How to make $10,000 with your side project

Estimated read time: 1:20

    Summary

    In this video, Marc Lou shares how he transformed from being broke with no marketing knowledge to making substantial revenue from side projects using clever marketing strategies. He outlines several free or low-cost ways to get customers for a startup, including cold outreach, creating free tools, and using affiliate marketing. He also emphasizes the importance of building a personal brand and using programmatic SEO to drive traffic. The video offers a comprehensive guide on unconventional marketing channels that have proven effective in generating income.

      Highlights

      • Marc Lou turned his financial struggles around with 10 effective, budget-friendly marketing strategies.💡
      • He grew his software business to $80,000 with zero ad spend using cold outreach.📈
      • Building free, standalone mini-apps as promotions can generate substantial revenue.💰
      • Affiliate programs can foster user engagement and drive new customers to your product.🔄
      • Hacker News is an invaluable resource for promoting new digital tools, especially for developers.🖥️
      • Hosting live coding sessions on YouTube can help boost productivity and build a community.👨‍💻

      Key Takeaways

      • Cold Outreach is an underutilized yet powerful marketing tool that costs almost nothing if done correctly.📧
      • Creating free tools can attract a significant number of users and promote your main product effectively.🛠️
      • Affiliate marketing can be highly lucrative with proper setup and engagement.🤝
      • Building a personal brand is invaluable, opening doors for networking and increasing product visibility.🔗
      • Utilizing platforms like Hacker News and Reddit can drive unexpected but substantial traffic.🌐
      • Directories like Product Hunt can boost your product reach and offer credibility through badges.🏆
      • YouTube Live coding sessions can enhance productivity and build a loyal following.🎥

      Overview

      Marc Lou shares his inspiring journey from being broke to creating multiple income streams through innovative marketing strategies. Three years ago, with no following or marketing experience, he explored every possible channel, and now ten of these are consistently profitable.

        He emphasizes the potential of cold outreach, explaining how personalized emails can open conversations that lead to customer conversions. Marc provides detailed steps on leveraging free marketing tools and creating apps that serve as entry points to paid services, illustrating with real examples.

          Marc also discusses the benefits and technicalities of using affiliate programs, product directories, and platforms like Hacker News to broaden a startup's reach. His approach is practical, encouraging aspiring entrepreneurs to think outside the box and use creative methods to bring their side projects to financial fruition.

