A few years ago, I grew my E-commerce site from $0 to $50k in monthly revenue just 3 months after launching. We didn’t have a physical presence and I didn’t spend one penny on marketing, every single sale came from free online channels. This past year, I used these exact same tactics to start a startup. We’ve since raised over $2.5M in VC funding and scored some marquee customers. Here are 37 of my favorite tactics. I’m happy to expand on any of these and provide more detailed commentary in the comments.
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Trade mentions and tweets with other companies and thought leaders. Companies with a similar number of followers will be more willing to cross promote.
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Share your startup on Betalist
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Create a Crunchbase page
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Respond to unanswered questions in your niche on Quora. Look for questions with a lot of people waiting for an answer.
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Share your website on Startupli.st or Erlibird.com
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Submit a free press release using a service like PRlog
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Sign up for a service like Mention.com, respond to anyone that mentions your brand, one of your competitors, or asks a question about your space.
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Launch a topic at Scoop.it and post your website into your topic page
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Message meetup coordinators and ask for speaking gigs at local events.
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Film your speaking gigs and share videos of your talks on your blog
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Use tools like MajesticSEO to see who links to your competitors, outreach to those websites and ask for links.
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Encourage social shares by using a service like Twilighter
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Send personalized E-mails to your existing users, ask for referrals or their help promoting your company.
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Create an infographic, share on free distribution sites like Visual.ly and Pinterest.
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Write a post called “Our competitor vs Our Company” – This will attract search engine traffic looking for reviews of your competitor
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Submit a presentation to Slideshare
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Giveaway a free e-book, ask users to sign up to your newsletter to download it.
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Create a “how-to” guide for something that is difficult in your industry.
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Promote your company in your E-mail signature
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Launch an E-mail newsletter using a free service like MailChimp.
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Get your startup featured on existing newsletters such as Startupdigest
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Submit your site to ProductHunt
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Find what blogs appear in Google for your target keywords, leave relevant comments on those blogs.
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Ask for feedback on Hackernews using their ShowHN forum
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Teach a class on skillshare.com or generalassemb.ly about your industry or niche
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Outreach to bloggers and influencers, invite them to share your content. If you mention them in your content, they’re more likely to share it.
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Write guest posts on other blogs
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If you’re a B2B startup, you can reach out directly to target customers on LinkedIn.
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Contact school alumni on LinkedIn, leverage their advice and assistance
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Pinpoint a young or new journalist at a big publication, offer them an exclusive on your content. Provide them with data that only you have access to. New journalists are hungry for connections and will be more willing to work with you.
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Giveaway your product for free to Youtubers and review bloggers in exchange for promotion.
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Start a drip E-mail marketing campaign
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Create a deal on AppSumo
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Invite your existing customers to provide feedback on the next version of your product. You can send them a survey or a WuFoo form to do this easily.
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Determine what questions people in your niche are asking, create blog posts answering those questions
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Run a free promotion or giveaway if users follow you on social media
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Manually reach out to Twitter followers of similar companies in your space. If you don’t want to reach out, just follow them.
Edit 1: I didn’t raise funding for the E-commerce site. These are two separate businesses.
Edit 2: Thanks for the great feedback guys, Keep the questions coming!! I didn’t want to be self promotional in the post, but a lot of you guys were wondering what the companies were. My E-commerce site is [RageHats] the marketing consultancy I built afterwards is Rank Executives, and the startup that I just raised funding for is NeoReach.
Edit 3: Thanks for all the support. I posted an expanded version of this list for you guys with more explanation (and 30 additional tactics) here for those of you that are interested.
