What marketing channels are currently working for the HN community in a sustainable way?
Paid: Amazon, the thing I like is that their dashboard clearly shows marketing cost and revenues, so you can very easily say whether it's worth or not.
Non-paid:
- Github: http://github.com/solokeys/solo
Last time I measured, we had 1% of our traffic coming from Github, and 1% of that traffic converting to a sale. This is pretty awesome I think, especially because having a baseline we can improve. We're not making any strong sale-pitch on Github, we simply put links to our store at the top and bottom of the readme.
Right now we're running a crowd funding campaign, and because we knew Github was bringing high quality traffic we're advertising it there.
- Twitter. This is our 2nd social in sales. We're not doing anything special, just clear profiles (personal and business) with links to the store, and clear call to actions when you tweet.
- Pinterest. This is the social that bring us most clicks the the store. I know the platform very well, of course. For SoloKeys specifically the audience is not right, so there's little to zero conversions to sales, but it's good learning nevertheless.
- Medium/Hackernoon. When we blog, we typically get spikes of traffic and sometimes sales. But it requires time to write posts, so it's not really as scalable as the other channels.
(We're barely using Facebook, and zero Instagram, so I can't really talk about these).
Your email list is the most vital piece of data that you truly own. Everything else depends on the respective platform's algorithms and uncontrollable factors to a large extent.
Source: I'm a copywriter and have worked with several e-commerce stores.
I see some people scoff at Adwords not being useful. Trust me, there is a reason companies pay collectivly $100+ billion to this platform. This goes the same for many other channels.
For free channels, YouTube, Facebook, Google Search and Google Maps do a great job here for the right product and message.
For paid, all the major channels work well if aligned to their strenght. The one channel many people look past is affiliate models. That said affiliate tends to suit certain product and pricing. Also there is huge amounts of snake oil in the affiliate business so get someone who knows what they are doing set up campaigns. This applies to most marketing channels but affiliate/SEO are probably the worst of having wool pulled over eyes.
Am happy to answer a few specific quesitons if your digging for information.