            Chapters

            • 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Marketing Channels The introduction challenges common misconceptions that getting customers requires vast resources, like significant advertising budgets or large audiences. The speaker shares a personal story of being financially challenged yet succeeding by exploring multiple marketing channels. Today, they have ten profitable marketing channels, some of which generated as much as millions and were mostly free and easy to utilize. The chapter aims to reveal these channels so others can benefit from them.
            • 00:30 - 04:30: Cold Outreach In this chapter titled 'Cold Outreach', the author discusses the effectiveness of cold outreach as a marketing channel, highlighting its low cost and high return on investment. The author shares personal success stories of achieving significant revenue through cold emails without any prior marketing knowledge or spending money, despite not being a native English speaker. The narrative emphasizes the accessibility and potential of cold outreach, explaining how it significantly contributed to the growth of a software business in 2018.
            • 04:30 - 09:00: Free Tools In this chapter, the focus is on improving cold outreach strategies to get better results. Instead of directly pitching a product, the aim should be to initiate a conversation with the potential customer. The chapter begins with an example of ineffective cold outreach: generic, non-personalized messages that fail to engage or provoke a response. The advice given is to concentrate on engaging the recipient. The chapter ends by emphasizing the importance of identifying leads, which includes gathering contacts of potential customers.
            • 09:00 - 14:00: Affiliate Marketing This chapter focuses on strategies in affiliate marketing, highlighting the importance of identifying potential customers. It suggests utilizing platforms like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Twitter to find where customers gather. The example given is marketing software to escape room businesses. Emphasis is placed on collecting customer information, specifically identifying the business owner's name, which might be found in review replies.
            • 14:00 - 20:00: Hacker News The chapter titled 'Hacker News' discusses a strategy for engaging with businesses by leveraging terrible reviews. It suggests that business owners often respond to negative feedback, providing an opportunity to get in touch with them. The example given is of a business owner named Victor who replies with an invitation to contact the manager directly, providing an email address for further communication. The chapter also recommends using a CRM tool, such as Streak for Gmail, to manage these interactions by integrating a pipeline into your email workflow.
            • 20:00 - 23:00: Cold Calls This chapter titled 'Cold Calls' discusses a multi-stage strategy for reaching out to leads. Initially, contacts are categorized as leads, which are people not yet contacted. The subsequent stages involve sending a series of emails: stage one follows sending the first email, stage two follows a follow-up email if there's no response, and continues through additional stages. The key takeaway is crafting simple, effective cold emails to achieve a high open rate. An example provided achieved a 50% open rate and a 10% reply rate. The chapter ultimately underlines the importance of concise communication in successfully growing a business revenue.
            • 23:00 - 27:00: Programmatic SEO In the chapter titled 'Programmatic SEO,' the focus is on crafting effective communication through structured email marketing. The structure includes starting with a personalized subject line that mentions the business owner's name, highlighting the benefits of the product rather than the product itself. The strategy involves making the email personal by mentioning the business owner's name again and creating a sense of urgency and curiosity by pointing out missed opportunities. The chapter emphasizes engaging the business owner's interest, potentially through interactive elements like mini-games or bots.
            • 27:00 - 31:00: Meta Ads The chapter discusses a strategy for growing a small software business using email marketing with no hard sales tactics. The author shares their personal experience of selling a monthly subscription for $19.99 per month and growing the business to $80,000 revenue. The key tactic was sending emails with a simple call to action, encouraging responses rather than directing recipients to a website or to book a call, followed by structured follow-ups if there was no initial response. The strategy emphasizes personal engagement and steady follow-ups without pressure.
            • 31:00 - 36:00: Building a Personal Brand The chapter 'Building a Personal Brand' discusses effective strategies for marketing and acquiring new customers. It highlights a method where by sending a certain number of emails daily, there is a predictable pattern of replies, subscriptions, and customer acquisition. The strategy, albeit boring, is efficient and effective for making money online. The author also talks about free marketing tools that offer great return on investment, noting them as a favorite channel because they help promote any product at no cost, making it a valuable strategy for developers and those learning to code.
            • 36:00 - 40:00: Reddit The chapter discusses the concept of creating free tools as a promotional strategy for paid products, such as SaaS applications. An example given is 'logo fast,' a tool designed to help users create logos and icons for startups. This free tool also serves to promote the author's coding course, based on the assumption that individuals interested in creating logos for websites might also be interested in learning web development.
            • 40:00 - 45:00: Directories The chapter discusses the concept of creating free tools to attract website traffic and generate revenue. The author shares a personal success story where a tool they built in just three days generated over $110,000 in revenue and attracted 583 website visitors in 30 days. A strategy suggested is to extract a feature from a paid product and offer it for free to draw in users. An example provided is of 'Tweet Hunter', a paid tool for improving tweet writing and audience growth on Twitter, which offers a free feature allowing users to generate tweets by typing a name and hashtag.
            • 45:00 - 51:00: YouTube Live In the chapter titled 'YouTube Live,' the discussion focuses on how a tool generates tweets as if they were written by a particular person, and highlights the integration of an advertisement for the paid version of that tool. The tool offers a feature for free as an advertisement for its paid counterpart. The chapter also discusses strategies for gaining free tool ideas by examining the customer journey and identifying the steps users will take to use or consider using the product. An example is provided with a habit tracker, illustrating how habits and numbers are tracked.
            • 51:00 - 57:30: Conclusion and Bonus Tips The chapter emphasizes the importance of setting and visualizing long-term goals for daily habits. It introduces an app called 'Visualize Habit' that helps users anticipate their achievements over a year by consistently following their habits. Examples given include reading for 15 minutes three times a week, meditating for 10 minutes daily, and coding for 60 minutes every day. The app aids in motivation by allowing users to see potential outcomes of their regular activities.

