How have you started gaining traction?

I launched my app about 4 months ago, and already have gained about 30k+ downloads and 7k+ active users. 😊
Most of the users come organically, I just optimised my play store listing with the help of various articles, guides, google trends ands researching keywords. This is a crucial step if you want people to see your app/website. 🙌🏻
I also did some paid targeted marketing through google ads, but it’s results were almost negligible. 😅
Make sure you create your product listings on various startup sites like producthunt, indiehacker, betalist, crunchbase, etc. This can also help you a lot. 🚀
Also make sure to make good and productive use social media to promote your product and building a community. 💪🏻

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Cold emailing users
• Write blog posts to build up SEO keywords

I have multiple projects that I just started, but in terms of building an audience, YouTube seems to be great. I have a niche project (indiedevcasts.com) but I got more views than expected (was expecting not more than 20/50 views for the first video, got 480+).

Now I want to try for owlduty.com and see if I can create some traction. I open sourced my core library (provides traffic from github) so creating documentation with videos could be a good way to bring traffic to my website.

On the other side I really struggle to build a network/audience on Twitter; but https://firstinternetdollar.com/ helped me to get 2/3 followers I think and some website visits.

I'm not good at creating "big announcements", but more at building a community. But it asks time.

I will list few ways to gain traction that worked for me for various projects:

• getting into google first page for some very popular word
• paying for traffic (Google Adwords, Facebook)
• creating successful sociale media profiles for the project(Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc), and posting content on a regular basis.

The key here is to have a validated flow. If your website/app makes you $1 for every 1000 visitors, then you know how much time or money can you invest to get those 1000 visitors. For example, if you find a way to pay 0.5$ for every 1000 visitors, then you will make a profit and paying for traffic is not a problem anymore.

If you cant make a profit, you can wither find cheaper sources, or you can figure out how you can make more, improving your conversion rate or the purchase amount.

There are some good comments in here but I have some quick thoughts.
SEO is fantastic for medium and long term and really solidifies traffic.

But you absolutely need a short term solution and in my opinion needs to be a 'get your hands' dirty approach. Something that most likely can't scale (or shouldn't). Find where your customers hang out, some social network, discord, a forum etc., and make your presence felt there by being engaging.
I wouldn't recommend spreading it across multiple channels right at the beginning either, because this type of work is very time consuming

Good question. Our head of growth, Chris, recorded a video answer cause honestly it's a lot easier explaining over video. Since I am not yet allowed to post links in the comments, here's the Loom video in a shortened link using bitly. bit. ly/45bqVi2

Also, don’t do a lot of stuff because otherwise, you’ll end up with your energy going zero.

By the way, how fast do you want to grow? Do you want results in the next 2 months? Next 6?

It will be easy if you know your target audiences.
Some of the best ways to get traction are:

1. SEO takes time but its a must
2. Launching pads like Product hunt
3. subreddits like /entrepreneurridealong /entrepreneur are really great
4. The OG: Cold emailing
5. Hackernews and Indiehackers

Content marketing and influencer marketing work for us

Hi InfluenceLabs! Congratulations on your upcoming launch!

We're planning to "launch" in a coming months as well, probably Q3, but we've already started building an audience on several social media channels using the #buildinpublic approach (right now the Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Medium - we're using Zapier to automate postings). For social media, we're focusing on quality over quantity. In previous companies, I wanted to have a higher number of followers quickly but that hasn't always paid off in terms of the engagement we're looking for. We are also blogging 1-2 times/week sharing our build in public journey and step-by-step tutorials, lessons learned and knowledge along the way.

We put up the landing page about a month ago and because our name is a pretty common list of words, we're just trying to rank higher. We've already got some DMs for collaborations and we're building up both our waitlist and newsletter list in the meantime. Also, planning on some programmatic SEO! I considered paid ads, but I'd like to try the organic approach first, especially because I'm foraying into new territory with this business and should likely start with a few customers first before scaling.

In the coming week, we'll beginning sharing our first product on some relevant forums on Reddit.

So, basically putting in a ton of ground work now for a launch in the coming months! Hope this is helpful. Let us know when you launch <3

• SEO Keywords to be at the top of Google organic search
• Submit your project to different free blogs (this also helps you to scale at Google organic searches)
• Use social media to engage people. #buildinpublic as you are doing now with this post is becoming very useful lately.
• Paid Ads such as google search and Facebook ads.

