📢 Startup advertising: Stick with the bubble
Tags: marketing, saas, startup, seo
Published: 2021-01-11 14:57:45

---
title: "📢 Startup advertising: Stick with the bubble"
published: true
description: "I work as a software developer"
tags: [marketing, saas, startup, seo]
cover_image: https://jpomykala.com/assets/2021-01-04/analytics.png
canonical_url: https://jpomykala.com/2021/01/04/startup-advertising
---

[I work as a software developer for more than 7 years now](https://twitter.com/jakub_pomykala). For that time I spent many years in companies which were struggling with 
getting traction and more customers. 

Eventually, at some point every manager wanted to invest some time in online marketing when the [lead generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_generation) by networking was not enough.
Obvious and easy way? __Pay for ads and get more customers. It never worked.__ I also tried to buy ads for my projects. 
In most cases it's useless, I was getting more views and clicks. I never get an e-mail or customer

## 👺 Don't buy ads

If you ever wondered if it's worth to create a campaign on Facebook then... it's not. Consider hiring an expert for that or __don't do it on your own.__
I've never hired someone to run my campaigns, so my expirience may not be valid, but many of you probably would try to run ads on your own.

![SimpleLocalize ahrefs report](https://jpomykala.com/assets/2021-01-04/analytics.png)

I created more than 20 different campaigns on Facebook and other social platforms, and I've never meet a customer
who saw my ad on Facebook or Google. Recently, I read [an article about spending on digital ads at Uber](https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/) and it made me thinking if online marketing is still a thing in 2021. 
Maybe the targeting was wrong, or maybe I should put much more money on it to make it effective. The only difference which I noticed was more page views.
__Follow the next steps in this post before you buy ads.__

## 😇 Find good backlinks

Don't flood [Reddit](https://reddit.com) or any other [side project aggregator](https://www.producthunt.com) with your links. It won't improve the SEO because everybody can post there a link. 
Try to find places where not everybody can post about you and try to appear there. In 00's URL exchange was a popular way of __getting more traffic__ on your website. Today this is still relevant. 
__Try to appear in places which are related to your project.__

## 👨‍🔧 Fix SEO first
When I was creating landing pages, I got brief knowledge about SEO. I knew I need some links, keywords, good titles maybe and not copied content.
After I finished death march for features in [my projects](/#projects) in 2020, I started thinking: 'how to increase my sales'. I knew I probably need to write some tutorials, 
but then I discovered [ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com). I bought 7 days trial and started checking all the issues which I got on [SimpleLocalize](https://simplelocalize.io)

![SimpleLocalize ahrefs report](https://jpomykala.com/assets/2021-01-04/simplelocalize-ahrefs.png)

I didn't realize how much work I need to do to fix all of these issues. Unique page title, keywords, text with good contrast, good descriptions for every page. Go through [ahrefs SEO checklist](https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-checklist/)
to fix your issues if you don't want to buy a service yet. It's not cheap, but it's worth to subscribe. 

![SimpleLocalize backlinks](https://jpomykala.com/assets/2021-01-04/impressions.png)

All my rankings started going up after adjusting a few HTML tags. It was extremly easy thanks to [react-helmet](https://www.npmjs.org/package/react-helmet). I also moved my docs from [GitBook pages](https://docs.gitbook.com/editing-content/content-structure) to [GatsbyJS](https://www.gatsbyjs.com), so this also helped a lot.

## 🛁 Join to the bubble
This is the final advice which combines all advices from above. By fixing your SEO and using backlinks it's easy to join to the bubble. 
By bubble, I mean __'being among all other websites which are similar'__. People who will need your service or something similar to your service will find you later or sooner. 
They will compare you with your competitors and choose the right option. You don't need to put $$ into adverts or flood Reddit to a get traction.

## and happy new year! 😄