1. Commit to spending at least 50% of your time on marketing. For every hour of coding, do an hour of marketing.
2. I used the book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth to build a marketing plan.
3. The first exercise of the book was to focus on the outcome you want (for example, I want 1000 paid subscribers by end of 2018) and then figure out how big of a funnel you need to build. That helps you be realistic about what types of marketing to do.
4. I took a Udemy class on digital marketing -- It was about 20 hours of material that was on sale for $12. I found about 1/3 of it useful.
5. I am focused on marketing ideas that are repeatable and scalable. I do a lot of work up front to setup a marketing idea, but then I can keep it going with minimal new work. For example, to do blogger outreach, I first built and tested a drip campaign in Mailchimp. Then I harvested the first 50 blogger emails myself and determined my campaign would work. After that, I outsourced the blogger email collection. Now, the free lancer collects the contact info and loads it into my drip campaign.