What is this article about?
I wanted to share my experience on how to promote something on the internet. I have used/still using some products/services and I will tell you about their performances.
What does this document cover?
- Why to promote something?
- How to promote your product?
- Keep track, measure data
- Hire professionals
- My results
Why to promote something?
Well, otherwise noone will know about your creation. I believe that if you are living in a society, you have a duty to fullfill your destiny, do your job and inform others about your creation. Yes, I believe it is a duty, I can talk about this for a few hours, but not now!
How to promote your product?
I am certainly no expert in digital marketing but I am trying to learn. Here are a few things that I learned recently while I was trying to promote myself to learn about the social media. My task was to get as much as attention that I could in the social media.
- Whether you like it or not, you have to use social media. You have 0 other choices. Everyone is in there, most people are glued to their phones and they are not looking anywhere else. If you want to get their attention, you have to start appearing in there.
- There is a lot of noise in the social media, so to get noticed, you need to make a difference.
- Get more followers: This helps you a lot to get noticed. If you consider an average user is following 300+ accounts, it’s unlikely that your post to appear on their feed. But if you have more followers than average, it means your post will be more likely to appear on their feeds. Because popularity is everything in social media. To get more followers is not an easy task. You need to follow the steps:
- First thing is to build a proper profile and choose a topic to share things. Best would be to choose a single topic and post only about that. If you share about a hundred different things, you probably will fail to get an audience.
- Post consistently. Post something new every day and tag it with the relevant hashtags/keywords. Adding a location also helps to get noticed.
- Interact with the others. You need to consistently like other’s posts, comment, follow etc. People feel in debt when you like their post, so they come back and pay you back by liking your post
- Get more followers: This helps you a lot to get noticed. If you consider an average user is following 300+ accounts, it’s unlikely that your post to appear on their feed. But if you have more followers than average, it means your post will be more likely to appear on their feeds. Because popularity is everything in social media. To get more followers is not an easy task. You need to follow the steps:
- Cheat. Yep, if you don’t cheat, there is zero chances that you will get noticed among a million people. So, this is how people cheat:
- For instagram, use a service like stim social. They simply let you to choose a target and start bombarding them by likes, comments and follows. That’s all they do, they simply automate the interaction for you.
- If you have a coding background, you cna use a tool like InstaPy. This tool does exactly the same thing with stim social, but you don’t pay for it.
- Use Selenium to generate automated jobs. They have chrome extensions like Katalon Recorder to created automated jobs.
- Advertise on facebook and instagram. But don’t choose a target automatically. Facebook allows you to upload a list of Facebook IDs to show the advertisement to. If you don’t have an audience already, it means that you don’t even know who will buy your product. Don’t invest on your product if you don’t know who you are going to sell it to already. It’s as simple as that. Go ahead, list the relevant facebook groups, extract the FBIDs. Here is a simple script to extract the IDs on a developer tool when you browse the FB Group page.
setTimeout(() => {start_first();}, 3000);
function start_first() {
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
var last_child = document.querySelectorAll(".profileBrowserGrid:last-child");
last_child[0].childNodes[1].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].click();
setTimeout(() => {continue_scrolling();}, 3000);
}
function continue_scrolling() {
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
var last_child = document.querySelectorAll(".profileBrowserGrid:last-child");
if(last_child[1].childNodes[1] !== undefined) {
var doc = last_child[1];
var more_wrap = doc.childNodes[1];
var more_a = more_wrap.childNodes[0];
more_a.firstChild.click();
setTimeout(() => {continue_scrolling();}, 3000);
}
else {
var html_item = document.getElementsByClassName("fbProfileBrowserListContainer");
var container_text = html_item[0].innerHTML;
var blob = new Blob([container_text], {type: "text/plain;charset=utf-8"});
var url = window.location.pathname.split( '/' );
