Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

What field is it in? For ours (http://feefighters.com), which is b2b app, we have a 6 pronged attack which works pretty well:

1) SEO - people find us when they search for credit card processing and lots of long tail keywords. This is a long term thing but completely worth it. Make sure all of your pages are optimized for SEO.

2) SEM - we were buying keywords on google/bing/yahoo. Facebook has been less effective for us since we're b2b (but we tried it).

3) We get media coverage. We hustle and email and tweet a lot of reporters, etc, try to get interviews. Try to help them out all the time, refer friends businesses, etc. It works (http://feefighters.com/press - page not quite up to date). We paid a PR firm $5,000 a month. It didn't work.

4) We try to write interesting content on our blog/twitter (http://feefighters.com/blog). People link to it and we have a lot of subscribers who have nothing to do with our main business, but they tell their friends. We also do infographics. I personally think they are sort of played out (it was cool when you saw a link to one every few days but now they are everywhere), but they can still work WHEN THEY ARE GOOD and actually explain something well. We have some good ones and some that we aren't proud of: http://feefighters.com/blog/infographics/ - good: tech bubble... bad: restaurant one

5) Business Development - make deals with people in a similar space to sell your app

6) We let anyone refer their friends to FeeFighters and get paid $25 for it: https://feefighters.com/signup-or-login-to-refer-your-friend... It works... people want to refer us anyway, but this gives them an added incentive that makes sense to us financially. We use Amazon.com giftcards because they are the closest thing to cash we can think of that allows us to purchase it on our credit card and send via email to anyone - PayPal is annoying.

These things obviously work better for a particular type of app (one that is the sole focus of your time and makes you money), but some of these things are pretty universal.

Compare this to PPC campaigns and you might be surprised at how low the user acquisition cost actually is.

I wouldn't underestimate facebook for b2b. The users that see the ads still work at businesses. I have had very good success using these for my b2b application.

could you elaborate on this? what is successful and what have you learned about ad content?

Hi. When we first released http://limelightapp.com/ the only thing we did was post it on Hacker News. It made the first page for a few hours. In addition to generating really great feedback from the community, it also generated a decent amount of traffic (about 6000 unique visitors.) Later that day, our app got picked up on http://www.thenextweb.com/ and a few Chinese sites. The article on TNW generated about 200 tweets. Within about a week or two we had enough paid subscribers to cover all our recurring expenses. Everything since then has been profit.

Since then we've started a blog and we've got some of the other promotional ideas in the works as well. But at least initially I think we really benefited not just from the discussion on HN, but the traffic. There is a large overlap between the community here and our product's target audience.