            How to make $10,000 with your side project Transcription

            • 00:00 - 00:30 most people think you need to spend thousands of dollars in ads or have a huge audience in order to get customers and this is completely wrong 3 years ago I was broke I had no following and no idea how to get customers I was also desperate so I tried every marketing channels I could find today 10 of those marketing channels are making money for my product every single day some brought in $10,000 some brought millions and most of them are actually free and easier to use than you think so in this video I'm going to show you the 10 marketing channels that worked for me so you can use them too to get customers let's Dive In let's start with the most
            • 00:30 - 01:00 underrated marketing channels out there called Outreach it cost almost $0 it requires a little bit of effort but nothing too crazy in the return on investment is great this is how I grew this uh software business to over $80,000 in Revenue I have another PayPal account with uh over $10,000 there and I did not spend a single Dollar on it and back then it was 2018 I knew nothing about marketing I'm not even English native and yet I managed to use cod emails in order to grow this business to this Revenue the reason 99% of people
            • 01:00 - 01:30 don't get results with code Outreach is because they're trying to sell a product when actually what you want to do is to get a reply from the person and open a conversation for instance this is an example of a terrible Cod Outreach not personalize how are you I know you don't care about how I feel then pitching me your product with a bunch of Tes and unclear Cod to action instead of doing this let's talk about how you can get the most out of cold Outreach to grow your startup first you will need to find lead a lead is basically a contact of a potential customer so it includes email
            • 01:30 - 02:00 um could be the name of the person and some extra information so you want to go where you can find all of your potential customers that could be Trip Advisor Yelp Twitter wherever your customers hang out you want to go there in my case I'm going to pretend I'm selling a software for escape room businesses what you want to do here is you want to collect information about each of your customers so let's take an escape room business and you want to find something very important you want to find the name of the business owner now it's not always R return everywhere but one good place to find it is in the reviews sometime there replies to reviews from people looks like in this case they
            • 02:00 - 02:30 didn't reply so what you want to do in this case would be to look for terrible reviews you apply those filters because usually the business owner would tend to reped so in this case you would see that for instance um here we have Victor who replied for the business and say you can feel free to reach out to our manager and you have even better you have the email the personal email of the manager okay then you want to download a little uh CRM for Gmail or whatever email box you're using so I used to use streak so it's like a little pipeline that you plug into Gmail and you can have
            • 02:30 - 03:00 multiple stages so the first stage will be lead so the person you haven't contacted yet so you put those contacts there first and then you have stage one after sending one email stage two after a follow-up email if they didn't reply to the first one stage three stage four Etc and then you want to do something very simple you want to send code email that are well crafted so this is an example of of email that I used to send that got uh 50% open rate and 10% reply rate and this is the entire strategy here on how I grew a software to 80,000 in Revenue if you want to write a good code you have to make it super short
            • 03:00 - 03:30 like three sentences and you want to follow some kind of structure so for instance in this case I open the email with the subject line that's first mention the name of the business owner and second is about the benefit they will get with my product and not my product itself then I make it personal by again saying the name of the business owner then I create I show them that there is an opportunity like they're missing out something they're missing out potential customers I create a little curiosity cap that talking about these like mini games Bots that people like to share the hopefully that make
            • 03:30 - 04:00 them curious and the the emails end with a simple call traction I don't ask them to visit my website I don't ask them to book a call I just asked them to respond to this email if they want to learn more details if they don't reply I'll add them to the next stage follow up two to three days later and then one last followup maybe a week later and then move on and this is the how I grow this like little software business from0 to $80,000 I was back then I was selling a um monthly subscription to access to the software for 1999 per month if I send 20
            • 04:00 - 04:30 call emails per day two would reply one would subscribe I would add one new customer for 199 months per day to be honest it's a bit of a boring strategy it's not super fun but if you do it properly it works it is the fastest way to make money on the internet okay let's talk about free tools this is by far my favorite marketing channel the cost is free the A4 reord is kind of minimal and the return investment is great it's great that it's also good for promoting literally anything you want to sell on the internet if you're a developer or if you're learning how to code code this
            • 04:30 - 05:00 will fulfill your inner dreams uh so what is a free tool so let's assume that here you have a paid SAS or a paid product or whatever this is and you want to create Standalone free mini apps that are promotion for your paid app so a good example of this is logo fast this is a little tool for people to create uh icons and logos for their startups and what I do is on the right side I have a promotion for my coding course because I assume that if you're looking to make a logo for a website you might want to learn how to build a website as well
            • 05:00 - 05:30 this app that I built in 3 days made over $110,000 in revenue for my product and in the past 30 days only there are 583 people who visited my websit through this free tool now how do you find ideas for free tools the first one is to extract a paid feature from your your paid product so a good example of this is tweet Hunter it's a paid tool to help people write better on Twitter and grow on audience and they created this like generate tweet thing where you can just type the name of the person the hashtag of the person you want to tweet like and
            • 05:30 - 06:00 it's going to generate a bunch of tweets as if you're the person and surprise surprise right here there's a little ad for the the actual uh paid tool so they extracted one of their feature and they put it for free on the internet and they use that as an ad for their own product and another way to get free tools idea is to get inside of your customer journey and think about all the previous steps they will have to accomplish in order to use your product or think about using your product here is one of my habit tracker I track my habit like this then I have some numbers Etc