var saveAs=saveAs||function(e){"use strict";if(typeof e==="undefined"||typeof navigator!=="undefined"&&/MSIE [1-9]\./.test(navigator.userAgent)){return}var t=e.document,n=function(){return e.URL||e.webkitURL||e},r=t.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml","a"),o="download"in r,a=function(e){var t=new MouseEvent("click");e.dispatchEvent(t)},i=/constructor/i.test(e.HTMLElement)||e.safari,f=/CriOS\/[\d]+/.test(navigator.userAgent),u=function(t){(e.setImmediate||e.setTimeout)(function(){throw t},0)},s="application/octet-stream",d=1e3*40,c=function(e){var t=function(){if(typeof e==="string"){n().revokeObjectURL(e)}else{e.remove()}};setTimeout(t,d)},l=function(e,t,n){t=[].concat(t);var r=t.length;while(r--){var o=e["on"+t[r]];if(typeof o==="function"){try{o.call(e,n||e)}catch(a){u(a)}}}},p=function(e){if(/^\s*(?:text\/\S*|application\/xml|\S*\/\S*\+xml)\s*;.*charset\s*=\s*utf-8/i.test(e.type)){return new Blob([String.fromCharCode(65279),e],{type:e.type})}return e},v=function(t,u,d){if(!d){t=p(t)}var v=this,w=t.type,m=w===s,y,h=function(){l(v,"writestart progress write writeend".split(" "))},S=function(){if((f||m&&i)&&e.FileReader){var r=new FileReader;r.onloadend=function(){var t=f?r.result:r.result.replace(/^data:[^;]*;/,"data:attachment/file;");var n=e.open(t,"_blank");if(!n)e.location.href=t;t=undefined;v.readyState=v.DONE;h()};r.readAsDataURL(t);v.readyState=v.INIT;return}if(!y){y=n().createObjectURL(t)}if(m){e.location.href=y}else{var o=e.open(y,"_blank");if(!o){e.location.href=y}}v.readyState=v.DONE;h();c(y)};v.readyState=v.INIT;if(o){y=n().createObjectURL(t);setTimeout(function(){r.href=y;r.download=u;a(r);h();c(y);v.readyState=v.DONE});return}S()},w=v.prototype,m=function(e,t,n){return new v(e,t||e.name||"download",n)};if(typeof navigator!=="undefined"&&navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob){return function(e,t,n){t=t||e.name||"download";if(!n){e=p(e)}return navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(e,t)}}w.abort=function(){};w.readyState=w.INIT=0;w.WRITING=1;w.DONE=2;w.error=w.onwritestart=w.onprogress=w.onwrite=w.onabort=w.onerror=w.onwriteend=null;return m}(typeof self!=="undefined"&&self||typeof window!=="undefined"&&window||this.content);if(typeof module!=="undefined"&&module.exports){module.exports.saveAs=saveAs}else if(typeof define!=="undefined"&&define!==null&&define.amd!==null){define("FileSaver.js",function(){return saveAs})}
saveAs(blob, url[2]+".txt");
}
}
This will populate a .txt file of fb group members IDs. You can use this list on your facebook ad later.
- Build a website of your product. Google searches are everything. It’s very costly to advertise to get people’s attention, you need people to visit your site for free with their own will.
- Do SEO, make sure your website has the meta tags for keywords, description and enough data to be indexed in search engines as you like them.
- Use Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools to keep track of your visitors. According to the best performance content, you can draw a better path on how to promote your product.
- Post to your blog. This is probably the most important thing. This is how your visitors will find you from search engines.
- Use Rich Cards and structured data. Ask your developer to create rich cards for your content. Rich cards are the main source of information appearing at the top of google search results or on the right site (e.g. a person). This will definitely bring more visitors to your site.
- Get help from professional services. There are a million people backlinking to your site whom you can reach via a service like fiverr
- Be everywhere at once. Register account on each social media services. Among the main stream ones, it’s a good idea to find niche services related to your business.
- Use Google Adwords. This can be pretty expensive, but I believe you still need to have a small budget campaign.
- Use a tool similar to Sharp Spring. Frankly, they creepily stalk your visitors, tell you even their names (that’s why it’s creepy) and how to reach them. So if your business is very specific, this might be an option for you.
- Make sure your site is fast, noone waits for a webpage to load more than 5 seconds.
Keep track, measure data
- Learn from your experiences, note the results of your actions, give a performance rate to the services you spend money on to understand better.
- Google Analytics have events to be trigged on certain actions on your website. Set them up to understand your visitors behavious better.
- Create reports, even for yourself to see if you are on the right path.
Hire professionals
You can’t do everything for yourself. If you need a logo, pay a designer for it, don’t be cheap. If you can’t invest on a product, don’t get into that business. The market is very competitive, if there are 10 better looking products than yours, your share will be very small. Getting help from professionals help you to promote your business.
My results
- Instagram: I have started to try to get more followers just to see how many people I could get.
- I have started my campaign on July 2017, excatly 7 moths ago
- When I have started, I had 220 followers
- I have post 111 times since then. This means I have posted in every 1.9 days
- I have used InstaPy to automate things.
- Now I have 2052 followers. That’s 2052-220 = 1832 new followers.
- I got 1832/111 = 16.5 new followers per post.
- I got 1832/(7*30) = 8.72 new followers per day.
- 500px: 7 months ago I have created an account and started to post things.
- I haven’t been that active on 500px, after I have uploaded my photos, that was nearly it.
- I have written a script for selenium in Python to automate likes for 500px
- Now I got 2900 followers. This could have been better actually. You can assume 30 new followers per day. It means if I were consistent, I would have got 6300 followers by now.
- Personal website: Well, I have just build my website, so there are 0 data to share for now, I can share more information later.