Tip: If you're quick enough, there's an opportunity in breaking news. Bring in more backlinks, traffic, and conversions by offering your spin on industry news before journalists publish anything.
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Newsjacking is when a brand takes advantage of breaking news by injecting their own content into the story. It’s a powerful way to reach a bigger audience.
Carrie Rose of @riseatseven boosted organic traffic by 329% and organic conversions by 53% for a client within two months, primarily through newsjacking.
Timing is key. You need to get your thoughts out before journalists start scrambling to find additional information for their articles. Carrie’s rule of thumb is to get something out within 40 minutes. And they were sending at least three per day to national news outlets.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be anything much — a brief but valuable comment is enough. So create Google (and other) alerts within your industry and put together a calendar of upcoming events that might be worthy of a comment.
From there, you can take Carrie’s lead and send your commentary to journalists and publications. Or if you have a decent audience already, you can simply ride the wave by posting on social media and your blog.
Tip: If you've got design chops, you can garner interest in your product by showing off its design. Get traffic and signups by submitting your site to UI showcases.
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Harsh Vijay of @RuttlApp got a big spike in traffic and a couple of new users after submitting his website to One Page Love.
Design showcase sites like this and Dribbble are unlikely to be the cause of hockey-stick growth, but they can help while you're searching for your first ten customers — especially if you hit the front page like Harsh did. Of course, you'll need a killer design for that.
If you're using text on a crappy image, try using it more like a background by overlaying the brand colour at a semi-opaque setting.
This will give you the necessary contrast to make text readable.
02/ Don’t over do negative space
When there’s excessive negative space between elements that belong together, the eye stutters and falls into empty voids instead of easily flowing over connected elements.
Tip: To bring new people to your product's ecosystem, it can be helpful to tap into a new marketplace. Increase your brand awareness and get new users by launching a free Chrome extension.
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Surfer attributes roughly twenty trials and five subscriptions per month to the free Chrome extension they launched in 2019. The extension now has 220,000 users, and each of those users sees Surfer's logo whenever they conduct a search on Google.
More than 1,000 people have come to their landing page through the extension's CTA. And they've received hundreds of high-authority backlinks to boot.
The first step is to recognize a good problem when you see one.
A good problem is one that many people have, otherwise you won't have enough customers. For indie hackers, this number doesn't need to be too big. Usually a few hundred thousand is enough. In some cases, much less.
You want these to be people you genuinely like talking to, because they'll be your customers for years. And ideally you have the same problem as them, too, so you can empathize with what they're going through.