Also, once you get that traffic to your site don't forget to interact with it. You can send them a newsletter with updates, have a support chat, etc.

What kind of project are you working on?
Can you share your landing page with us?

There's no general rule; it depends on the type of product you have.

I suggest utilizing all social media platforms (Twitter, Linkedin, facebook, Instagram, and TikTok) for product awareness. But the site depend on the product your working. Additionally, I recommend considering the following platforms:

• Indie Hackers
• Quora
• Reddit
• Medium
• Other community sites

By reliably conveying excellent substance and drawing in with our interest group through different internet based channels, we have figured out how to draw in a rising number of adherents and create positive verbal exchange suggestions.

11 Tips For Startups To Gain Initial Traction

1. Start with a Great Product It may seem obvious, but offering a great product is the most effective way to begin gaining traction. It is true that other factors, such as packaging and customer service, will contribute to your startup's success or failure. However, if you have something so amazing that it practically sells itself, you have reached the halfway point.

Take Elon Musk's Tesla. The brand of electric cars has not launched a costly advertising campaign. Instead, the product is supported by the company's reliance on word-of-mouth advertising. And only if there was a great product to boast about could that be accomplished. What's this? Tesla succeeded.

The "all-electric luxury sedan earned a satisfaction score of 99 out of a possible 100, which Consumer Reports said was the highest in years," as reported by CNN, was promoted.

The people will come if you build it. If you construct it well, they will arrive even faster.

2. Brand Yourself When you think of branding, images of logos, tone and voice, website design, and social media presence come to mind immediately. However, according to Kevin Barber, "brand is the experience you deliver customers." You need to go deeper than just a catchy slogan like Nike's "Just Do It" or a lighthearted image like Dollar Shave Club.

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For Michael Marcial, his image is in a real sense conveying his voice to his clients. The Motivation MasterMind podcast has received nearly 3,500 downloads and hundreds of subscribers since its debut, when it reached position 25 on iTunes in the Business Podcast category. Paving the way to the day for kickoff, Michael was extremely purposeful on utilizing the most impressive asset he had: the people I announced the launch date by contacting my friends and engaging in social media groups. I wanted to demonstrate that if you have that kind of drive, you can accomplish amazing things. You attract what is meant for you when you are true to who you are."

Uber's tremendous success can be attributed in part to this. The experience provided by the company is extremely difficult to duplicate. “An operations team on the ground in all the cities where Uber exists, and that team is working with both local drivers and local clients to grow the business there,” according to Uber employee Max J. Crowley. Additionally, he states, "They inevitably become a brand advocate when someone sees the ease of use, the fact that they press a button on their phone and in less than five minutes a car appears."

3. Reach out to influencers in your industry and community is one goal that should be clearly defined and accomplished. Whether that means sending a certain number of cold emails to influencers, interacting with them on social media, or offering them something they can't refuse.

Yelp's rise from a Bay Area start-up to a global powerhouse can be attributed in part to this one tactic. The company made contact with a select group of influential bloggers and reviewers, and as a token of appreciation, it placed the profiles of these "elite" reviewers on the homepage. Additionally, Yelp gave "elites" the first opportunity to RSVP for exclusive events. This resulted in the development of a community of brand advocates who actively promoted the new review site.

4. Don't do things that scale, as Paul Graham wrote: At Y-Combinator, one of the most common pieces of advice we give is to do things that don't scale. Graham is suggesting that you need to manually give your product a little push rather than waiting for it to take off. Graham recalls Stripe's success. The company was aggressive and recruited users early on, despite having a great product that would have attracted customers.

You need to give your startup a push by sending cold emails, contacting influencers, hosting an event where you meet users, giving away swag, or building your all-star team. It may take longer than you would like, and it will require a lot of effort and drive, but it is one of the best ways to move forward.

5. Utilize Your Email List Despite the numerous other pieces of marketing advice and technological advancements, email is still one of the most effective marketing tools. This worked for Facebook during the good 'ol days at Harvard. An early Facebook employee, Adam D'Angelo, recalls that "the founders invited their friends and sent emails to some mailing lists." In some other early schools, they used their friends' social networks or emailing mailing lists to spread it. He adds, "There was likewise an email information exchange structure where individuals at schools that hadn't been sent off yet could enter their email address, and when the school was sent off, every individual who had joined from that school would be messaged right away."

