

Ask HN: Where do you submit your landing pages to gather potential users? - tim_nuwin

I&#x27;m trying to build a following with a pre-launch of a blog following projects I&#x27;ll be tackling next year (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;timnuwin.com)<p>Even though I&#x27;ve mentioned it a few times in IRC + google plus and collected a few emails, I don&#x27;t want to spam them and piss off the users who don&#x27;t want to see it.  Thanks.
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codegeek
You don't submit it anywhere necessarily. The best way is to get users to come
to you which involves doing many things.

First, have quality content that you are genuinely interested in writing. Be
detailed but also with a human touch. Keep it interesting. Cite real stories
if you can

Use a good newsletter software (Mailchimp, Aweber etc) and make it easy for a
user to give you their email address. Make it clear why you are collecting
their email and what will you do with it. If someone is genuinely interested
in your stuff, they will gladly subscribe

Start with a very simple Blog template where the focus is on your content and
nothing fancy. i personally like 2 column with the right/left column having an
About section and a newsletter form below it. thats it.

One trick with blogs is that you can auto post them to your social networks
like fb, twitter etc. If you use wordpress, there is a great plugin called
"SNAP" that stands for Social Network Auto Poster. Check it out.

Add Google analytics to your homepage. Create some "goals" and see how users
behave on your site.

Initially, focus on writing quality stuff and forget about optimizing on
google, SEO etc. It will happen with good quality content for the most part.

Rinse and repeat. There is no magic wand but this should give you a pretty
good start.

Lastly, make sure you know what to do with the collected email addresses. Do
you have a campaign setup ? Do you have autoresponders ? If you don't know
what these are, read about them. Engaging your users who could be potential
customers is a daunting task but also fun if you do it right.

~~~
trcollinson
Lately on HN there have been a number of threads on people being quite
successful with blogs and such. Of course this has left me thinking, "Hey! I
know interesting things. I bet I could share them in a blog and be rather
successful with it." This, however, if the first post I have read that really
explains in step by step detail how to make it really successful! So, thank
you.

One additional question: What kind of success have you personally had with
following steps like these?

------
ASquare
Try betali.st and erlibird.com

There's no guarantee of when they'll show up (unless you pay) but there are
the most common ways to get your pre-launch startup in front of an audience
who is interested in seeing new product everyday.

~~~
tim_nuwin
Ah very useful links. Thanks ASquare!

~~~
ASquare
Cheers!

------
AznHisoka
Nowhere. You find interested people manually and tell them about it. Do things
that don't scale.

~~~
tim_nuwin
Hmm.. I mean I guess if you want to get quality people off the bat, but
there's gotta be a place for people interested in a particular topic to be
able to discover blogs easily.

~~~
chatmasta
Hmmmm.... yeah.... if only there were some kind of news aggregator, with links
to blogs on topics that people were interested in... hmmm

;-)

~~~
tim_nuwin
haha, yeah but if I were to advertise the blog for sign-ups on hackernews or
reddit it would most likely be marked off as spam.

~~~
chatmasta
Would it though? You need to be a little sneakier with your self promotion
(and also not be ashamed of it!) It seems like you're suffering from the same
problem many engineers do when faced with marketing their products or
themselves. You don't want to spam people who aren't interested in your
product (you). Fair enough. Nobody wants to be a spammer.

I've always been a marketer first, so I don't have any personal advice for
overcoming this. I would advise you to look at some of the biggest brands,
both corporate and personal, and look at their marketing strategies. You'll
find that each brand, especially in its early stages, consistently
market(ed|s) itself in ways that you might deem "spammy". A frequent example
is Airbnb -- they pulled their listings from craigslist before they had both
sides of the rental market. How else were they supposed to get customers?

Is that spamming? Is it spamming to promote your product? To engage in tactics
that make it better for your users? If airbnb didn't use craigslist to acquire
early users, it likely would never have gained traction, and nobody would use
airbnb today. That would suck! Ask any airbnb user if they would be happy if
airbnb was gone. They will probably answer no. Therefore they are happier
because airbnb exists, but airbnb only exists because of the "spammy" tactics
its founders used in its early stages.

Is "spamming" wrong when it benefits your product/brand, and makes it better
for _your users_ (ultimately the only ones you care about)? Do you care what
people think if they aren't going to use your product or subscribe to your
brand? Why should you?

Once you realize that every popular brand goes through some kind of growth
hacking and/or marketing phase, you can accept it as the status quo
requirement for initial promotion. Then you have to realize that a personal
brand is no different than a corporate one. All the same branding rules apply.

Look at patio11, Brendan Dunn, Nathan Barry. They are two HN power users. They
have followings of people who upvote every post they write, who subscribe to
their email lists, and who buy their products. What do they all have in
common? PERSONAL BRANDING. They aren't afraid to brag about themselves, they
aren't afraid to ask for your email, and they aren't afraid to pitch
themselves to you as a product. They understand their personal brands are
valuable assets and they treat them as such. If you want to compete on the
same plane, you need to engage in the same tactics.

Self promotion is nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody does it. It's the online
analogue of self-confidence. Every leader needs to first be confident in
himself/herself, before anyone else can be confident in him/her. Leaders need
people to be confident in them. Therefore leaders need to be confident in
themselves. Self-confidence begets self-promotion, and both feed on each
other. Act confident, give people a reason to follow you, and build a
following. As your following grows, so will your confidence. It's a positive
feedback cycle. Be confident, promote yourself.

Congratulations on being on the receiving end of my daily diatribe! :)
Hopefully something I said helps you. Just put yourself out there.

