If there's one consistent issue that plagues startups, consultants, and even large established business it's marketing.<p>And that whole thread touches on a subject that I wish would get more traction here on HN: content engineering.<p>Content Engineering (building tools and useful online software projects) is an incredibly effective way to build an audience and awareness by helping people instead of writing yet another 500 word blog post or dumping six figures of VC money into FB or Google ads.<p>It honestly feels like cheating. I think tools just occupy a different part of people's brains than articles and certainly a different spot than ads.<p>This is a hot topic for me as I was looking through the analytics for my site yesterday and found that our Subject Line tester [1] was driving about 10x the traffic of our dozen 2000+ word carefully crafted and educational blog posts [2]. F'ing ridiculous<p>1 - <a href="https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester" rel="nofollow">https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester</a>
2 - <a href="https://sendcheckit.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://sendcheckit.com/blog</a><p>Here's some other good examples:<p>Clearbit's Logo API
<a href="https://clearbit.com/logo" rel="nofollow">https://clearbit.com/logo</a><p>ForAGoodStrftime
<a href="https://www.foragoodstrftime.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.foragoodstrftime.com</a><p>Atom
<a href="https://atom.io/" rel="nofollow">https://atom.io/</a><p>Golden Ratio Typography Calculator
<a href="https://pearsonified.com/typography/" rel="nofollow">https://pearsonified.com/typography/</a>
Marketing is not:
"Spending money on ads, Spending years building a social following, Going to networking events, Cold calling"<p>but is:
"posting it on relevant forums, sharing it with bloggers, sending it to journalists to potentially write about"<p>Isn't that sort of a contradiction, if the thing I want to market is a side project in itself?<p>I guess I'll try his strategy of talking about one of my side project's outputs instead of the side project itself: Learning Chinese with movies and music.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ/videos?shelf_id=0&view=0&sort=dd" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ/vid...</a>