Email marketing has helped Zappos, Groupon, and Thrillist all gain traction because it lets them talk directly to customers, send special offers, keep customers up to date, and highlight new products or features.

6. Partner Up A lot of startups have been successful in establishing themselves by collaborating with other well-known brands. It is a fairly straightforward strategy that places your startup in front of customers that another business has already acquired.

Generally, there are four kinds of associations:

Integration. This is when your product works well with another product to improve both companies' features.
API. You could encourage other businesses to extend on your own platform if you built it. With TripAdvisor, Starbucks, OpenTable, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, and Expensify, Uber has done this.
Syndication. This is where businesses work together to combine their products or show their customers each other's products. In 2004, Kayak and AOL were able to accomplish this. SilverSky, a provider of cloud-based security, recently joined Office 365 as a syndication partner.
Referral. This can be either a member, affiliate, or association that utilizes your item. One of the most well-known referral programs is Dropbox's 500MB space offer to both the sender and the recipient.
7. Test everything, as Kissmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah has described it: "Growing your business without tracking your marketing performance is like driving with both hands over your eyes." In particular, startups should pay close attention to the following analytics:

Content examination that uncover who your guests are, the means by which long they stay on your site, and what they're doing on your site are not simply valuable, they are fundamental.
Analytics for advertising that keep track of how many people convert from marketing channels like Google Ads.
Email analytics that will track conversions and opens.
analytics for social media that identify the most effective social media channels.
Subjective examination that jump further into the needs and needs of clients. For instance, if a client unsubscribes from your newsletter, discuss the reason with them. even if only by email).
One of the fundamental tenets of the Lean Startup movement is this concept.

8. Produce Original Content It is expected of businesses to produce and distribute high-quality, original content, whether in the form of a blog post, social media update, or press release. Content has been demonstrated to assist with spreading brand mindfulness, become a power figure in your industry, share important data with your crowd, and get you gotten via web crawlers.

Mint was successful for a number of reasons, one of which was because of this. “We focused on building out a unique personal finance blog, very content-rich, that spoke to the young professional crowd that we felt was being neglected,” says Jason Putorti, a former lead designer for the company. The blog eventually rose to the top spot in personal finance and brought users to the app. While we had content that had a high viral coefficient, our app did not. Digg, Reddit, and other sites began to regularly view our popular articles and infographics.

9. Promote Original Content It's great to have original content, but it needs to be distributed to as many people as possible. Native content advertising lets you reach the right people with your content. One of these methods for promoting your content is Revcontent, which recently acquired Content Click. It works by allowing readers to continue reading an article or move on to explore other recommended content, which increases audience engagement on the publisher's website.

Advertisers offer the other content that is recommended. Your content is displayed for users to choose from if they are interested in a particular subject. They view your content when they click on it if they are interested. This is an extraordinary technique for focusing on clients with specific interests. Advertising this way is proving to be very popular with advertisers, and the adtech industry is expanding quickly.

10. Showcase Your Product Don't just sit back and wait for customers to come to you, as was mentioned earlier. Take your item to your clients. Attending events that are relevant to your company's objectives and products is one of the best methods for achieving this. At the annual SXSW Festival in Austin, for instance, both Foursquare and Twitter displayed their offerings. Not only was the demonstration at the popular event a good match, Additionally, it did so without having to launch a costly marketing campaign and attracted thousands of new potential customers.

11. Break new ground (pardon the incredibly abused buzzword)

At long last, you don't necessarily need to carry on reasonably. You can sometimes be a little quirky or unusual to get people's attention. "The sales of a cereal we created around the time of the 2008 presidential election called Obama Os'" has been cited by Airbnb as a means of funding the business and gaining publicity. Half.com paid the town of Halfway, Oregon to change its name to Half.com, OR for a year in 1999. On Back to the Future Day in October 2015, Lyft offered free rides in a DeLorean to residents of New York.

Influencers can help a lot if they see potential in the product and also get incentives to promote. Outsourcing growth is something I think you should consider. I have a made a post on this.