Marketing any project can be challenging. Marketing your side project can come with its own added complications.

Some of the things you would normally do, become even more difficult due to the lack of time, or simply the actual times when you can work on your project.

Although there may not be an actual conflict, any day job you have may restrict exactly how you are able to share and discuss your project with the world.

For any project to be successful, we need to attract visitors, that we may convert to users and paying customers.

In the past we relied heavily on tech publications, such as TechCrunch, Wired or ReadWrite to bring attention to our projects and bring visitors. In the absence of such coverage, we turned to paid advertising to bring those visitors.

Fortunately, there are now a many different ways we can reach potential customers.

Social Media

Growing a following and posting about your project is a good way to attract visitors.

​Twitter has been my preferred social media platform for years, but others have found great success on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram.

This is by no means easy and can take a long time to get a significant following, but can worth the effort in the long term.

The build in public movement on Twitter for example has been a great source of exposure for many projects. You do have to be careful to make sure you're growing a following of potential users rather than other people making products.

Community / Forums

You could put Reddit in the social media bucket, but I think it belongs here. Communities gather to discuss topics of interest to them. If your product serves those communities, mentioning your product or sharing what you're working on (in line with their rules) is a great way to reach potential users. Gummy Search is a great way to find relevant communities on Reddit.

Similarly, using Facebook groups, you can find and engage with potential users for your startup, gather valuable feedback, and build a community around your product or service.

Directories

Directories have always been an important resource on the Internet. Going back to Yahoo! and DMOZ, humans have curated listings to help people navigate the every growing Internet.

Making a recent resurgence in popularity, directories can be a great way to reach potential users. Simply submitting your project to topical directories can get you great exposure.

As an example, users are looking for recommendation for new AI related products, and there are good number of AI related directory you can submit your product too (if it fits) to gain, often free, exposure.

A different kind of directory, sites like Product Hunt, can also provide good exposure. Rather than being focused on a particular topic, here people gather to find the latest launches.

Search Engines

Traffic from search engines can be a great way to get users. These users are often already looking for information or solutions that your product may offer.

Making sure that users searching find your projects if often referred to as Search Engine Optimization.

There are 4 key components to SEO:

Keywords

You need to identify the words/phrases that potential visitors use when search for related content, making sure that these are included in your website pages.

Tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush are very popular to help you with this.

They provide ways to research what is being searched, the number of times that search is conducted, and how difficult it will be to rank high in results for those terms.

On-Page SEO

There are a number of factors that ensure search engines and visitors find the content in your website.

Title tag and meta descriptions must be included.

Heading and subheadings (h1, h2, etc.) should be used to structure and make it easier for both users and search engines to understand. The

The URL structure for your website should be clean and include the keywords you are targeting.

You should link to relevant pages inside your website, not just to pages elsewhere on the Internet.

Technical SEO

Factors such as the speed of your website, good sitemap and structured data usage make sure search engines can quickly access the pages and information you want included in search results.

Off-Page SEO

The most important aspect here is the number of backlinks (from relevant/related sites) there are to your website.

This can be difficult early on for a project, but directories have been a good way to get early traction.

Mentions on social media too are now being used a signal for search engines as to the authority of a given site.

I've been focusing heavily on SEO for recent projects, and will do a deeper dive later on how I've been using it on my projects.

In the next post, I'll share details of my launch plan for Playlist Kit.

Cheers,
Mubs