Seth Godin, author of This Is Marketing has this to say:
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. It's a chance to change the culture for the better. Marketing involves very little in the way of shouting, hustling, or coercion. It's a chance to serve, instead.
Let's have a look how that looks like on the Indie Hackers community. The opportunity presented below was achieved with the help of Syften, a social monitoring app.
Indie Hackers try to keep costs low
A programmer who quits his job to work on his own app is concerned with server costs. I noticed it's is a recurring pain in the community.
So when I learned how to get $5000 Amazon AWS credits for $49 I wrote an article about it. I configured Syften to notify me when someone complained about their infrastructure costs and waited. Sure enough, one day a “How much does it cost to run your side project?" thread popped up. I replied as soon as I got the notification and watched:
Note how I provide the solution in the comment itself. The focus is on helping, not promoting. I’m not tricking anyone into visiting my blog. My comment became the most upvoted one in the thread, and the thread reached the “top threads of the month” list. I got 17 upvotes, but did anyone click the link?
I promoted my blog only once that week, so all of this traffic came from that one comment. I also got five mailing list signups.
Summary
Well, that's it. Rather starighforward really:
- Write down solutions to the most common problems
- Set up an alert and get notified when someone mentions one of those problems
- Be helpful
- Link to your blog, saying that more details can be found there
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