Drive Traffic

[00:00:00]
>> We're all ready to go, now we need to drive some traffic to it. So how do we do that? Well, we can start off with a bit of community engagement, right? There are all those communities we talked about where our audience hangs out. We can start posting on there and we can be really honest and upfront and say, look, I'm thinking about building this thing, love you to check it out.

[00:00:28]
If you think it's cool, feel free to pre-order or to join the mailing list, if you've got feedback, drop me an email. Where you go will be somewhat dependent on your audience, but those are the kinda places. You might be wondering, well, why don't I do a Product Hunt to launch?

[00:00:54]
Because, couple of reasons. First of all, Product Hunt tends to favour applications that got very broad appeal. There are certain types of people that spend their lives on Product Hunt. And if that's not your audience is probably not the best platform for you. It also doesn't address the issue of generating traffic over the long term.

[00:01:19]
So, give you a big spike of traffic, because if you perform well on Product Hunt, you'll get a load of traffic from it. But that's not giving you any sense of the sustainability of the business over the long term, or whether people will buy over the long term.

[00:01:38]
So it's a kind of artificial thing. I'm not saying you don't launch on Product Hunt later, but I wouldn't run this test campaign, I would wait till the products actually up and running before I consider putting it anywhere like Product Hunt. So, yeah, just bear that in mind, it's not the time to do that kind of thing right now.

[00:01:59]
Now other option is Content marketing, I do a lot of that as a way of drawing awareness to my landing page. So there's no point of posting to your blog cuz nobody's reading it. But you might wanna go and blog on other people's sites and be a guest blogger, that can be an excellent way of reaching your audience.

[00:02:20]
So, I've blogged over the years on all kinds of really dull blogs that like the institutional web managers workshop blog, right? Sexy, that is, isn't it? But that was where my audience for that particular campaign was. So that's where I went and blogged. You go where your audience is and contribute, and you talk about a subject that surrounds whatever it is.

[00:02:46]
The other one I do quite a lot is podcasts. So, for example, appearing as a guest on podcasts that audience is on. And again, it's the same principle, you don't just go in there and sell the product because nobody will care and they won't want you as a guest on the podcast if you do that.

[00:03:05]
But you can talk about some of the pain points of your audiences and some of the ways they can deal with it and how your app can help with that. And inevitably, a podcast host will always say, where can people find out more about you or something along those lines and that's when you promote it.

[00:03:21]
Then of course there's social. So, you can start posting on social about the pain points and the questions and the goals the audience has. And in your bio, you link back to your landing page. Also, engaging with influencers via social, right? Not in a, hey, will you check out my app, please you've no idea how many of those I get every day.

[00:03:50]
And I'm a, probably the worst influencer that you can get out there in terms of status. But what you're doing is you build a big, to build a relationship with some of those people. And don't go, I'm not talking about massive influences here. I'm talking about influencers with a small lie.

[00:04:11]
There are key people in an industry who aren't necessarily doing TikTok right? But are key people that a lot of people know and chat with and stuff like that. So, I remember once I was working on a higher education campaign. And you remember I mentioned institutional web managers workshop.

[00:04:33]
Well, that was run by a guy called Brian, right? And Brian just ran that mailing list, but everybody knew Brian, right? And Brian was at every event, he was always very chatty, everybody liked Brian. I became friends with Brian and Brian ended up promoting my stuff. Now, would you call Brian an influencer?

[00:04:54]
Well, he is, but he's not an influencer with a big eye, so look for those kinds of people. The Brain's of this world, right? They don't get enough love the Brian's of this world. So social is another and then of course there's paid acquisition. So, you might want to put a bit of money into it, doesn't need to be a lot, few $100, if you can afford it even less if you can't just to put out some paid posts, maybe some sponsored posts on certain well-regarded websites.

[00:05:28]
Probably not as high on the agenda for me, I would prefer to pay some money, maybe for some pay per click advertising where I'm only paying for click-throughs on relevant search terms. Or maybe some social ads. But you gotta start thinking about how are you going to be regularly driving your audience.

[00:05:49]
And if you can't drive them to the landing page, you're not gonna be able to drive them to the product at the end of the day. So the key, you're gonna start thinking about your ongoing marketing strategy and that landing page is a test scenario for that. But it does all basically come down to either organic or paid acquisition and is either kind of content marketing and getting out there where your audience is or it's ads.

[00:06:19]
Those your two choices in a nutshell. Over time you can get more sophisticated, for example, Frontend Master, they don't need to advertise to a lot of places because they've built their name up. They've got podcast and they've got a blog which you've got a good readership already so that, people are coming to them rather than them going out to people.

[00:06:44]
But you're not gonna have the luxury of that to be in with, so you gonna have to go where your audience are. So there's a lot of legwork involved in that, and that's the thing that most people forget. The marketing will take a vast majority of your effort.

[00:07:01]
I mean, I know lots of app owners and they spend most of their time going to events, going on podcasts, that kind of thing. So it's a big part of the job.