Ask HN: How to drive non-paid traffic to an app landing page?

20 points

16 years ago

This question has probably been asked in other ways or answered in part in other threads, but I thought it would be useful to have a definite thread.

Scenario:

You have an SaaS app that isn't inherently sexy by nature. You have a good conversion rate on your landing page, but you have a top-of-funnel problem; not enough people are seeing your landing page.

You could pay for some CPC ads, but you're more interested in somehow getting 50,000 organic/free prospects into the top of the funnel, rather than a trickle of (albeit more qualified) prospects from expensive CPC campaigns.

How can you do this? Lets pool ideas.

- Get dugg or redditted. Thus, write some content that provokes or excites that demographic.

- Get blogged by big blogs. This could be done with some hustle, by cold-emailing bloggers and presenting an interesting story.

- Make a landing page with such an interesting design that people just want to pass it round for the hell of it, e.g. http://www.mailchimp.com/v5-2/

- Launch a new feature, tweet it and get others to retweet it.

- SEO that mofo

- Offer a downloadable freebie (PDF etc) and hope that others will link to you because of it.

- Promote your site on relevant forums (thin line between this and spamming)

- Put something helpful up on Slideshare.net and put your link in each slide (not sure if this will work, but a presentation I put up a while back seems to get a ton of traffic)

- Offer free accounts to blogs to give away in competitions.

There's tons more ideas than this - I'm just brain dumping right now. I'll come back to this and submit more later.