            • 06:00 - 06:30 one good way to get users is to make them realize what they're going to accomplish in one year if they take their habit every single day so this is why I created this app called visualize habit where you can see one year later how much you will achieve so let's say for instance I want to read 15 minutes three times a week and I want to uh meditate 10 minutes every single day and also because I am a developer I want to code let's say 60 Minutes every single day and when I click next as as a person
            • 06:30 - 07:00 I would get this like a cute card here where I see that I'm going to read eight books this year I'm going to meditate for 3 days over the next 365 days and now you can see I have this little like how to reach my goal like how do I move on to next step and if I click here then boom I have a promotion for my habits tracker and actually if I click on achieve my goals I created this little system where it's embedded with my habit tracker where I'm going to import all those habits that I thought of and I can directly create an account this way this
            • 07:00 - 07:30 tool this previous tool got over 10,000 visitors in 24 hours when I launched it and I got hundreds and and thousands of users from my hit tracker just like this there are few requirements if you want to make a good free tool the first one of course it has to be 100% free you also want to have just one feature you want to make it extremely simple if you have two features idea in mind made two free tools you want to use a Smart name that could be either a name that people can search for SEO purposes so this is a free tool to gener generate like a user
            • 07:30 - 08:00 personal for marketing people you can search for like who what type of business you're in and who you're targeting and it's going to create like personels of you know what are typical customers doing this is 100% free and surprise surprise at the bottom there is an ad for their AI marketing platform to help you grow your business and user Persona in the name is likely something that people will search on Google so this is a smart naming another way to name it smart is to just um try to do whatever the product is doing so here logo fast it's a tool to create a logo
            • 08:00 - 08:30 fast the name is very important because this is what people will search if they see like a Tik Tok video or something they'll search for this on Google so it has to be either extremely simple or research oriented like SEO oriented next one you don't want to have any sign up or any emails or anything you want the product to be accessible right on the homepage without having me as a user do anything and you want to create a sort of a seamless plug uh a seamless plug for instance this one I showed you earlier is very simless because it feels
            • 08:30 - 09:00 like uh The Habit tracker is The Logical Next Step a bad example of this this is one of my products too is like a top productivity hack that are uh built by the internet so anyone can submit productivity hack and you see at the bottom I have an ad for instance for my course this is just a bad promotion because it looks like an ad once the tool is ready and we're going to cover that in other part of this video uh you want to publish your tool everywhere so Hacker News product hunt like directories Twitter Etc and finally don't over think it just build it ship
            • 09:00 - 09:30 it and repeat keep making those tools don't spend too much time working on each of those tools just make one great feature launch it and move on how to make money with affiliate marketing the cost is like medium because you'll give a commission to people who refer your product the at for on your site is very minimum and the return on investment is pretty great it's uh good for any product that is working already we're going to cover that later um affiliate marketing is how I made over $50,000 in revenue for some of my products here is how it works you have
            • 09:30 - 10:00 your paid product whether it's a software course whatever you will get users and some of them are power users they will love your product so much so they will sign up for your affiliate program and they will get a unique link that they can share with their audience and earn a commission whenever someone from Their audience sign up using their link which then will bring more users for your product and get you more affiliate it's very simple to set up there are three steps the first one is you want to find an affiliate software I use rewardful this is not a paid
            • 10:00 - 10:30 promotion here but I use reward food and I love them it's super easy to integrate with trie I just add a little tracking script to my site and it's all set up then you want to create an SEO page with link and proof so for instance this is one of my affiliate program I I give it an an dedicated page for SEO purposes and then here I am not talking to my customers I am talking to my Affiliates and what Affiliates are looking for and they're looking to make some money on the internet so the copywriting on the page is important and I'm clearly telling them that they can make some money using my affiliate program there
            • 10:30 - 11:00 are a few elements that matter so for instance here I add this photo as a social proof to show that there's some people already making money with my affiliate program sometimes I add this little uh slider here to give people an idea of you know how much money they could expect based on the number of referrals and I keep adding more social proof to really show that uh if for instance um this affiliate got 167 visitors and they earned $358 in commissions I want to show that it is a good a working affiliate program and
            • 11:00 - 11:30 sometimes I add a little button where they can download brand assets so they can download my logo headlines Etc to make it easier for them to share the affiliate program and finally you want to promote this affiliate program so if you have an audience on social media this is definitely the place you want to promote but sometimes you don't and so what um you can do here is you can promote it inside of your app so the affiliate program I showed you earlier is like a codebase for developers to ship startups faster and on the code base I have this like deployment part
            • 11:30 - 12:00 where it's like the end you're done with uh the project uh if you scroll at the bottom there like a button to apply to become an affiliate I try to put it at the right time in my customers's journey in order to make it easy for them to sign up for the program another example for instance Jack freaks is a Serial entrepreneur he builds lots of startup and he's using one of my startup to track analytics and of course I have set up an affiliate program for this web analytics startup so that when my users post a screenshot of their Dash board they can also include a link an
            • 12:00 - 12:30 affiliate link and earn a commission a few requirements here first is do not bother if you don't have a working product already you must be making money with that product this is very important otherwise you're going to lose your time and lose your affiliate time you want to be generous you want to offer at least 30% depending on your margin of course up to 50% one thing you can do if you start building startups is to copy an existing business so you're sure that the market and the product converts already and you can offer an a very generous AFF program like 50% that way
