Ask HN: Need advice on marketing and distribution
I need your help regarding marketing and distribution of my web app - DomCop.com. I am a techie at heart and find myself a little lost when it comes to sales, marketing and distribution. I hope someone can help guide me.
I launched DomCop.com a few months back and I've had lots of great reviews from (paying) customers on the app functionality, but I am having a terrible time reaching out to new customers. I have tried the following channels for distribution.
1. Posting to forums in the seo/domain auction niche - I got most of my customers from here. However, I do not want to spam the forums and therefore this channel becomes very limited.
2. Running banner and text ads on forums - this has surprisingly not been effective on the very forums that customers have converted from regular posts.
3. Google adwords - these are proving to be too costly and are not as effective as forums.
4. Facebook ads - these ads were cheap - but have not been converting.
5. Stumble upon - same as facebook - cheap, but not converting.
I've read on HN that blogging in your niche and contacting other bloggers is a great way of getting good traffic. But, I feel like that would take away the time I could use to add more features (especially ones that current customers have requested for). I am trying to work on SEO as well - but this would take a while before it generates decent amount of organic traffic
Are there any other channels that I am missing out on? How do I go about this? Should I try and get someone on board who has knowledge of internet marketing and sales (a business co-founder). I am a programmer by profession - so not very sure if I have been going about this the right way.
Thank you for your time.
Akash
A little about DomCop.com - The app provides information on expired domain auctions - verified page rank, SEOmoz and SEMrush data, social stats.