Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#31

Post by vladd » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:26 PM UTC

For http://www.erbix.com/ we have several traffic acquisition channels working at the moment:

1) SEO - We follow the mantra of segmenting by personnas, not features: imagine classes of users for the webapp and present the product to them based on each segment's needs. See for example http://www.erbix.com/eris-form-creator/collect-feedback/ or http://www.erbix.com/pluto-team-organizer/to-do-lists/ for how we did that with 2 of our most popular apps.

2) SEM - we buy keywords on AdWords, and, the critical part, we monitor signups as conversions to be able to track those clicks that actually convert. What we learnt in our case after spending hundreds of dollars: the clicks from the content network were cheaper but we never got a conversion from them, while those on the search pages performed quite well. We also zoomed into several other characteristics of converting clicks, which lowered our price per conversion (i.e. Thursday was from a long shoot our lowest performing day so we stopped advertising during this day etc).

3) Blogging - see http://www.erbix.com/blogs/erbix/view for recent posts.

The key to all those channels is to go through a 3-step cycle continuously: implement, measure and learn. Implement the traffic acquisition channels you can imagine, measure the effort and the results you get (clicks, conversions), compute the relevant acquisition price for each channel, learn from your data and zoom into (segment) those well-performing channels hoping to find an even-better performing niche. And repeat.

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#32

Post by socialmediaking » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:29 PM UTC

Another decent way which wasn't mentioned here so far is to comment on other blogs and pages with similar content. Not only is it a boost for SEO but, if your app is related to the post, people who read the comments will click through if relevant.

In SEO a main strategy is actually doing this, blackhatters use software that automatically posts comments on related blogs, but the whitehat (clean) method is to do it manually, and it works. Try to comment on as many high quality blogs as possible (high Page Rank).

Tip: Try to use your keyword for your name so it is anchor text, although some blogs might not approve your comment because of that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#33

Post by thanasisp » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:32 PM UTC

We are in the consumer-social space (http://boothchat.com) so we need to go out in the wild and find our customers. I'll talk about the first 2-3 weeks of starting up.

At the very beginning you'll need to do direct "sales". Apart from any ongoing efforts to attract press, SEO, SEM, etc, at the beginning you'll have to go out there and beg.

Locate your target audience and create campaigns. These campaigns should create you leads, which you'll have to turn into accounts and then customers... I'm talking like a salesperson here because the principle is the same. Were i mention 'accounts' imagine visitors to your website, where i mention 'customers' imagine those visitors converting to users.

E.g. specific search for relevant to your startup keywords on Twitter. Then engage with these users both from your personal and company twitter account. Never "sell" directly, rather try to get into the conversation.

Do that in a systematic way for a couple of weeks and soon you'll have your first hundred users. Of course this method does not scale, but by the time you're done with it hopefully your other efforts (press, SEO, etc) will start to kick in and you'll move to a whole new game...

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#34

Post by frankrrr » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:36 PM UTC

For us (http://www.sparklingapp.com), Betalist worked very well. We used this site to collect beta testers. Check it out at: http://betali.st/

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#35

Post by kingsidharth » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:38 PM UTC

One thing that always worked for me is writing. I write a lot- emails, blogs, guest posts, tweets. It tends to get you a following that not only gives you a market to promote to but people to build for.

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#36

Post by againwiththemoz » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:50 PM UTC

You know, trying to provide ACTUAL VALUE. I understand that you suck at that as much as your "identified competitors."

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#37

Post by acangiano » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

There are essentially four categories of promotion you need to do:

1) Inbound marketing. Have a solid blog and social media plan in place, which doesn't ignore SEO and link building. (My upcoming book for The Pragmatic Bookshelf is exactly for people in your position: http://technicalblogging.com. Sorry for the plug, but hey, we are talking about promotion :)

2) Hustling. Get in touch with as many bloggers and mailing list owners in your niche as possible, offer to guest blog, reach out to journalists with a compelling story, and so on. Do the heavy work so that all they have to do is say YES. This is at the core of hustling.

3) Paid advertising. Online and offline advertisement can be amazing tools to grow your business. You need to be careful though, and optimize your campaigns or it's very easy to bleed money.

4) Affiliates and rewarded referrals. Give an incentive to those who want to promote your app. You can give monetary compensation to your affiliates or provide some perks to your users (e.g., free premium account for you when you refer someone who buys a premium subscription).

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#38

Post by danberger » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:56 PM UTC

At Social Tables - seating charts for events made easy - we picked a very early group of people to market to who could benefit from our app: brides. Today, we have over 1,000 users (we've been quiet for the past 1 month as we contemplate our future). Here's what worked:

1) Guerrilla Marketing - We found real life events that catered toward brides. For example, the Running of the Brides is an annual wedding dress sale hosted by Filene's Basement, so we showed up really early in the morning to talk to brides waiting in line.

Here's the write-up: http://blog.socialtables.com/post/6147037160/social-tables-f...

2) Social Media Targeting - We monitored specific keywords "wedding & seating chart" and "just got engaged" and replied to each of those users telling them there was an easier way to create seating charts. We also participated in Twitter chats (here's a list of chats: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnV...) and people got intrigued. Finally, we actively tweeted using conference hashtags during conferences that had our target audience.

I hope these two out of the box approaches help!

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#39

Post by Saketme » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 1:59 PM UTC

This should be among your first steps: Reach out to the bloggers. Tell them about your app and if they are interested, they'll make your app reach out to several hundred or thousands of people.

P.S.: I'm a blogger as well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

#40

Post by DanielBMarkham » Thu, Sep 08, 2011, 2:02 PM UTC

I've reached the point where I don't distinguish between programming and writing -- to me they are both people being creative and trying to create scalable things people want.

I do a lot of micro-projects. Sometimes the projects are web apps. Sometimes the projects are simply essays. Lately I've been mixing them up some -- so, for instance, something like a social site for people interested in X, with a freemium model for an app that helps a lot with X.

So my advice is to not think of your webapp as simply a hunk of code that you are trying to get out to people. Instead, think of yourself as on a mission to care about/promote/help fix X, then mix and match various formats to reach out to people who might be interested. As part of reaching out and emotionally engaging with people, you'll promote and sell your webapp. My opinion, for what it's worth.