When you have just started up, will you have millions of users and downloads? Hell no! Absolutely no one knows about your startup and cares about it. Your website might lie under a pool of thousands of Google search results and your product might be buried under millions of similar products on e-commerce stores. How do you get your initial attention then?
The quick answer? Growth hacking! A simple tip to growth hacking is to remember you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a cart, you just have to find the person who owns the wheel and barter it. Here are some quick tips to help you growth hack your initial days of startup:
Affiliate Partners: Your website will have nil traffic in the initial days. And it will take considerable time to build a decent traffic. A quicker way to get the traffic is to partner with affiliates who already sell similar stuff and ask them to tag your website on their homepages as well. Promise them a certain commission 5-10% depending on your product for every sale that comes through their website.
Now imagine if an affiliate partner is already getting lakhs of customers everyday, then even if a percentage is coming to your website, you have cracked your initial traffic without advertising or paying anything upfront. Cool eh?
Bloggers/ Media Partners: Imagine if you are a customer of your product. How do you decide when to download this app or buy that product? You mostly make your decisions after reading an article on a renowned blog or a review of the app. So it makes sense to talk with such bloggers who your customers usually follow.
Offer the bloggers free samples of your products and let them write an unbiased review on their website. Now when a potential customer will read this article, he can decide on his own whether he wants to pursue this product or not. One of our comic books Ved was reviewed by a top blogger and that helped us get a lot of attention towards this superhero comic. Within days it had become #1 bestseller on Amazon. Perhaps you can try this tip too
SEO: This is a big topic in itself. But for now I would tell you that study basics of SEO and push content on your website so that it starts reflecting higher on Google ranking. You will be amazed on how little changes can push you higher in search results.
If you have any queries, feel free to write to me on Rajeev@TBSPlanet.com
Rajeev Tamhankar
Twitter@rajeevtamhankar
The writer is IIT-R Alumnus, Entrepreneur of The Year’17 (Print Business) and the Founder of TBS Planet Comics