
Ask HN: What marketing channels are working for you in 2019? - trevett
We have seen the decline of free channels in the past decade and more and more I hear of startups buying FB and IG ads to gain initial traction for their products and services.<p>What marketing channels are currently working for the HN community in a sustainable way?
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ecesena
We sell open source security keys:
[https://solokeys.com](https://solokeys.com)

Paid: Amazon, the thing I like is that their dashboard clearly shows marketing
cost and revenues, so you can very easily say whether it's worth or not.

Non-paid:

\- Github: [http://github.com/solokeys/solo](http://github.com/solokeys/solo)

Last time I measured, we had 1% of our traffic coming from Github, and 1% of
that traffic converting to a sale. This is pretty awesome I think, especially
because having a baseline we can improve. We're not making any strong sale-
pitch on Github, we simply put links to our store at the top and bottom of the
readme.

Right now we're running a crowd funding campaign, and because we knew Github
was bringing high quality traffic we're advertising it there.

\- Twitter. This is our 2nd social in sales. We're not doing anything special,
just clear profiles (personal and business) with links to the store, and clear
call to actions when you tweet.

\- Pinterest. This is the social that bring us most clicks the the store. I
know the platform very well, of course. For SoloKeys specifically the audience
is not right, so there's little to zero conversions to sales, but it's good
learning nevertheless.

\- Medium/Hackernoon. When we blog, we typically get spikes of traffic and
sometimes sales. But it requires time to write posts, so it's not really as
scalable as the other channels.

(We're barely using Facebook, and zero Instagram, so I can't really talk about
these).

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Catsing_Cats
I think many are a little too ad-averse. For a little bit of $ you can get
traffic that would take months to build organically. Nowadays I'd first
validate with ads and THEN go for organic channels.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
I think you're right, but Ad blockers complicate matters and make it necessary
to have organic more than ever. Google adwords works but my previous employers
standard issue install, blocked ads, including on Google, which for a b2b
business especially is bad.

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mkbkn
In my experience, I have found email marketing as one of the most underrated
and under-utilized channels.

Your email list is the most vital piece of data that you truly own. Everything
else depends on the respective platform's algorithms and uncontrollable
factors to a large extent.

Source: I'm a copywriter and have worked with several e-commerce stores.

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Gustomaximus
Maybe cause I am marketing, but I would say all major channels work in for the
right product, message and goal.

I see some people scoff at Adwords not being useful. Trust me, there is a
reason companies pay collectivly $100+ billion to this platform. This goes the
same for many other channels.

For free channels, YouTube, Facebook, Google Search and Google Maps do a great
job here for the right product and message.

For paid, all the major channels work well if aligned to their strenght. The
one channel many people look past is affiliate models. That said affiliate
tends to suit certain product and pricing. Also there is huge amounts of snake
oil in the affiliate business so get someone who knows what they are doing set
up campaigns. This applies to most marketing channels but affiliate/SEO are
probably the worst of having wool pulled over eyes.

Am happy to answer a few specific quesitons if your digging for information.

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trevett
Thanks. I'll try to contact you through your website.

