Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps?

The key word there is "typically".

I've seen people recommend doing exactly what I described. Obviously, being honest about what's up is not a bad thing, but that's not what I was talking about.

The reason we object to it is that in reality it's spam. 99% of the time it's not a great article, it's crap. You're not writing it out of joy, it's to get links and make a computer deep in google think it's relevant. You need to trick google into thinking people like it so you spam wherever you can and pray you get those links.

There aren't 100 great links per day on HN. It's actually extremely difficult to write good content. Yet there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of companies doing this.

All off-page SEO is grey as you're essentially trying to trick google into thinking your content is better than organic content. But is there any organic content any more?

On the other hand, we have to get off our high horse. Real life is full of spam, TV adverts, radio adverts, billboards, networking events where you have to filter the schmoozers from the interesting.

The web is the same way and if you don't compete to get your content out there, you competitor will. As everyone does it now, you have to do it too.

So I agree with you, but I'm more realistic about the fact that most content produced is going to suck.

Just FYI, TripLingo has been featured on Mashable, TNW, RWW, etc., and each of those posts generated between 200-1k tweets. Problem is, most of them are just bots that auto-tweet stuff from those sites. Probably got 10-15 legit tweets off of each. But be wary of tweets off of sites like that, I doubt anyone legit follows the people auto-tweeting.

Which isn't to say we didn't see a lot of traffic from those articles, just not from Twitter.

Here's some ideas we've used for our B2B app incentiBox (http://www.incentibox.com):

1. Tried Press Release company that says they will push your articles out to thousands of media sources - didn't work as well as we hoped, because they do just what they say: "push the article out in a feed", no guarantees it will even be picked up. I'd be careful with this one.

2. Contacted relevant bloggers - works pretty well. You need to find relevant bloggers so your web app is in line with their interests. Then they will likely write about you.

3. SEM - Google adwords. This can work, depending on the cost of your keywords. For popular keywords (eg. "Social media") this may be too expensive to see any results at all. It's a great way to test out initial response to your web app and test the overall market demand. Depending on your revenue model, if you can figure out how to set your adwords budget so that you have a low enough average cost of acquiring a customer, you can have great results.

4. Blogging - can be VERY effective if you keep generating relevant information/content, especially in the long term for organic search engine optimization. Don't dis-count the use of Twitter / Facebook, to promote your articles, re-tweet, etc. This takes time and you might not see results right away.

5. Try a social-media advertising app - of course we use our own product! Yes, a shameless plug, but depending on your webapp and target market (great for apps targeting the younger generation), investing in social media marketing may be a great way to get users. Check out our platform http://www.incentibox.com/ - you can set up contest or rewards program in minutes and get your visitors to help spread the word amongst their friends. It's always refreshing to hear that people signed up because of word-of-mouth!

6. Cold email / cold call - This imho is the best way to get INSTANT feedback. To start, call / email 20 ppl a day, and see if there's any interest. If yes, then it's a numbers game, and you should invest more time into this.

I would suggest trying all that you can think of for promoting. In the beginning it will always seem like guerrilla marketing - it pretty much is! But hopefully that will lead you to discover which methods work for you and which don't. Good luck!

SEO and SEM are must. Working on both for our site www.Pawrks.com. Still on launch page as we are cranking the code for the other pages we are giving extra attention to meta tags (any suggestions welcome) Also extensively canvassing with Facebook friends and twitter buddies to spread the word around. Media coverage will be important just when we launch with all glory.