Journaleo

Thanks to indie hackers across the interwebs, I learned the benefits of alternating between coding and marketing weeks.

I did a lot of different things throughout marketing week #1. Here are the 5 most memorable tactics and how they went.

1. Recurring tasks

In November 2021, I saw a picture of somebody’s marketing week on Twitter. It contained a lot of repeatable tasks that help increase awareness of your product.

I decided to pick a couple and incorporate it into my own marketing weeks. I tweeted about Journaleo 3-5x and participated in relevant forums 3-5x.

The funny thing is I was sort of already doing this for Ahero. Every morning, I spend ~30 minutes browsing through r/productivity. I started doing this to gain domain knowledge of the productivity space so instead of shilling my app, I participated as a normal interested party would. Every now and then, somebody requested exactly what Ahero provides so that was my chance to do my plug. To this day, the long-term benefits of this are incredible:

• Strong backlinks & SEO.
• New users find Ahero through old comments every day.
• Insight into new ideas and pain points.

2. r/SideProject

I posted on r/SideProject and had amazing success. Just kidding. It was terrible. I was honestly scared of posting on Reddit because of how notorious the community is against promotion. But, I went with it and my fear quickly turned into anxiety. I was checking every minute and every hour if anyone commented or upvoted my post.

The outcome… crickets.

3. Updated landing page

I spent some time updating the copy and media assets on the landing page. This tactic was pretty straightforward as I just wanted to reflect the most recent updates.

I also spent some time adding SEO and social preview tags. This is probably only the tip of the SEO iceberg.

4. Posted on Indie Hackers

I posted 2 articles on Indie Hackers. One article was about how I used the 12-week year to create an MVP and the other was actually just a random post in a group called ‘Self Promotion.’

The first article, which I spent about 2 hours writing, didn’t do well because I think it didn’t align with what the community was looking for. The second article, which I spent a max of 10 minutes writing, did surprisingly well.

5. Youtube Shorts

In an effort to try something new, I created a Youtube short. I read online that Youtube is pushing shorts in their algorithm so I created a simple short featuring Arlex’s triathlon training. I mentioned Journaleo in the caption.

I, myself, am not on social media and in fact, use DFTube to ‘de-entertain’ my Youtube. I felt a little behind and lost with all the content and trends out there. I ended up procrastinating and in the end, forced myself to just publish whatever I had.

It’s definitely way too early to see the impact of this tactic. It was good to try something new, but I don’t know if social media content creation is for me. I can’t throw in the towel yet, so I’ll shoot to publish at least 5.

That’s a wrap for marketing week #1. I’m pumped for coding week 😄.

Thanks for reading! See you next time.
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