Question for people who have built an audience/sustained web traffic before they built a product...
This is nothing groundbreaking, you probably already know this... One consistent theme I've seen for founders to greatly improve their odds of success is having an established audience they can sell to or a strong web presence with a site that already has organic traffic going to it.
But it doesn't happen overnight.
For people who've built an audience or have sustained web traffic before you built a product, what was your plan early on? Did you have a strategy or was it a natural evolution? Did you start building an audience and then figure out what you could sell them?
I've always been able to grind out cold outreach on day one so I've never attempted doing something like this.
I'm thinking I should write about B2B software and sales tactics because I might be able to monetize this audience/traffic at a later date.
Any thoughts?
Very interesting topic -- I've done this a couple times, but honestly it was unplanned.
I have a content site where I write about a particular product category, and some adjacent product categories. The reason I started the site is somewhat unimportant, but it was primarily because I needed a medium to stay up-to-date on the product category.
Not that I really liked writing about the category, but forcing myself to write about it also forces me to stay somewhat current on the category.
Over the years (12+ years now), I've written articles about topics as a result of getting a question from visitors/readers. I did research, and published an article that tried to address or answer the visitor's question.
After a short while, some of these articles got (a lot of) traffic, as well as people commenting saying they're looking for the same thing.
In several cases, and after doing tons of research, I found that there weren't any really good solutions for the problem the article addressed.
So, I decided to create the solution to the problem people were (already) looking for, and use the article as a lead-gen to the product I created.
In one case, the product I created became one of my top sellers.
I'm about to do it again, and have an initial waiting list of about 100 people (give or take). But I'll also use this other article as a lead-gen to the new product.
Separately, I've learned many other things by watching the search terms and traffic patterns, and have utilized that information to improve the products I was selling or to add information to the product pages of my ecom site where I was selling the product.
Again, it was mostly unplanned.
But, now that I have this knowledge, I keep it top of mind as I explore other opportunities.
thanks @iammike for the insightful reply. Can you link to your site? I'd love to take a look.
I'd be happy to do that privately vs here in IH. My email address is in my IH profile. Drop me a line!
Note: No offense to anyone here on IH, and not casting any stones to anyone specific, but I see a LOT of self-promotion here cloaked in replies and I'm trying to avoid doing that.
@StartupSales - I got your email, and tried replying to you at two different email addresses, but I got email rejects from both.
Can you email me from a personal email vs the "rev..." email?
I am doing that right now for our upcoming product. I'm not sure if i'm allowed to post this but basically growing my audience through my facebook group www.facebook.com/groups/pitchback
we're heading towards 3000 members in short few months and yes there was some thought and strategy put into it
Interesting topic. Following...
Curious, how do you follow a post here on IH? I know you can get replies if someone replies to something you posted, but I've never figured out how to follow a post and be notified when any reply is posted.