
Ask HN: How do you advertise without spending money? - eagleal
If someone wants to share their story, it would be of enormous help to people here (HN users are constantly launching new products).<p>With a 2 man work force, I do basic advertising by sharing content of the product to free services (email, print stuff (brochures, posters, etc), twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services). I have also the benefit of being a designer myself, in this way I can deploy targeted websites, and somehow try to impress the potential customer with graphics or words.<p>(edit: It gets tricky to track all this services, though, without paying services who offer dedicated stats/tracking)<p>As a <i>developer, what do you do to advertise without spending money</i> (ie. by not paying services)?<p>Or, if you're a <i>designer</i>, what other methods do you use?
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patio11
Organic search engine optimization. I could talk about this topic every day
and not get tired. My two best tips are that 1) create a way such that linking
to your site solves a problem for someone else and 2) do #1 in a scalable
fashion. If you can do that, organic search is like a free money buffet.

Failing that utopian outcome, at the very least you can create things on your
website which solve problems for the type of people who give links. For
example, I'm a Rails developer. Among other talents, I can write code. Being
able to write code means I'm able to write OSS projects of use to other
businesses which use Rails. I host them on my site, and when other developers
write blog posts taking credit to their friends and bosses for solving the
problems that I actually solved for them ( _grins_ ), I generally get a
backlink.

OSS is by no means the only thing you can do. Good tutorials, evergreen
resources (things which will never go out of style in your field),
authoritative statistics, high-quality visualizations of data, etc etc, all
attract links. Again, try to do them at scale.

 _twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services_

Do you find that that actually gets results? I am kind of outside the Valley,
physically and spiritually speaking, and I just can't imagine a business
spending time on Facebook or Flickr and that benefiting them more than
spending the time on their own website.

SEO getting you a little money to reinvest into AdWords or similar paid
acquisition strategies is a nice feedback loop if you can get it, too.

~~~
eagleal
Yeah, I forgot to mention organic SEO (it's almost always the first thing you
can do).

>> twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services

> Do you find that that actually gets results?

Yes, if the tech industry isn't the only industry :) . I mean, it's not always
about web applications, like this time I have to advertise a series of books
(not mine).

Till, there is a company that centralizes this process (like a product
recommendation service/device in every ones homes; like a Google TV with
Google Tv Ad :P), we'll have to do things like this manually.

EDIT: If you're pretty much always responding on twitter/other service about
the bugs on your OSS project, then it might be considered a bit of customer
satisfaction, I guess.

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vaksel
I don't actually do these myself, but if I was a developer I'd do these:

1) start blogging about things in your niche.

That way you'll get a number of people in your niche coming to your site every
day and seeing a link to your product.

2) There are a ton of free/bonus advertising coupons, $100 at Adwords, $100 on
Facebook, $50 on Myspace, $100 bonus when you spend $30 on Yahoo. etc etc

Focus on long tail keywords in your niche, and you'll be paying 5 cents a
click, which will go a long way.

3) Since you are a developer create a few templates for all those blogging
services. Wordpress, Tumblr etc. Throw a link in the footer "Web Design by
YOUR COMPANY" and eventually you'll have a thousand blogs a) linking to your
site and b) showing off your work to thousands of people

4) Volunteer to do design for a few rising stars. i.e. from what I understand
Pallian did the early Mixergy's design for free to get his name out there.

5) create a bunch of long tail websites, and advertise your services through
those.

6) Print a bunch of business cards go to your local town center, and offer to
build sites for all of those small businesses. Charge one amount for a
template, and a much higher amount for a custom job.

7) Get on those freelancer sites, and start bidding on projects.

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paraschopra
Not sure if it applies to all startups but writing case studies or producing
info-graphics are great ways to attract attention.
<http://www.flowtown.com/blog/> are doing great job at the latter and we
(<http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php>) try to do a good job at
the former

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dpapathanasiou
It helps if you can donate some of your time to an open source project that's
complementary or related to what your company does.

For example, I volunteered to write the tutorial for Sigil
(<http://code.google.com/p/sigil/wiki/BasicTutorial>) because it's a great
alternative to the closed, expensive InDesign product
(<http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/>).

Tutorials or presentations are also good.

I created a basic overview of how to create an e-book, and presented it at
BarCamp5 in NYC.

After the conference, I posted the slides and links on my personal site
(<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=286>).

As a result of both activities, my company's site (<http://www.fifobooks.com>)
gets traffic and business (new registered authors and readers, as well as
other opportunities I hadn't expected).

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quizbiz
I share my excitement about what I'm working on with my close group of
friends. I give them free gear (shirts) when possible, behind the scenes
access as in stories about what I'm doing and seeing what I need to do. I ask
them for favors and get them involved. They get as excited as I am and there
you have the beginnings of word of mouth.

~~~
arfrank
You also get stories in publications that are always hurting for an
interesting story.

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bdickason
I do alot of the stuff like you mentioned but I have a slightly more nefarious
method that I've been thinking about trying.

There are alot of 'coupons' for Google AdWords. If you sign up for HostGator's
$5/month plan, for example, you get a $50 or $100 (I forget which) voucher. If
you buy the Google Analytics book (well worth the investment), you get a
credit. There are lots of websites and services online. You could
theoretically string these together to create a number of free advertising
campaigns.

Of course, the catch is that you have to create a new AdWords account each
time (most of the coupons are only for 'new' customers).

~~~
oziumjinx
And it may be tough to register multiple google AdWords accounts for the same
domain name. I think they check against that.

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CoryMathews
SEO is the biggest thing its keeps driving traffic and should keep getting
bigger as time goes on.

Blogging works to get you some visitors, as long as you write something people
want to read.

Contact bloggers, and local newspapers to write a review about your product or
site.

Post on related forums with a link in your signature

Not free but cheap:

Print out some flyers and post them around town (if going for a local market)

Create t-shirts and wear them and give them to people to wear.

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joubert
I would figure out if there is a way to create incentives for your existing
customers to spread the word. If they derive a benefit from talking about your
site/product, both they and you benefit from more eyeballs.

~~~
jeffepp
^^ This ^^ and SEO are the two best ways. Having your customers spread the
word inherently increases SEO as well.

Email me for a demo, we are about a week away from our beta launch for a
custom incentive engine.

