
Ask HN: What was your product's biggest marketing win? - mijustin
My friend Lars recently told me that his company&#x27;s biggest win (in terms of getting new email leads) was a focus on SEO: &quot;Nothing beats people searching with intent.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s been your biggest marketing win of the past year?
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JoshDoody
I have had two pretty big wins.

Pretty easy (results in days): Answering questions on Quora was a relatively
easy, quick win. I answered a question on salary negotiation or job interviews
every day for a month, and immediately saw a lot more interest in my site.

Harder (results in 90+ days): A focus on SEO has really paid off. SEO takes a
while to build up, but once it's built up, it's pretty reliable traffic
source. That means I can spend time working to offer more value to visitors so
they'll stick around and come back later.

~~~
mijustin
How long did it take? What keywords did you target?

What tools / approaches were most helpful?

~~~
JoshDoody
My site is
[https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com](https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com)

It seems like you're just asking about the SEO side (not Quora), so I'll focus
on that.

My book is about salary negotiation, so most of my focus is on variations
around "salary negotiation". That's a pretty competitive search term, so I
focus on more long tail terms like "salary negotiation email", "salary
increase letter sample" and "current salary interview question".

The tools I use are all free: Google analytics, Google search console, Google
keyword planner, MozBar, and Google itself.

When I want to write a new article - I have a topic in mind - one of the first
things I do is hop into the Keyword planner and figure out what people are
ACTUALLY searching for around that topic. Most of the time, the way _I_
describe the topic is not the same as what people are searching for.

Once I know what people are searching for, I write the same article I would've
written, but I try to use the more common terms rather than my own made-up
terms. (For example, I would not usually say "salary negotiation email sample"
\- I would say "counter offer email template" or something like that. But when
people want that email template, they search for "salary negotiation email",
so that's the terminology I used for that article on my site.)

I gave a very, very brief overview of some other tactics I use in a talk at
this year's MicroConf in Las Vegas. Here are my slides, a link to a video, and
links to some of the tools I use:
[http://www.joshdoody.com/microconf](http://www.joshdoody.com/microconf)

Hope this helps!

~~~
d_evyn
I've never really thought about diving deeper into those tools until you and
several others have been mentioning it more and more.

Quora has surprised me how much traffic you can get from it if you're
correctly and directly answering questions with value

~~~
JoshDoody
I highly recommend Quora as a marketing channel. It's worth exploring for your
subject. Some areas aren't great, but some are very good. Mine (interviewing,
salary negotiations) is particularly good on Quora because people have LOTS of
questions about those things.

You could just search for a few terms in your area of expertise and see what
comes up. You'll know pretty quickly if there are a lot of questions about it,
or if Quora might not work for you.

------
paulmatthijs
We reached out to everyone that ever did a review of a direct competitor
within the last 4 years - we were very much last-to-market.

About 10% actually did a review of us on launch which gaves us a major boost.
However, the ones that reviewed us a few months later are those with a long
tail.

Reach out to those that love good products. Even if they have a small
audience, it all adds up in the end.

------
spencerfry
Biggest marketing win for
[https://www.withcoach.com/](https://www.withcoach.com/) has been using our
own product to create and promote free content.

Since Coach is an online course platform, we're not only giving people a demo
of our product, but we're also providing value through content.

For example, we giveaway a free eBook on selling more online courses & digital
products: [https://coach.withcoach.com/level-up-your-
sales](https://coach.withcoach.com/level-up-your-sales)

We also run a free email course on launching your next digital products in 10
days: [https://coach.withcoach.com/10-day-product-
bootcamp](https://coach.withcoach.com/10-day-product-bootcamp)

Both have driven thousands of leads to our product.

------
jasonkester
The Cheap Bastard Plan:

[https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx)

~~~
jpster
Hats off to you for thinking up a really clever way to get and offer something
of value to people who are super price-sensitive.

------
bossybowser
Our focus has been on giving as much free value at
[https://www.cluboid.com](https://www.cluboid.com) as we can.

We mostly do this through our blog to pick up traffic like @JoshDoody
mentioned below, but we try to capture the email by pay-walling (which I was
MASSIVELY against at first) with a subscription page popup.

From there we drip feed them value before ever mentioning our own product.

However, without a decent backlink profile it can seem like you're not getting
anywhere, so do bear in mind that SEO is the other side of the coin here.

------
limedaring
For [https://hellowebapp.com](https://hellowebapp.com), it was running
Kickstarter campaigns to promote the books. It's a really effective way to do
a "pre-order" campaign for the book, start a lot of conversations, and start
building my email list (not to mention getting a chunk of money that replaced
a traditional advance a publisher could give.)

For [https://weddinglovely.com](https://weddinglovely.com), I work with small
businesses and running the weddings blog has been our biggest marketing win.
Our businesses send us content, which we publish, getting traffic and also
cementing our relationship with the submitting business. We've also started
getting significant affiliate revenue ($2k+ mo) from past articles we've
written.

------
mijustin
OP here. These answers are great! Feels like content marketing is a big winner
so far.

If you'd rather not comment on this thread, I've also created a quick survey
here:

[https://tinymarketingwins.com/2017survey/](https://tinymarketingwins.com/2017survey/)

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d_evyn
I set up a small product and self assessment tool for
[https://compassofdesign.com](https://compassofdesign.com) validating my
target audience.

About 20% of my visible audience took part in the assessment and/or bought the
product. I got a really good vibe of the people that are most likely to engage
and who I should be focusing on.

Surprisingly, people that my content is reaching are further along in their
journey than I had intended on reaching out to.

This has been my biggest result so far from my efforts

------
thomasrw
Writing, blog posts on [https://thomasroest.com/](https://thomasroest.com/)
that lead people to
[https://linuxforwebdevelopers.co/](https://linuxforwebdevelopers.co/)

------
pryelluw
B2B here: Cold everything. Then put them on a drip to keep warm if nothing
happens quickly.

Be active not reactive.

------
codegeek
Yep. Inbound marketing. Let people find you. That is the most qualified lead
ever.