            • 12:30 - 13:00 if your product is good of course lots of people will jump on your affiliate program and share your product and they'll give you a competitive Advantage uh next you want to ban branded keywords uh of course if someone search for ship fast one of my products and they add Google ads to include their affiliate link uh it doesn't make sense to give them a commission because people were already looking for my product and so what I do here uh I normally would ban them but in this case I just figured out someone is using Google ads to promote chip fast uh so when I click the link and there are like some parameters right
            • 13:00 - 13:30 here that shows me as a developer that the the the person is coming from a Google paid ad campaign and so I just delete the referral cookie and it will not get any Commission because this is breaking the rules the terms of service of my affiliate program and of course you want to mention that clearly on your affiliate program rules okay one last thing you want to set a 30 days window for the payout minimum because sometimes some Affiliates are not well intentioned they'll sign up for your program they will purchase your product using their
            • 13:30 - 14:00 own affiliate link which makes them earn a commission and then they will ask for a refund or charge back and they will just earn the commission to avoid this try to set up at least a 30 days window minimum I usually do 60 days for people who are just getting started affiliates with zero commissions and then I slowly increase them to a 30 days window Hacker News is a gold mine to promote your startup I use Hacker News to drive well over 25,000 visitors to all of my site combined it requires $0 on your s very minimal effort like you could literally
            • 14:00 - 14:30 be up and running in 3 minutes and this is a good return on investment you won't always go viral but if it goes viral it goes viral and it's crazy and it is best for any sorts of like digital product especially if it's for developers or if it's using some kind of new trendy Tech like AI the problem with icon new is that most people don't use it right so those are some of the rules you want to follow in order to get the most out of Icon news and eventually go viral first you need to understand who is on this platform this is very important it is backed by why commer the famous startup
            • 14:30 - 15:00 incubator so it's the ecosystem of like tech people startup entrepreneurs lots of developers so you can see here on the homepage it is a very TIY nerdy platform this is very important because this is how you're going to shape your message when you're going to post across the platform on The Hacker News website you have a category called show this is the only place you want to promote your startup this is a place made for people like you and I who ship startups on the internet um first you want to submit your project and you want to to write show hn column you always always always
            • 15:00 - 15:30 want to start with this because this is going to put your post into the show hn category then after posting you're going to end up in the newest the show new or the newest post and if you get like above three four five votes then you're going to be pushed to the main show category and sometimes what can happen it didn't happen to me but what can happen is if you stay at the top of the show Hacker News category for a little while you might even end up on the homepage of Hacker News and now we're talking really big numbers to increase
            • 15:30 - 16:00 the chance of your post to get voted you want to always start with I made XYZ so for instance those are some of my post as you can see here my very first Hacker News Post uh so show hn I made a movie recommendation app based on your mood here I have zero Karma like it doesn't matter how many followers you have on the platforms it won't help you go viral but if you use the I made you increase the chance because you're telling a story you're telling your story then he wants to have an outcome base what is
            • 16:00 - 16:30 the tool you made for so for instance here it's a movie recommendation app based on your mood so it's interesting it's like it's an app to recommend your movies another one that went viral is this one with 152 upv it's a habit tracker to fight procrastination again here I'm telling the outcome of why I made the app not just the app itself then you want to use a tech based language remember it's used by developers so you want to be a techy somehow so in this case I use the word gamified which is a bit nerdy I try to use words that are uh Tech and trendy if
            • 16:30 - 17:00 you need inspiration for your post go to bestof hn.com and it will show you all the best performing post of the show atrian category and you will see that the recing pattern is that it almost always start with I made and then something have created a new type of puzzle I made a site where blah blah blah um this is a recurring pattern and use that as a template to create your own post now to no goes first do not ask for up votes they are moderators on the platform if they see people coming from your uh post link you will get banned
            • 17:00 - 17:30 instantly so avoid that and you also don't want to use emoji you want to speak Hacker News language they don't use Emoji so don't use emojis and finally if you want to post multiple times on Hacker News you will need to become active because there is a rule that says you can post once you need to engage five times so like post comment on post like show that you're an actual user of Hacker News if you want to post over and over okay you're going to call me crazy on this one but hear me out Cod calls this is the best way to learn marketing if you're in for the long term
            • 17:30 - 18:00 I would definitely recommend you to give it a try you just pick your phone and you call businesses and you try to pit your product this is extremely hard but you're going to learn so much about human psychology you want to ask tgpt to make a lot of script like a call coding script so um how to open the call uh how to handle some of the objections and then you want to find information about the business you're going to call the name of the business owner the location uh try to find stuff on the internet like I don't know maybe it's from reviews or maybe they're fully booked or something try to find something that will instantly make the person who pick
            • 18:00 - 18:30 up the phone like oh this guy is interesting I swear this is one of the best way to learn marketing how to use PSO or programmatic SEO to drive traffic to your startups this is how I drove over 50,000 visitors to some of my websites and currently there are like 200 people visiting this site in the past 24 hours 100 people visiting this site in the past 24 hours and 110 people visiting this website what is programmatic SEO it's basically you rank a bunch of longterm longtail keywords on Google so that people discover you
            • 18:30 - 19:00 through those keywords and they end up on your uh main product page it is one of the best way for developers to bring traffic on autopilot to your website it doesn't cost anything it requires medium medium effort from your side and the return on investment is great this is good for product that have some kind of a search intent how to get started you'll need very basic programming skills so I think you can use AI to create those websites or directories first you want to find a relevant keyword to your business so let's assume that I'm going to make a uh directory for raid room like I want to rank raid
