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- 🖐️5 Ways to Market Your Business
Hey friend 👋
Today I want to talk about the marketing strategies I've found to work where you don't need to spend any money. I think these are useful to people who are just starting out.
So let's get into it -
5 Ways to Market Your Business
Marketing is one of those things that most creators and makers find awkward and uncomfortable doing.
But it's still super essential.
Without marketing, there's no business, there's only a product, that makes no money.
So we must do it.
But most marketing methods are expensive.
Over the last 12-15 months I've found 5 marketing channels for my projects to work well, where I don't have to spend any money into them.
If you don't have much of a marketing budget (like me), then you will find these useful -
1. Building in Public
This is a totally legit way to market your product in the early days. You're sharing your thought process, your lessons and your reasons for building the product.
Your ideal customers are bound to be attracted to it.
Pick a channel and talk about your business every day -
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Or anything else.
Make sure to pick a platform where your customers also hang out.
Once you grow, you can choose to stop building in public and to prevent your secrets from the competition, or keep building in public to share lessons with your followers.
2. Go to communities
Subreddits, Hackernews, FB groups, Slack communities, Quora.
Your users are hanging out somewhere online.
Go there every day and talk about your product.
Explain how you can solve the problems of the community. Don't be overly promotional otherwise you will get banned. Communities don't like self promotion.
But they do love value.
So provide them with value, and you will benefit from it in the long run.
3. Collab with an influencer
You don't have an organic audience, but someone else might have it.
A newsletter writer
A YouTubers
A TikToker
Barter a deal with them.
Maybe give them an extended free trial of your product in exchange for a shoutout.
4. Submit to directories
There are directories for all types of products -
Product Hunt
AppSumo
BetaList
There are even newsletter directories you can submit your newsletter to.
Whatever be your project, there are directories that would love to collect and feature your information. And their audience will be mostly early adopters - perfect people to give you feedback in the early days.
The backlinks from them can even help you with SEO as well overt he long term.
5. SEO
Search Engine Optimization.
Write blog posts answering specific questions that your ideal customer maybe asking on Google.
This will take time to kick in.
But once it starts working, it can be a source of regular free traffic over the long term.
Bonus - Go 1:1
The best strategy I like in the early days.
You know who the perfect user of your product is?
Reach out to them and ask them to use it. Reach out cold via email or DM.
It would be easier if they knew you before hand, this is where point 1 helps a lot. Building in Public can make 1:1 outreach easier.
All these methods don't nee money, but they do need time.
Once you know the channels that are working for you.
And you make some revenue, you should start looking at paid marketing channels. T
hat is the only way to scale your marketing activities. Until then, focus on these 6.
That's it for today, tell me which strategies do you use for your own projects? I would love to learn and apply them to my own projects.
Read the Twitter thread version of this post here.
Cheers!
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Now, onto the finds and reccos of the week -
📢 Finds, recommendations and shout outs of the week
This week I found a really interesting newsletter - The Playbook of the Unemployable. If you want to become your own boss, then you should definitely check it out. Aligns a lot with how I like to think about work and life.
This week's recommendation is The Craftsman Creative Newsletter. It's a newsletter by Daren Smith, he helps 5 figure creators become 6 figure creators. I'm a big fan of Daren and how he's building his creator business without relying on social media (unlike me 🙄). So if you want to build a business without trying to build an audience then definitely check it out.
This week's shout out is for The Category Surfer's newsletter by Stan. I'm a big fan of data and research backed newsletters, here Stan does a great job of finding new and interesting categories to go into and build solutions for. Especially loved this issue of the newsletter. Very interesting opportunities have emerged because of the rising trend of remote work. Do check it out.
👋 Bottomline
Time to go, these were my best performing tweets from last week -
Thank you for reading, see you again next week 🙏
Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
🦉 21 simple tips to get your first 1000 Twitter followers without losing your mind here
✍️ Write high converting copy like a pro here
💸 Learn how to make profit as a creator here
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Cheers,
Ayush
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