🗞 What's New: Using side projects as marketing tools

A side project can double as marketing for other products:

• Spend less than a week building a side project that complements your main product. Launch it and give it away for free.
• Keyword research is essential for SEO. Identify your niche, and study your competitors and industry trends to find your focus keywords.
• $40K in total revenue from two digital products. Josef Strzibny's e-book and SaaS boilerplate gained traction due to his existing blog.

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by Sveta Bay

In the last three months, we've launched two side projects for our core product, MakerBox, marketing resources for solo founders.

Here's how these products doubled our website visitors!

The side projects

Here are the products we launched:

1. Virtual CMO: A free tool to solve marketing problems.
2. User Persona Generator: A free tool to generate user personas for any product.

The result: Our monthly website visitors for the core product went from 6K to 12K.

Using side projects for marketing

Follow these four steps to launch a free tool that organically promotes your main product:

1. Identify a compelling problem:

• What problem will your side project solve?

• How will solving this problem simplify selling your main product?

• What segment of your target audience has this problem?

2. Build a simple product:

• Use no-code tools or a simple tech stack.
• You shouldn’t spend more than one week building it.

3. Promote your main product:

• Include a call-to-action (CTA) button on all pages of your side project.
• Create a welcome email sequence (if you are collecting emails).
• Present a limited offer for side project users.

4. Distribute it:

• Launch it on Product Hunt. Your goal is to hit somewhere within the top five products of the day (obviously easier said than done, though!).
• Reach out to AI and tech newsletters to land features.
• Share your products on Indie Hackers, Reddit, Hacker News, Slack, and Discord.
• Launch it in startup directories.

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

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Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Thomas Griffin

Keyword research is an integral part of an SEO strategy. It allows you to explore queries that resonate with your niche, and create content around them to fuel your search engine rankings.

Here's how to find the right keywords to target.

Select a niche

Choose a specific demographic of customers to whom you want to offer your solutions.

Explore seed keywords

Seed keywords help you identify the players you'd be competing with, and come up with keyword ideas to stand out in your respective industry.

If you sell clothing, for example, your seed keywords may be "clothing," "party dresses," etc.

Seed keywords are generally pretty broad.

Identify and study your competitors

Use Google and your seed keywords to find your competitors.

Go through the top ranking pages and pick the ones that offer solutions closest to yours. Once you've found them, go through their website pages and look for focus keywords.

You can also use keyword research tools.

Do some digging

It's possible that even the top ranked players in your respective industry may have missed targeting keywords that could help you capture quality leads for your sales funnel.

The goal here is to take inspiration from your competitors, not replicate their strategy as is. So, it's necessary to also do your own research.

You already have a list of keywords that your competitors are targeting. Use Google to explore those keywords one by one.

Once you've performed the search using a particular keyword, scroll down to the bottom of the page and note the queries in the Related Searches section.

This will help you find additional queries similar to the keywords you've been exploring, and dig into different variations of the respective keyword.

Explore trends

It's great to leverage keyword research tools, but don't let it stop you from exploring the latest trends in your respective industry.

Always be on the lookout for trending topics that align with your niche.

Identify focus keywords

Now, you're all set to identify your focus keywords. There are three things to keep in mind here: Traffic volume, keyword difficulty, and intent.

Traffic volume tells you how many average visitors a potential keyword may help you attract to your website.

Keyword difficulty shows how difficult it will be for you to climb the SERPs while targeting a particular keyword.

Finally, intent tells you what users expect when they use a particular keyword in their search query when seeking answers to their questions.

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This issue is sponsored by Mercury

Startups looking to fundraise in today’s market should be laser-focused on these key metrics to land the funding necessary to realize their ambitions.

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by AJ

Josef Strzibny is a software engineer who recently crossed $40K in revenue from two digital products! This is one of the top viewed stories on my site, so I wanted to share it here, too.

The intro

I'm a 34 year old full-stack software engineer, indie developer, and author.

I wrote a book on web application deployment, Deployment from Scratch, and built Business Class, a Rails SaaS starter template. I also run a blog, and am active in indie and Ruby communities.

How did you get started?

I had just quit my job leading a dev team at a small startup, and I needed a break. I had some pain in my leg, likely coming from my back, and I needed to give my body time to recover.

I chose to write a technical book to stay close to my profession. I figured that, even if it didn't sell well, it could at least serve as a reference of my skills. I didn't have a real following at the time, but I recognized that there wasn't a book that really focused on Linux fundamentals when it comes to deployment.

It took me three years (one year of billable time) to write the first draft.

How did you get your initial customers?

Once committed, I announced it through a blog post. Then, I posted in the Ruby subreddit, where I was already a regular contributor.

Since launching, I've posted on Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt. The most influential was my highly upvoted Hacker News post; it led to 100 sales in one day!

Lots of Reddit submissions completely tanked. I was featured in various newsletters, though, which was pretty good. I'm now focusing more on SEO.

My schedule changes depending on whether I have a day job or not. Right now, I don't have one. But every day definitely starts with coffee, and I can do up to four of them! Coffee is my fuel.

Advice for indie hackers

Just start today. A lot of your assumptions are likely wrong, but you won't find out until you start.

If you are writing a book, try a smaller one first. I had to wait a long time for my release date. If you are self-publishing, it’s all on you. I wrote my book in Markdown and LaTex, then built the PDF using Pandoc. I also used a lot of Ruby, and did the technical illustrations with draw.io.

For more interviews from founders who have built profitable businesses, check out Indie Hustle!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Sveta Bay, Darko, Thomas Griffin, and AJ for contributing posts. —Channing