            • 19:00 - 19:30 rooms like those places where you break stuff I want to add user reviews I want to make it easy for people to find good reviews and good raid rooms around them if I search for raid room inside of this free keyword generator uh tool I will uh disc discover how much traffic there is you can see raid Atlanta raid Room Chicago has a bunch of volume like over a thousand searches and the difficulty the KD so key difficulty is quite easy uh if you use the paid version of Atri you can actually find more details about
            • 19:30 - 20:00 the exact keyword difficulty and volume uh what you want to do is you want to have one main keyword for which you want to rank and you want to find longer ta keywords so that can be the location that could be skills like beginner Advance Pros Etc it really depends on your business and then you want to build a web page skeleton like sort of like a mod where we're going to stuff keyword in there later for instance this is one of my websites workbook pdf.com and I can see here uh this is the same template I'm reusing for all those pages to be index and Google the only difference is the language that people
            • 20:00 - 20:30 are going to learn so personalized Japanese workbook personal Ukrainian workbook etc etc now this is a raw example but just to show you what code what it would looks like you would have your HTML tags and you would have like a variables inside of those skeletons so later we're going to step data to have a bunch of like thousands of pages that look different even though they have the same skeleton and then you want to collect and stuff these data so one good place to uh do that is you can go on fivr you can hire someone who uh would go on websites and just collect all the
            • 20:30 - 21:00 data that you need or you can also scrap the web yourself if you want to that will require Advanced developing skills and then you want to optimize your web page skeleton for SEO so you want to make sure that your images have the right out attributes you want to make sure that your links are titles you want to make sure you stuff the important keywords in the H1 tag you want to make sure you're clean on the SEO side and the last part is to get backlinks back links are like uh other websites linking to your site which going to tell Google that your site is trustworthy a good
            • 21:00 - 21:30 place to get back links for free is to use product hunts you're going to get one backlink you can also use my Indie page website if you create your portfolio and you'd add links to your website you're going to get a nice backlink and the last part to increase a little bit the speed at which you're going to get index is to submit your site on the search console so just enter some of your URLs here as Google to index it as soon as possible and then you just have to wait as you can see here for this site it took mon mon until they start to take off and if you have
            • 21:30 - 22:00 done your work properly you're going to get consistent traffic over the years next on the line we have meta ads Instagram Facebook ads this is how I drw for these little websites over I think was it 400 Facebook and 300 like I think there's around 1,000 visitors a months visiting my site and last month I spent around $14,000 for that the cost per purchase was around $48 so I made around $6,000 from ads last month the return investment can be great uh if you're a developer like me and you're not a big
            • 22:00 - 22:30 fan of ads the effort can be significant and the cost as most ads usually it's quite significant it works for pretty much anything but you want to make sure you have a product that is already converting just like affiliate programs um setting ads is actually pretty simple first you want to install the pixel so this little uh tracking script on your site you can actually install the extension called meta pixel helper to see if it's on a website so this is one of my websites for instance and uh there is actually the metap pixel install tracking page views this is how how you let Facebook knows that people who click
            • 22:30 - 23:00 on their Facebook ads actually end up visiting the site then you want to manually track some information for me I make it very simple because I don't have uh I don't like ads so I don't want to spend too much time on ads so I just track payments so whenever someone end up making a purchase on my site they redirected to a uh I think this SLC course page and right here I would send Facebook a little even let's say someone purchased and then you want to start launching your C your campaign on the Facebook meta ads manager so there are two things that are important the targeting so who is going to see this ad
            • 23:00 - 23:30 um there are two important Notions in marketing knowing like a cold audience and a warm audience a warm audience could be someone who know you through social media could be someone who has visited your website Etc and call these people who have never heard of you and of course it's much easier to sell to a warm audience but the data set is also much more limited because it's only people who know you already so if you're in doubt the best way to get started is to do retargeting so Target only people who have already visited your sites so they're somehow familiar with your brand and your ads will convert better and
            • 23:30 - 24:00 then you want to do creative like you want to create like uh images and photos and videos uh for instance this is one of my ad on mobile it looks like this so there is a first like the copy and then there is the the image itself I am lucky one of my good friend who is much much much better at me than as Nico is helping me he build some cool stuff for people who are learning how to make as like a little guide to learn how to do it um the right way if you want to check this out and then for the image and this is very important because this is what's going to catch the attention um you want
            • 24:00 - 24:30 to make sure you use templates that are already working you don't need to reinvent the wheel you don't need to start with a blank template uh you want to find stuff on the internet that works those are some of the ad I run uh you can find like libraries and templates everywhere on the internet you have this famous one where you have like this note iOS note app the famous Drake meme Etc you want to make sure you don't start from scratch and one really good place to get started is to just make a screenshot right now of this YouTube video Steal this ad add what your competitors are doing uh the wrong way
            • 24:30 - 25:00 this way and add what you're doing the right way here and this could be a perfect add for your product building a personal brand this will cost you $0 but it will cost you a lot of time but on the flip side it's probably what will bring the most return on investments not only marketing wise but also from a personal standpoint you can meet friends you can discover cool people you can organize Meetup up all across the world with your followers uh this is probably one of the best thing I have done so far I grow this Twitter audience to 160 follow 60,000 followers in the past 3
