🗞 What's New: Marketing strategies with a twist

Don't try to implement every single marketing strategy out there:

• Start small. Discover what works for you, then lean into it. Try engineering as marketing, old school meetups, or reverse sales talks.
• Leverage analytics and insights to enhance your content. Audience analysis, content performance analysis, and competitor analysis are all vital.
• $4M with a boutique website brokerage. Chelsea Clarke grew and flipped her first site for $39K in one year, and now helps others flip their sites.

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by Martin Baun

At Goleko, we are a small team with a small budget. Here are some creative marketing strategies that worked for us, and can probably work for you!

1. Personal branding

We market ourselves as a personal brand, and this works well. I never thought I'd do this, as I like being anonymous, but leaning into my blog and social media has made a difference.

2. Build in public

People enjoy watching someone succeed or fail, and learning through the experience. Showcase what you're doing on a daily basis on social media, a blog, Indie Hackers, Medium, etc.

3. Be so good they can't ignore you

Most project management tools are dismal. They are slow, bulky, and ugly. I've done everything to make my project management tool simple, yet powerful.

Creating a great tool can drive word-of-mouth recommendations!

4. Blog posts, but with a twist

We make articles that are optimized for sharing. These are provocative articles that people want to share, like Porn and Tech Innovation: Tech's Unlikely Muse and Happy Developers: It is possible.

5. Newsletters

Engage readers with well-written articles, and build your email list with a newsletter. This can be a powerful marketing channel.

6. Engineering as Marketing

We use our engineering capabilities to create useful tools. We give these tools to the public for free, and in turn, get them to use our sites.

For example, Toolbun offers free tools for developers to conduct uptime checking, form submission, and encrypt content in emails.

7. Free

Draw people in with the classic "bait and hook" business model. Offer your product itself for free, but remember: Do not optimize more than required.

8. Product Hunt and AppSumo

Take time to interact with people before you launch. Find friends and build a network. Help people, and they'll help you get to first place.

Many people claim they can get you to first place, and some may be legit. But most are probably scammers, so don't fall for it. Focus on building your own network of supporters.

9. Video

We make fun, edgy videos showcasing what we do, and educating people. These videos are short, precise, and welcoming.

Creating videos may seem daunting, but it could be the missing link to your marketing strategy. All you need is confidence in yourself, and passion for your craft.

10. Old school meetups

I go to conferences and meetups and listen to what other people are doing, while also sharing what I'm doing. People like talking about themselves and what they do. I learn a lot from these interactions, and pick up vital information.

These meetups have been beneficial for networking, and I've made some friends in the process. This is an underrated bonus!

11. Cold email

Cold emailing is a time-consuming venture, but we do it with a twist. We scrape a lot of information automatically from Github, blogs, X, and LinkedIn. We combine this information with AI to create personalized messages that explain how they move us in some way.

Then, we share our project management tool and ask for honest feedback. This strategy gets people talking about Goleko, and lets them see it in action.

12. X outreach

We have 50 waitlist signups. I meet with everyone personally to ensure they are onboarded well, and I ask for information about how they use the tool.

13. Reverse sales talks

Reverse sales talks involve listening to your client's needs, problems, and concerns, and actively solving them through the products and services you provide.

We optimize our LinkedIn profile to get more contacts to sell their products, then we introduce our project management tool to them. We show them how it will help them be more efficient.

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

👀 HubSpot says it's investigating customer account hacks.

🤩 A strategy for shaping your brand identity.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🚖 The robo-taxi game is getting spicier.

🤔 What is a sales funnel?

🐴 An AI-designed horse purse is tearing apart this small, but passionate, community.

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

by Tuiddy

To truly stand out in a competitive market, dig deep into how your content strategy is performing, and continuously optimize it. This is where analytics and insights come into play!

Audience analysis

Knowing who your audience is, and understanding their interests, needs, and behaviors is the cornerstone of a successful content strategy. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to gather data on:

• Demographics: Location, age, gender, etc.
• The channels they use.
• Their behavior on your site: Time spent on pages, bounce rates, and conversion paths.

Content performance analysis

Analyze the effectiveness of your existing content by looking at:

• Pageviews and user engagement: Which articles are most popular? Which pages attract the most visitors?
• Conversion rates: Which content successfully drives users to complete desired actions, like signing up or making a purchase?
• User feedback: Gather reader comments and feedback to understand their opinions about your content.

