First a little background, we’re making an A/B testing application for publishers to enable them to optimize their ad revenues. While, recruiting users for the launch was a little difficult in the beginning, we figured out a few ways, which we’re sharing here, so, this is a story of how we’re getting hundreds of pre-launch signups for our Ad Revenue Optimization App. If you’re in pre-launch stage, this article should help. So, here it is – short & simple:

Content Marketing

Not something new, but works very well! Choosing what to write about, is an important decision though. Zero down on 3-4 primary user segments who’d be interested in your product, In our case they are Bloggers/Publishers, Conversion rate optimizers, AdTech and Analytics Professionals. Once you have identified these users, create in-depth and engaging content for all of these segments.

Here are some content ideas (which can help you get domain relevant traffic), which we have used:

Mentions known players
A lot of Webmasters/Bloggers & Publishers, search for PPC Ad Networks, so we created the following content and mentioned some popular ad networks:

• Top 12 Best Paying CPC/PPC Ad Networks

Most of the Ad networks we mentioned, shared and RT’ed the post. Some other Examples:

• Top 30 Web Analytics Tools | Google Analytics Alternative (Similarly, this post mentions a lot of Analytics Apps)
• An In-depth Article on Real Time Bidding (For the AdTech community)
• A Guide to Programmatic Buying (For the AdTech community)

Creating content is only half work done, content outreach is equally important (more on this later).

Create sharable content with Insights
Here are a couple of posts which were aimed to maximize shares and tweets (through the tweet link, at the end of each line), and this worked well:

• Interesting Facts about the Banner & Display Advertising
• 25 Stats about Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B Testing

Novelty Content
Create content which has – Novelty value. For example, I could not find any single in-depth resource about the history of online advertising. Most of the content either focused on a single company or covered very short time frames. So we came up with a piece on The History of Online Advertising.

SEO – Keywords based content
Good content is shared, of course. However, finding and writing content around important keywords isn’t a bad idea for generating long term regular traffic. Our organic traffic has been rising quite steadily as well.

Social Outreach: Twitter & G+

Just like I said above, Creating great content is only half work done, rest of the work is outreach or promoting that content. We’ve been primarily using Twitter and Google Plus for this. Facebook has been mostly a waste of time, would be happy to know if it worked for you and how, just write about your story in the comments.

An important thing here is that whenever you give an outbound link or mention someone, make sure you find their twitter or G+ Account and reach out to them with a link to the post you have published. It helps build very relevant followers, increase engagement and get even more traffic from the Re-Tweets.

Similarly, Google Plus has been very helpful in reaching out to the right audience for our content. Find popular communities which are relevant and share it with them. It goes without saying that you should read the rules, and ensure that sharing your own content is acceptable. Similarly don’t drop the links just for the sake of it. Make sure you answer to all the questions/replies and interact with the community.

Inbound & Hackernews

Both of these websites deserve their share of attention. I haven’t got a lot of upvotes on HN yet, but some of my posts which reached the homepage, really brought a lot of traffic, though they were on the HP for a short while. Similarly, Inbound is a very good community of online marketeers and has sent a lot of relevant traffic our way. Here are some posts which did well on Inbound:

I am no longer submitting my own links on Inbound now, as the community has become quite strict about the self-promotion rule, off late (and which is better, for the greater good).

Guest Posts & Interviews

I’ve only done a couple of Guest posts so far and I do plan on writing guest posts more actively in the near future. The few ones that I did, still helped get some relevant traffic. We also got the opportunity of an interview on MonetizePros and some more are coming out soon! I’ll be writing a detailed post on this, when I have enough guest posts published.

Optimize for more conversions

All the traffic which you are building is of no help, unless your website/blog is optimized to improve conversions. You can notice the two signup forms – Sidebar and at the bottom of the content. After a few A/B tests, on the copy used on the signup form and the banner, we’ve improved the signup rates by 72% from the first version.

We still have a lot of time before our beta version is released and there are a lot of other marketing and outreach plans we’re planning to execute, Subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated!

Special Thanks to Arun for proofreading and helping me finalize the draft.