5 Must-have Tools when Launching your Website on Product Hunt
A few days ago I noticed a post on Reddit (r/startup) asking for advice when launching his website on Product Hunt. This particular thread wouldn’t usually catch my eye, however, just last week I launched my side project on Product Hunt and felt obliged to provide some advice.
Whilst I had personally read multiple articles, listicals and blog posts providing detailed guides — how to obtain the most votes, tried and tested launch strategies, optimum time and day to be hunted… the list goes on — I thought I would provide some handy advice regarding the tools I used/ integrated on my website the day NoCode was featured on PH.
These FREE tools provided me with incredibly valuable user analytics, improved social media sharing, continued traffic to the site after launch and hundreds of newsletter signups in the process.
5 Must Have Tools for your Product Hunt Launch
Hotjar allows you to gain an insight into how your users interact with your website and what they are clicking on. Understand what users want, care about and interact with on your site by visually representing their clicks, taps and scrolling behavior by creating a heatmap like my example below.
Installing hotjar only took a couple of minutes, requiring me to insert the tracking code into my Weebly website footer (simple copy and paste!). After a few minutes data started to appear and a heatmap was generated.
If you are lucky enough to feature on PH, the data you will get from thousands of users in the form of a heatmap is worth it weight in gold. This allowed me to see where my users clicked, what pages got the most attention. I then adapted my site accordingly based on the data.
Hotjar also allows you to identify usability issues by watching recordings of real visitors on your site as they click, tap, move their cursor, type and navigate across pages. This again is totally free and I was blown away by the quality of data that was provided. This gave me a great insight into how much time people spent on a page, how and where they clicked and also the type of device, operating system and their geographic location. Trust me when I say it seriously addictive to watch!
Knowing your audience and what they want is an important success factor for any website. The best way to know your audience is through your traffic stats and this is exactly what Google Analytics provide for FREE.
Install Google Analytics a few days before your proposed launch and prepare to be blown away by the stats. I’m still analysing the data and finding fascinating trends about my users that I can now use to adapt my newsletters, social media content and future featured resources and tools.
AddThis is a fantastic free tool that allows you to add social buttons to your website allowing users to share the url or content of a particular page on your website. Make it easier than ever for your audience to spread your content around the web.
AddThis is extremely easy to integrate and only requires you to add some HTML to your website. AddThis provides a tonne of customisation on its free plan, allowing you to choose from hundreds (220+) of social media sharing buttons allowing you to adapt their look, colour and position on your website.
During the influx of traffic to my site from Product Hunt users could easily share my website to their preferred social media channel of there choice. This has spread like wildfire since and continued to drive traffic to my website post PH frenzy.
MailChimp is one of the best email marketing services available because it is extremely easy to use for anyone, regardless of how tech savvy one is or is not. It’s also an affordable choice whether you have 100 contacts or 20,000 contacts to reach. Create easy drag and drop newsletters in minutes.
I could praise MailChimp’s newsletter builder all day, but for this post i’m going to focus on specifically their subscriber pop-up tool.
MailChimp’s Form Builder allows you to create and style a signup form that launches in a pop-up modal when someone visits your site. The Form Builder allows you to customize the pop-up signup form and promote giveaways, contests, and offers on your website. Take a look at the simple form I built below.
Once the flurry of PH visitors ascended to my website I managed to collect over 700 emails addresses in a 24h period. This has been an essential tool that I’m glad I had setup during my PH launch.
Always wondered how small teams or a one man band can consistently post fresh content on multiple social media channels throughout the day and night! Me too.
Turns out they use tools like Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows you to schedule and manage all your social media posts from one dashboard. Hootsuite currently allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.
I would have seriously struggled by myself to post content on my social media streams, reply to comments on PH, respond to emails received and work my full-time job if I hadn’t had Hootsuite setup in the run up to launching on PH.
Sign up to Hootsuite and start scheduling posts for your PH launch strategically over a 24–48h period so you can focus on the other tasks at hand! Spend just 30 mins at the start of the day once you have been featured and embed the PH url to each of your posts. Try using the AutoSchedule option to allow Hootsuite to determine the optimum time to post your content.
Once you have all your posts scheduled you can then focus on thanking voters and influencers for their support throughout the day.
And if you still want to read some posts about successful Product Hunt launches here are some of my favorites below.
Looking for more free easy to use tools and resources ? Checkout NoCode: A curated directory of the best free resources & tools for non-technical entrepreneurs.
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