Some time ago, the reliable formula of building something cool and having folks flock to it stopped working. And then ads stopped being so cheap. And now it's freakin hard to get anyone to give a damn about what you build.
Enter marketing, the dark art we love to hate but truly love — when it works.
If you want to learn marketing, here's your todo list:
☑️ Launch a landing page.
Don't overcomplicate it, use no-code builders. Launch a super simple 1-screen page from the templates today. Seriously, make the first step, it won't be perfect — that's the key for marketing.
☑️ Learn copywriting.
For starters, just take 5 of your favourite websites and write their copy by hand. It will help you discover useful patterns for your copy and you'll remember it better with handwriting. Copywriting is fundamental and you will write a lot.
☑️ Don't use ChatGPT for your copy.
Understand the writing basics first yourself, so you can tune GPT to produce less generic copy. If your copy is garbage people won't trust you and won't buy from you. So it's better to write 3 words full of meaning rather that 100 words with none.
☑️ Collect visitor emails.
There are few reasons: join waitlist, sign up to newsletter or log into your product. You will also likely want to collect user's name for communication, but don't go over it — keep the forms super simple, it's important for conversions
☑️ Connect web analytics from day 1.
Measure conversion to signups and clicks. Conversion = percentage of users who performed specific action. Connect PostHog, it's the best tool today.
☑️ Launch a blog.
Write weekly articles, organise posts into categories — see ghost, beehiiv, substack — even medium can be a great place to start because the algorithm there can pick up your work and help with distribution.
☑️ Learn about SEO.
Research keywords, backlinks and domain reputation (use Ahrefs/Semrush/KeywordsEverywhere). Include the keywords in your articles. That helps people discover your website via Google. Never turn your copy into meaningless list of keywords — people won't appreciate it — and neither will Google.
☑️ Send updates to the mailing list.
Send weekly emails to your subscribers based on your articles and progress; optimise for open rate and click rate — see mailerlite, convertkit, mailchimp or substack.
☑️ Collect your research.
Put everything into databases (airtable, google sheets) or files (notion, google docs, miro), record a video (loom). Publish your research as an info-product with it's own landing page. You can collect emails to access them as gated content or even launch it on Product Hunt.
☑️ Monetise.
Turn your best-performing content into paid products. Create stripe payment link, show the content only after user completed purchase.
☑️ Done!
You used your knowledge to create the free useful content and build reputation, so now users trust you enough to buy from you!
Find out more about my journey to marketing, building Momentum and building in public in this show 👇
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