Their follow-up email, though, was what made me promote it. In it, they were thankful that I signed up, and offered to help me promote any of the projects I had on the go (I’m not ready to promote any of my apps so I’ll save that favour for later). So out went the tweet: skills: a tool for identifying expertise and passion in developers – http://skillsapp.com – Sounds interesting
Today, @smashingmagazine retweeted my message, and I received a thank you from the team at Skills. Then, they showed me their traffic. As you could imagine, Smashing Magazine, with their 300k+ followers could make a real impact on traffic, even if only 1% click through. As you can see, Smashing Magazine did a good number on their servers. Good thing they had aggressive caching!
(Disclosure: I am lucky enough to write for Smashing Magazine occasionally. It’s not very good money, but I learn a lot, get someone to edit my writing, and, let’s be honest, get a great deal of traffic to my blog and portfolio. They are also really nice people that I feel fortunate to know them. )
Making an effort to become friends with some bigger players in the industry can substantially increase your standing too. When you’re promoting new products, having someone with thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of active followers endorse it can initiate a snowball effect. Just ask the lovely folks at Alfredapp, who got picked up by some big names in the web design community even when they planned to release quietly. Now they are one of the top 10 apps in the Mac App store.
Okay, you’ve managed to get someone to promote your product. Yay! Great! In that case make sure that you have something at the other end to entice the traffic to click through.
In my experience, traffic from twitter is short lived. So, while big names may spike your traffic for today, it’s just one day. How about tomorrow? What are your plans?
Marketing is absolutely mind numbingly boring and takes a lot more effort than anyone realizes. Throwing marketing hours at a mediocre product, or trying to get the big names to promote something that doesn’t impress is a huge waste of a great resource. You need to make both your product and your marketing efforts stellar. So, take care with your marketing, grow your network, and you’re… er, halfway there!
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