How to Market Yourself for Cheap
Your MVP is finally finished and you are building a beta user base. You’ve got 1100 downloads, and you get about 10 to 12 new sign-ups per day. Things work, but they need to go faster. You spend too much time everyday checking for iTunes download notifications. You check, but don’t see any emails. Something is wrong. Your pitch deck projected 100 downloads a day. What will your friends and family who helped fund your seed round say? Crap.
For any new app on the marketplace, getting new users is probably the largest challenge.
Here are three quick and cheap tricks to market yourself to get more eyes, ears, and ultimately sign ups and/or downloads.
Become an expert: As I learned from Tim Ferris, in order to be an expert, it means you need to know a little bit more than everybody else. With so many different domains of expertise, you have an unique opportunity to find yours, learn as much as you can about it, and as long as you know just a little bit more than everyone else, you’re an expert by definition.
In actuality, you are more than the definition, since you’re actually doing what you say you’re doing and you stand as living proof of an expert. Whatever you’re accomplishing, whatever problem you’re solving, you need to own it and become an expert in solving it.
Become educated on your topic: read books, listen to podcasts, go out there and do things, learn from your mistakes, take chances to speak in front of audiences, put on workshops, and breathe your goal. You will become the expert.
Build an email list. As you build and brand yourself as the expert, you meet many people along the way. If you have influenced these people in a positive way, there’s a good chance that they will remain in contact to learn of further discoveries of your expertise.
Everybody can learn something from everyone. But the learning stops if you don’t have a way to contact them afterwards. The more information you have to teach, the more people will appreciate that info. The more knowledge you give out, the more knowledge you receive. Teaching can be the best form of learning, even if you already know how to do something. If you teach it, you have to understand it and to revisit the basics, appreciating the learning process.
Keeping track of your early supporters is crucial for future growth. The cost per acquisition of a customer for you is very high in the beginning, so gather as much data on those early fans as possible.
Ask people for their emails to stay in touch as you continue to develop material that you want to share with the world. Not everyone will sign up, but those who do will be loyal followers if you continue to communicate with them.
But remember getting an email address is not enough. Fortune is in the follow-up. If you attain emails but don’t communicate, their interest will stale. Make a monthly newsletter when sharing important information, as well as things about yourself and things you find interesting. If you send a consistent monthly email to your network of supporters, you start to create a community.
Once you create community, there’s more of an opportunity to spread via word-of-mouth and through referrals. Communities begin to trust each other, building on the character you’ve displayed with your consistency in becoming an expert.
So gather emails to build your newsletter list, then make an effort to create a newsletter. People who want to listen to you will continue to do so only if you give them the chance.
Create a press release. Who, what, when, where, how: the very important questions that you need to be able to answer about your business. A press release essentially answers these questions in a longer form.
Inform people about recent news in the form of a press release. It allows content developers to use your information and regurgitate it into an original article. The format of a press release can vary, so learn the essentials by reading other press releases online!
Talk about the aforementioned who, what, when, where, how, why questions. Or take a press release that you like and copy the template. Change the details, but leverage some of the key transitional phrases and structure.
Communicate your progress to the rest of the world. Don’t focus on the size of a press release, but rather the content of newsworthy information that can inspire others to further conversation.
You can also send your press release to your growing email base. If they like the content, it allows them to send the press release to their own network and community.
Take these simple steps, stick with them, and watch your business grow.
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