            • 25:00 - 25:30 years last year I decided to start YouTube and I grow a YouTube channel to 120,000 followers and this has brought thousands of tens of thousands of visitors to my website if we exclude direct known Twitter is the Second Source that's bringing most of the traffic to my startups building a personal brand could be a 2 hours long video so I'm going to try to keep this very short and give you the main highlight and some of the mistakes I see people make the first one is you want to pick your favorite platform if you see for instance on my Instagram account I barely have uh any follower it is
            • 25:30 - 26:00 because I am not active on Instagram because I am not good with photos I don't enjoy in the daily life taking photos I find better to write text because my I have a bunch of thoughts and text is a is a good way for me to put on my thoughts you want to find the platform that fits you if you're young if you're used to Tik Tok and YouTube shorts you want to start creating those kind of like short format videos if you're good with photos and you have like a beautiful camera to make like photos are very uh nice you want to build your audience on on Instagram first find what is right for you number two you want to find your unique
            • 26:00 - 26:30 personality trait we are all unique in some way sometimes even something that you think is not a good thing like you might think like you're overactive or or you're you cannot focus on something but this you can turn this into your strengths for instance I struggle to focus too much on one thing and that is somehow my strengths because then that makes me create a bunch of websites and stuff like I get bored very quickly and I really want to move on to the next one and this is how I build my entire Twitter account under the ship guy the guy who ship a lot of startups if you
            • 26:30 - 27:00 look at Famous personalities out there like whether it's the rock or artist Etc they all have something unique you want to find what is yours and double down on that then you want to craft your entire profile just around this unique personality trait for instance mine here uh shows all the websites that I work on I don't even need to write a sentence it's just I am the guy who ships lots of websites that's it and of course your uh Banner uh profile pictures the way you write Etc everything have to somehow match your profile and your personality
            • 27:00 - 27:30 traits then first if you have like literally zero followers the first thing you want to do before writing or creating content is to actually consume content so you want to follow creators that you admire you want to immerse yourself inside of the culture you want to learn the language learn the codes that is going to help you write content then when you want to start writing content and depending on you know what kind of business and what kind of things you're building uh you want to share behind the scenes so um there just a photo of me on my laptop and say today I did this you want to share r results I just got my first customers with a nice
            • 27:30 - 28:00 screenshot of your stripe dashboard you want to share learnings you want each of your uh content created to have one outcome at least for me I remember at the beginning I had like a bunch of thoughts and I wanted to share this and this and that you want to make sure that you try to organize your thoughts and you try to ask yourself it's like is this a behindth scene content is this like a result oriented inspirational tweet is it like a more of an educational tweet with learnings try to make one piece of content per outcome you want and finally and this is very important if you're getting started try to use template it is scary to look at a
            • 28:00 - 28:30 bling page and like what am I going to write about for instance this is one of my tweet that perform well and you can see here this is an actual template I saw someone making a similar post for writers and I was like oh this is quite interesting and so I reuse that template 1 hour of this 1 hour of that one hour of that do this every days of the years and by 2026 you would have outcome and not saying that you should write everything in template you also want to sound like an actual human but it is great to uh look at what's working for other creators and try to see how you
            • 28:30 - 29:00 can use that as a template and add your own signature to it and finally remember two things the first one is it takes a lot of time and the second one is that an audience won't follow you for no reason you need to build cool stuff next we have Reddit the cost is zero we have a minimum effort required and the return investment is medium because uh you never know what's going to happen um this for instance is a post on a r went viral and in one day I got like 50,000
            • 29:00 - 29:30 visitors you never really know what's going to happen Reddit one thing to know is that Reddit ate hads so they hate promotion so most subreddit won't allow you to post anything one of them that still allows you to post stuff like they literally it's made for people who want to share their side project so you can post anything here you can make a pro profal post um you want to reuse The Hacker News formula we have studied so you want to say like I have built XYZ and something happened and the outcome for people uh you usually it performs best when you have a little video to um
            • 29:30 - 30:00 introduce your product so that can be just you like I'm doing now with the camera uh explaining why you created the product and just showing a little demo of that product most other subred will just ban you for sharing anything promotionals so there are two things you can do the first one is there big subredit like the/ entrepreneurs uh where you can just share stories so this has uh this is a post of mine that went viral there's zero promotion I'm just educating people on what I've learned from selling my AI tool for 30 $25,000 and if people are interested they can
            • 30:00 - 30:30 visit my profile and on my profile uh it says that I build apps and they're like a link to all of my websites another uh another hack on on Reddit don't tell them I told you that but so what I would do when I make free tours so these other marketing channels I mentioned I would launch them in those subredit but of course if it's a promotion like you know like there's an ad on the right and I'll get banned so what I do is I create a little URL where as a developer uh if I know if I add this on my site I just hide the promotion so now it looks like
            • 30:30 - 31:00 just a tool like a literally a free tool with zero promotion that could be shared easily on Reddit later on you can either remove the promotion you will get banned but you'll get some people seeing your site but you can also just uh do it as it is right now and add a little link to your social media profile and that way you can grow an audience on Twitter Youtube whatever Reddit could just be a platform for people to discover your free tools your work and you channel that attention to your uh branded personal account all right we have
            • 31:00 - 31:30 directories directories is like a basically like a website that is made for people who launch products because there are lots of tech enthusiasts who are curious about what's going on in Tech so this is a really good place to launch your product the cost is either zero sometimes it's free sometimes it's a paid I'll show you some directories later you can post on the effort on your side is really minimum because you just have to make a listing and the return on investment is really good for instance the probably the most popular platform out there is product hunt so for 24 hours you have all those products competing and the one with the most upos
