Ask HN: How do you promote your side projects? - yanis_t
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limpkin
\- reddit

\- content gathering websites (such as hackaday, if electronics)

\- applying to conferences

\- IRC

\- related topic forums

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justboxing
TL;DR:

\- Identify your target users / audience

\- Identify sites and forums where they hang out online

\- Get involved in those communities, and subtly promote your app / site,
answer questions that your app or product or site might really help them with

\- Google Adwords, FB Ads etc require a huge budget to be effective, so it
usually doesn't give ROI for side projects that are just launched.

LONG ANSWER:

It really depends on what your app or site is about, who it's targeted
towards, and what problem it solves.

1 size does not fit all. You should look at your traffic, analytics
demographics (and referral sites if you are getting referral traffic) and
other data to identify avenues for promotion.

Let me give you an example.

My most recent project is [http://www.visaok.in](http://www.visaok.in) \- It's
a niche job board for tech jobs where the employer will sponsor your work visa
/ permit to come and live and work in their country.

My target audience is young, smart techies who want to leave their home
country (ex: India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Eastern Europe and Middle eastern
countries) and live and work in a progressive nation like Germany, Australia,
Netherlands etc.

So I started hanging out at immigration forums and answered visa questions and
noticed a steady stream of traffic

I also noticed a lot of traffic from India and China and many were asking me
questions about how to apply for work permits etc, so I identified the top
visa sponsoring countries on my site, and started to make visa guides 1 by 1
for each of the countries. Examples: [http://www.visaok.in/work-
permit/blog/](http://www.visaok.in/work-permit/blog/)

Now, I am getting requests to translate the guides into chinese, so I am
looking for a bi-lingual english-chinese speaking person to help me.

Should you get paid advertizing?

For side-projects that are just launched, I do not recommend this. I tried
this with my other fun side project (didn't expect it to make money, just did
it cos I love cats). [http://www.pawpurrazi.com](http://www.pawpurrazi.com)

I tried FB Ads for 50 $ and Google ad-words for 100 $. Facebook was total
waste. I got about 800 likes on 20 posts over 20 months, less than 5% was
actual visits. Most people seem to just click the Like button for some reason.

Google ad-words was effective but expensive.

Also, if you are going the ad route, make sure you get your money's worth by
either having a newsletter signup form, or if it's an app, user signups. You
can setup ads on FB where you only pay if the click-er performs a certain CTA
(call to action).

Hope this helps

Feel free to ping me. Email in user bio link.