Keyword and SEO analysis

An effective SEO strategy boosts your content's visibility. Use tools like SEO AI to analyze keyword performance and optimize your content for search engines:

• Keyword research: Identify which keywords bring high-quality traffic, and integrate them into your content.
• On-page optimization: Ensure that your content titles, meta descriptions, and body text include relevant keywords, and that the page structure is well-organized.

Competitor analysis

Observing your competitors' content strategies can offer valuable insights. Analyze your competitors by looking at:

• Content types and topics: What kinds of content are they producing, and which topics are most popular?
• Keyword strategy: What keywords are they targeting?
• Audience engagement: Study their user interactions and feedback to understand why their content is successful.

Trend analysis

Track and analyze industry trends by:

• Social media monitoring: Use tools to follow trending topics and discussions on social media.
• Industry reports and research: Regularly read industry reports to stay updated on market changes and consumer behaviors.
• Google Trends: Use Google Trends to see the popularity and interest trends of keywords over time.

Real-time data and adjustments

Utilizing real-time data helps you quickly respond to market changes and audience needs:

• A/B testing.
• Real-time analytics tools.

Discuss this story.

🤷 How would you respond to this customer? Posted by Jay Tan.

🆓 The best free ways to drive traffic to your website. Posted by Smoteria.

🥹 I'm finally getting out of my comfort zone by building in public on Indie Hackers. Posted by Jaypy.

💡 80+ micro-SaaS ideas. Posted by Tony.

💻 Getting more traffic from Google. Posted by Tuiddy.

😣 Is it a bad idea to have a cofounder? Posted by Vlad Tolm.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

by Marc Andre

Each week, Flip My Site publishes an inspiring success story featuring a founder growing and selling an online business.

Chelsea Clarke is a content creator and website flipper who has brokered $4M in sales through her business.

The first flip

Before Chelsea was a full-time content creator, she worked in marketing. One role gave her experience with a business brokerage focused on traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. She was inspired by the business model, and wanted to apply it to online businesses.

In 2017, Chelsea went on maternity leave. She decided to start a business so she wouldn't have to go back to the corporate world. She launched HerPaperRoute, a blog and newsletter for other content creators and founders.

At the same time, she launched a beauty blog, which she used for case studies published at HerPaperRoute. The case studies documented specific strategies she implemented to grow the blog, along with the results.

Chelsea's plan from the start was to grow the beauty blog for a year or two, then sell it. She never intended to hold on to it long-term. In about a year, she had grown the blog to 70K monthly pageviews, using Pinterest and SEO. She sold it for $39K.

After the sale, Chelsea published a case study on HerPaperRoute to show how she had sold the blog. This marked the beginning of Chelsea's journey as a website flipper.

Portfolio and website flipping strategy

Chelsea likes to manage several websites and products at a time. Her portfolio typically includes 5-10 different websites. This helps Chelsea avoid boredom, and also increase security for her. If traffic drops on one site, she has income from other sites to soften the blow.

While Chelsea started HerPaperRoute and the beauty blog from scratch, she adjusted her strategy to involve buying existing websites and blogs instead. That helps her skip the initial grind, and get straight to profitability.

Chelsea's strategy hasn't changed following Google's Helpful Content Updates or recent core updates. She still focuses on Pinterest and social media platforms for traffic, and prioritizes building a community and growing an email list. SEO is important, too.

Chelsea's goal is to sell a site within 6-12 months of buying it. By starting with the end goal in mind, she knows exactly what she needs to accomplish to make it a successful flip. She looks for sites that already have passive revenue coming in. They should have organic traffic without relying on ads, and be set up in a way that the new owner can take them on and seamlessly manage them.

Niche Investor

In 2019, Chelsea launched Niche Investor, a boutique brokerage that helps people sell their sites. So far, Chelsea has brokered the sale of hundreds of websites, totaling over $4M.

Chelsea's goal is to own a portfolio of websites that generate passive income for her so she can continue to be a solo founder, live a chill, creative life, and work on her business when she feels like it!

Discuss this story.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Martin Baun, Darko, Tuiddy, and Marc Andre for contributing posts. —Channing