            • 31:30 - 32:00 stay at the top and of course gets the most traffic but traffic is not the only benefit you usually get a backlink you can also be shared inside of the newsletter of the the actual directory so product hunt newsletter for instance um you would expect if you're number one maybe like a 2,000 visitors in 24 hours if you're resar in their newsletter you would expect another 2,000 clicks later on when they share the newslet so this could bring significant traffic and also you would get a little badge uh so for instance this is one of my websites I
            • 32:00 - 32:30 got this little badge here for people who know product hun these ads social proof I know quite a bit of product hun I have launched like over 20 websites on there and I was awarded product of the Year 2023 so I will share with you some tips um first I also wanted to mention some other Alternatives uh we have un need which is similar to producton but is maintained by a solo developer and we also have tiny launch which is uh also maintained by a solo developer so those are free directories for you to just promote your startup uh if you want to invest a little bit of money and you
            • 32:30 - 33:00 make uh stuff related to AI there is a future pedia which also has a bunch of users and of course there is an AI for that which I think is the biggest AI directory those two will cost a little bit of money but they're great directories that will bring a bunch of traffic okay so now you have 24 hours to compete and you have to get as many up vote as possible so there are two types two ways of getting votes the first one is inbone of votes so up votes that you get from people actually on the platform for that you have to make a good listing a good listing is of course a good product but that's uh that's normal but
            • 33:00 - 33:30 you also need to have a good logo so make something that is super easy I see people like spending hundreds of dollars for a professional logo you don't need that make a logo that symbolize very simply what your product does for instance buy dispute is one of my project it's a shield with a dollar inside it protects your money you want also a name a name that is extremely uh outcome oriented and easy to understand unless you are stripe which you have a name that does not make any sense but you have VC money and you're going to concure the payment world uh you are like me a solo developer you don't want
            • 33:30 - 34:00 to make something smart you want to make something simple buy dispute remove dispute and then your headline it's basically 60 characters that will be shown on the homepage of the directory to explain what your product does in one sentence lots of people get it wrong especially developers you don't want to make it about your product you want to make it about the people so that can be either something that trigger my curiosity it can be a sentence that inspires me an emotion you want to remove your product from the equation and second you want to bring out bone up votes so if you're just getting started
            • 34:00 - 34:30 you might not have an audience yet but uh if you have I don't know 500 friends on Instagram you can use that that's already a really good start I used to ask my family all the time to upvote my launch and you want to use the badge so this is just a screenshot of one of my set when I launched it on product hunt you want to add somewhere on your banner header footer wherever this you want a little icon that says we are live on product hunt or on any directory at the moment would love your support and add a link back back to that directory listing so that actual visitors of your site can
            • 34:30 - 35:00 also support you during this launch another really underestimated marketing channel is YouTube live so literally making a live of you coding on YouTube this cost Zer this cost except that you need a camera it requires no effort on your side because you're just basically coding and the return on investment is great it can promote anything especially if you're targeting developers or any like a b2c apps like a habit record food loging Etc so this is my YouTube channel back a year ago I had zero followers and
            • 35:00 - 35:30 you can see that YouTube pushed some of my videos to people like 50,000 views on a 3 hours long video I have no idea what I'm doing there but but YouTube decided to push this video because there's a demand out there so first this will be good for your productivity it sounds simple but actually when you say that you're going to show up at 11:00 a.m. and you start the stream there is no way you spend time on Instagram because people are actually watching so really is going to scar at your productivity second you're going to grow an audience YouTube is going to push your content out there so people are going to discover your channel and you're going to build a little audience then you're
            • 35:30 - 36:00 going to get customers because there there there's something really important to understand one visitor from a random hiker news websites and a person who sees you coding live those are two separate person one does not care about you the other one trust you already because they can see you through the life and so even though you won't have big massive numbers just the fact that they're seeing you through the live which make them much more likely to trust you so you could literally be making money on the live live stream while your product is not even finished
            • 36:00 - 36:30 and finally you will discover some stuff some really random stuff like some people will jump in and try to uh help you with a bug uh the other day I had a French person who helped me with the design and we ended up reframing the entire app something will happen and this like all the noise that's created usually it's a good thing for entrepreneurship a few tips here um you want to either frame it as a challenge so day one of growing a software to $1 million day two of blah blah blah you want to challenge yourself and you also want to make a good thumbnail so in my case I was doing something like SAS related so this is for developers that's
            • 36:30 - 37:00 why the background is like lines of code uh there are also some uh Tech icons like nextjs stripe Etc so it's like Crystal Clear it's about coding and you are just bring in a weird emotion it is hard to get started with YouTube live stream but this is something that can really change your life and now bonus steep try all of those El marketing channels it will become so good at marketing you will never have to worry on how to get traffic again now getting visitors in one thing but converting these visitors into customers is another and I see lots of people getting started
            • 37:00 - 37:30 who make those five mistakes so to watch this video if you want to convert more customers and if you're inspired and you just want to uh create stuff on the internet I made this three hours long video where I teach you everything you need to know to go from zero to building an entire business using code and until the next one I hope you keep shipping