed you $129, what would you guys do?
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Ah, that makes sense. Sounds solid. Will definitely consider you guys for any future projects!