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Comment by itengelhardt | Hacker News Reader

Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far

1. Set up a blog on your domain

2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic)

3. get a number of emails from prospective customers

4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive

My response rate so far was >80%

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Good for you to have such high response rate. I learned the first two tactics from other people and applied it to my project. My blog posts usually have some hits everyday without prospects. I think my blogs did help some people and brings interesting topics. Unfortunately no luck. I'd appreciate if you can give me any input. Here is the blog: http://bingobo.info/blog/.

"3. get a number of emails from prospective customers" Can you elaborate on this step? How are getting these emails?

Typically, you swap them their email address for something they'd presumably want. Instant download of a white paper, one-month free course delivered over email about $FOO, etc.

Patrick already mentioned the best way to get email addresses.

However, for my use case (i.e. emailing cold contacts) you usually don't get their address handed to you. I just looked them up with a combination of Yellow Pages and Google-Fu.

Now that I think of it, I could probably ask the people on my list for interviews. Thanks for the idea, Patrick :-)

When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?

I do both. Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that. On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.

Thank you Christoph and best of luck to you and your projects.

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