10 Common Sense Ideas to Drive Traffic to your Startups and Services
Who is sick of the term “Growth Hacking”? I know I am, plus these hacks are often very complicated and time consuming for someone who has limited time and energy to devote to testing these hacks that may or may not work.
I decided to create a simple list of common sense ideas that you can do to drive smaller but low effort traffic to your startups and services. Let me know in comments what your ideas are.
Read more below this inspirational stock photo…
1. Centralize your Startups
If you have a bunch of startups, it can be hard to promote them all quickly and easily. I created a very simple site for my parent company where I list all the Startups, Services and Blog posts that I publish. This isn’t an un-common idea, a lot of people will do this on their personal site on a sub-page called “My Projects” or something similar.
My parent company is called Krazier Inc., here is a partial screenshot of what my site looks like, as you can see it’s nothing fancy…
I like the idea of having all my content on one main landing page so there is no distraction and it’s super easy to send off a link to someone who asks “What do you do?”
2. Email Footer
Like it or not, email is still a huge daily part of our lives. I still send a ton of emails to clients, friends, family, introductions, etc. Why not use that to your advantage?
Here is what my email footer looks like (usually my phone number is in there too but I took that out for obvious reasons)
I don’t include all my startups in my footer, but certainly my more active ones. Some might say this is a bad idea, as you might get spam blocked for so many links in an email, but I have yet to run into that issue.
It’s a nice simple, trusted way to drive a little bit more traffic your way without being overly pushy about it.
3. Social Media Pinned Posts
In Twitter and Facebook (and others) you can have “Pinned” posts, I think people often forget to use that feature in a productive way. Be smart and use it effectively by adding a list of links to all of your startups and services. Add a simple emoticon to grab some attention and remember to have your “most important” link last so that Twitter will pick it up as your embedded visual.
Tip: You can do something similar in LinkedIn bio area and on other services that allow for long bios. (Sometimes links aren’t clickable though)
4. Tweet Back with Link to Website
When someone starts following me on Twitter (without me following them first), I will often send a tweet back to them suggesting they should check out my startup. You’ll want to start the tweet with their handle though, so you don’t clog up your main timeline. Here is an example…
Often times I’ll get something similar from other people but they do it to my Direct Messages. Maybe it’s just me but that seems to feel a bit more spammy and irritating. I think maybe because I expect direct messages to be more personal and important where as a simple tweet is less distracting and easier to ignore.
5. Follow and Interact with People
This is a fairly labor intensive tip, but just follow people on twitter and interact with the community. Every day I try to follow a bunch of people that are relevant to my industry, my location, my services and more.
Just think about all the successful Indie Startups that are successful, their Twitter account (and Facebook, Instagram, etc.) have like 10K followers. The easiest way to grow your own follower base is by following people yourself.
If people don’t know about you or your services it’s hard to grow. Get visible, the more visible you are the more you will grow.
In addition to that, have multiple Twitter accounts and cross promote on them. I have something like 16 profiles right now, all for different startups and services. I only focus on 3–5 in reality, but I have a parent company one, personal one, startup specific one, etc. When I launch a new startup, feature or content like a blog post I can push that content out across all of them, or a combination of them where it makes sense.
This allows me to reach a different set or type of follower.
6. Cross Promote Services: Part 1
As someone with many startups, low budget and no help, I need to be able to promote all of them as efficiently as possible. One way I do this is by cross promoting my various services in the footer of my sites. It’s out of the way but adds a nice backlink and makes it easy to get those “curious” people on my other services.
Here is how I do my footer on Retrospect.team, BugFeedr.com, etc.…
7. Cross Promote: Part 2
In addition to cross promoting services, you can cross promote content. I do this in a number of ways…
First, I list all my Medium blog posts on my parent site: http://www.krazier.com. This makes it very easy to see articles about all of my startups and services and not just one. I used to have blogs for every service, but as you can imagine this becomes un-manageable and end up not publishing posts on any of them. I have reduced down to one main Medium blog.
Secondly, I have a feature called “Broadcasts” over on First 100 Influencers where I promote my blog posts or other important Startup information. I also allow all members on First 100 Influencers to do the same. It’s a simple and affordable way to gain some additional traffic and reach an audience you typically wouldn’t.
Broadcasts are then pushed out through our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles for even more traffic potential.
8. Join Online Communities
There are what seems like thousands of online communities you can join to gain feedback on your startups, promote your startups and get help with your startups. Join them and participate in them.
As you build your startup you will often run into issues, what better place to get help than from others who also have similar issues. Being part of these online communities doesn’t mean constantly spam them with a sales pitch. Sometimes you can gain traffic simply by asking for help on the issues you are legitimately struggling with.
Many of these communities also provide a place to publish your Startups and Services in a community directory. It’s a simple way to showcase your hard work without being pushy. For instance, here is what my profile on Indie Hackers looks like: https://www.indiehackers.com/user/Krazier
9. Complimentary Services
Ok, so this one isn’t quite so easy, but it’s important to think about if you want to build a bunch of startups.
Build startups that compliment each other, for instance I knew that by having lots of startups I would have a big need to have an easy way to collect feedback, bugs and feature requests from my clients and users. I didn’t want to create a new contact form for every site, that just gets tedious.
So one of my services is https://www.bugfeedr.com a simple tool for collecting feedback from my users with an embeddable form.
So in the footer of all my sites I have a link to “Feedback and Support” which takes the user to my feedback form for that specific site. Users can fill out the form with relevant information, steps to reproduce, urgency and even attach screenshots. I can then manage those tickets from my dashboard rather than my email.
This is just one subtle way that I compliment and cross promote my services with each other. Give it a try: Sample Form
10. Can you guess the last one yet?
Let me give you a hint, you are reading it right now. It’s important to give things away for free that are helpful but can also offer some value to you as well. Creating a blog post similar to this where I’m offering some real-world tips that I use everyday is a simple way to grab the attention of entrepreneurs who truly want more ideas to grow their businesses.
In Closing…
Those are 10 different ideas that I use to help grow traffic across my startups and services without spending any money and without feeling like an annoying sales guy.
What simple, common sense ideas do you focus on?
