Ask HN: What are effective ways to market a side project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are effective ways to market a side project?

12 pointsfreerobby9 comments

It's easy to see how projects like threewords.me will spread virally, but what about SaaS services that don't have social components? How do you get the word out? Conversion is poor from local blogs, and Techcrunch is not likely to cover you unless you're funded.

What have you all tried? What's worked?

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Organic search, particularly scalable content generation: my bread and butter. This has worked fantastically well, including when I was just working on side projects, and requires no gatekeeper approval. It is also free to get started working on, and plays to many of the strengths of technical founders.

AdWords: other people execute better than me on this, but my AdWords has been routinely profitable for the last few years. I recommend a small budget while trying to find a mix that works, then blowing it up.

Facebook ads: like setting money on fire.

Facebook viral mechanisms: apparently not a great fit with my product, and ways I can see to improve this would make it difficult for me to look in the mirror.

Would you elaborate on what you mean by scalable content generation? How is this different from writing content or landing pages directly, how does it become scalable? I find the content bit hard with my own side-project because I'm having to learn to be a great writer on the side of my side project (not a bad thing)!

That's usually the interesting question for a project. That said, the general sketch of making landing or content page generation scalable is figuring out all the work it takes you personally to make one unit of content and then automating, eliminating, or outsourcing all of it.

I talk about this a lot on my blog. In my example, the content is bingo games on pages dedicated to any teaching activity you can think of. It scales because the bingo card, images, and PDF can be 100% automated, and the actual captivity can be written by someone much cheaper than me.

Care to share some details about your FB ad attempts, please? Seemed like the social graph could improve the targets of the ads.

The qualifier is that Facebook Ads are like setting money on fire if you're trying to sell something. Facebook users are simply not in a buying mood. If you're doing lead gen or have a short sign up, Facebook can be tremendously effective.

One of my very favorite methods is creating plugin/add-on integration for various platforms/software. People who use the platform/software will tell other people that they can use your service with it. It also gives you license to promote yourself in the appropriate directories/forums.

My stab at this (its still so alpha it hurts), try http://www.startupbeanbags.com - the idea is practical promotion for start ups via the medium of beanbags :)

I don't understand what this is.

Vinicius Vacanti listed some helpful tips in a recent blog post, "How To Get Your First 1,000 Users:" http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your-first-...

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