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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

Searching for reviews of my competitors, contacting the blog owners and asking for something similar, along with a free subscription - so far to a resounding silence.

It's listed in a few directories, and I still get a few visitors from the likes of KillerStartups (featured it back in March), but other than that I don't really know where to begin :)

Oh! I added an affiliate programme about a month ago and submitted that to various directories, and have had about ten users sign up for it, leading to zero sales.

Honestly, I think the product itself is good and enough people seem to want to pay for it - I'm just not sure what the next steps should be. I'm deliberately not mentioning the site as I want this question to not be specifically about me, but if you have any tips I'd love to hear them! :)

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While on one hand your restraint in self-promoting your site here on HN is admirable, I suspect that it reflects a reluctance on your part to aggressively market/promote/sell your site.

If I may be so bold, I suggest you try to get over this reluctance. If you're shy or self deprecating with your marketing message, you won't attract as much attention as you may deserve. Be bold, be aggressive. For example, try different approaches with the media (just asking isn't enough, you have to give them a reason to cover you).

Good luck!

You make a good point and I suspect that you may be right :)

I'll give it a try, I'm going to sit down now and think about what rocks about my web app (ahh, sod it, it's http://tweetingmachine.com), what makes it relevant to the people I contact, and why it should be covered. Thanks!

Looks like a nicely executed product, I haven't tested it, but this is the feeling I get from visiting the site.

However, I think you might have two minor problems here:

1) Getting people on the site and let people know you exist. See rmah's suggstion above. Free accounts for bloggers is a good idea at this stage, but not enough.

2) Customer acquisition: Please tell me immediately _how much_ I am going to spend. I won't hook my twitter account with your app, I've come to know your site 10 seconds ago, I won't let you dive through my contacts. I don't even know if this is a paid or a free service. To me this is a enough to let me close the browser tab and look away.

Thanks! Good point about the money, I've temporarily placed this on the homepage, and will be working at a better way to display and get people clicking "Buy now!" :)

I'm now following the advice and have spent a good amount of time today finding relevant websites and contacting them about TweetingMachine. If all goes to plan I hope to write a successful post here in a couple of months stating everything I did.

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