Making it onto Product Hunt is potentially a very big deal for startups, and a great way to spur user growth. But what’s much more important is being prepared to get the most out of the posting. What should you do to ready your site for major traffic? And who should you reach out to in order to spread the word post-publication?
I asked 10 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) how they would maximize unexpected but welcomed coverage. Their answers are below.
1. Work your network
Now is the time when all of your investments prior to being chosen become important. Did you bring in influencers around your brand? Do you have tools set up to track mentions? In other words, if you aren’t organized yet, it’s important to get your ducks in a row.
2. Capture leads
Make sure that you have the ability to capture leads and sales from your homepage. Many people direct viewers to another page to sign up. Have the sign up page right there on your homepage so that users don’t have to hunt around.
Product Hunt also drives investors, so upload a few statistics that will wow customers and investors alike. It’s a great way to capture leads and those who can write very large checks for your business.
— John Rampton, Due
3. Address comments
Make sure to answer the comments that people leave on your product. Engage with people who shared your product on Twitter. Follow up with users who signed up. Leverage your time on Product Hunt to the maximum.
4. Add a feature request option
Getting featured on Product Hunt is a huge opportunity to learn what features people wish your product or service had, whether or not they end up buying. There will be a big influx of traffic from sophisticated players in the tech industry, and it’s important to make it easy for them to give you direct feedback.
Add a feature request form or option in an easy-to-find place on your landing page, and pay attention to requests that are repeated over time. You could even segment it into one option for people who signed up and one for people who leave the site without buying. You’ll get insight into the perceived value of your offering, as well as improvements that you should be working on in order to make your company even more valuable.
5. Get creative with marketing
Now that you’ve gotten people’s attention, you can keep it by demonstrating how your product can simplify or enrich people’s lives. You can easily do this by supporting something/someone who needs what you have to offer (for free), provided that it is clearly specified that your company provided the service. In this two-way relationship, the person receiving your support will be able to attest to the fact that your product works, and you will be able to reap the benefits of marketing. Basically, get creative with marketing. Think of an unusual thing that your product can be used for, and have a trained professional actually give your product a try. You should already have advertised your feature on social media, and added the feature to your website for future reference.
6. Increase your votes
Make sure whatever page Product Hunt linked to is set to scale. If you have time or are ready beforehand, do a load test. Blitz.io works pretty well for this. To maximize the chance you get to the top, it’s a great idea to share your link page with your users, friends and family. We were using Mailchimp for a past project and it’s easy to email all of your users who have Twitter accounts. This really helped increase the votes.
7. Set up retargeting ads
Retargeted ads (ads geared towards people who have already visited your site) can be one of the most successful and profitable forms of advertising. Just by visiting your site, people are expressing interest in your product. The problem is that usually, once someone leaves your site, you don’t have their email address or any contact information to try to get them to come back.
That’s where retargeting comes in. By using retargeting services like AdRoll, A Perfect Audience or Facebook’s Native Ad Platform, you can cookie users who visit your site and advertise to them later to get them to come back. Make sure that you set up the tracking code on your site before getting a big feature like Product Hunt. That way you can take advantage of all that traffic to keep people coming back for weeks.
8. Track analytics in real time
Assuming you already have a Google Analytics or Kissmetrics account set up, it’s important to track what’s happening in real time the day you go live on Product Hunt. Are users bouncing off too quickly? If they are, make amends around messaging or the layout of your homepage. Are the users spending too much time on the homepage? Maybe they are looking for a signup button. Ideally, it’s recommended to have a couple variants of the landing page that you can A/B test. Monitor which landing page is doing well in the first couple hours and then give it more traffic during the rest of the day.
9. Improve your SEO
If your company has just been featured on Product Hunt, you’ll see increased search volumes for interested searchers trying to find you on Google. They might search for your ‘brand name’ keyword, for which you should absolutely rank No. 1, or they might search weeks later for keywords descriptive of your product or service. Do you show up? Or will your competitors get the traffic you helped generate?
Make sure your website has content and webpages beyond the homepage, no robot.txt file on your site (they might be blocking Google spiders), an XML sitemap, plugins and widgets to build email lists and optimized user onboarding in place. Be sure to track everything.
— Matthew Capala, Search Decoder
10. Spread the news
After your product is featured and gets a positive review, it is important that you let all of your internal and external channels know about it. But there is a difference between sharing your featured article on your Twitter page and sending it to other, more important sources. Be sure to spread the news, but in places that will truly benefit your company and keep the news spreading and growing. Draft up a press release or email send with this feature included and send it to contacts and other publications that will benefit your company even further. You want to make sure that you are not just celebrating the feature and moving on; but instead turning this feature into more and more buzz in the future.
— Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com
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