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Comment by tjholowaychuk | Hacker News Reader

Nice congrats!

I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me.

Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two

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We've tried everything, and the only two techniques that have paid off are: website SEO (including having a blog) and Adwords. Adwords is hard - we've thrown away many thousands of dollars on garbage traffic. And some keywords are in the $15-$30 per click range! (our competitors have deep pockets)

Interesting, I was pretty much ignoring SEO since it's such a saturated market (for my stuff at least), good to know!

Also in a very saturated market. Getting to the first page of Google is everything. It takes time work, editing each page, good content, and (though they seem to want to downplay it) good incoming links.

But TJ, you already have a platform, I would imagine that you'd get inundated with inbound request ;)

How long of a tail do you target for SEO? Especially with the blog.

Do you do rich content marketing? Like publishing books, useful infogrpahics, etc?

No, but it would be great if I was that creative or could come up with stuff like that.

TJ – I've found this book to be particularly useful for generating marketing ideas: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu... Written by the founder of DuckDuckGo, and a great reminder of all the different channels for marketing.

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