List Building Strategy #1: Side Project Marketing

According to Brian Clark, the golden rule of online marketing is this:

“Give something valuable away in order to sell something related.”

So when you get to a point where blogging and content production take too much time, or buying advertising space kind of works, but you don’t feel like you’re really breaking through the noise of all the online chatter, using a side project to get attention is a great way to grow your brand awareness… and your email subscribers.

Side projects are a product or service that is clearly not your business’ main offering, but is a related and free offer provided to your audience in exchange for their email address.

It might sound like a lot of work at first, but it really doesn’t have to be.

A lot of SaaS companies do this with a freemium version of their offering while those customers gear up and grow to the point that they’re ready to become full-fledged, paying customers. (Think Buffer or MailChimp)

But beyond freemium, you can offer something completely different, too.

Crew, a company that matches companies with high-quality, hand-picked freelancers, can’t exactly offer a freemium version of their service, so they have six different side projects they offer for free in lieu of other marketing or advertising tactics:

Including things like a calculator to help people figure out the cost of an app they want developed,

a collection of free stock photos, and a list of what they call ‘unicorn’ coffee shops to work from that have the ultimate trifecta of working perfection: good coffee, good wifi, and plenty of outlet plugs.

You might be thinking, “OMG, we don’t have money and resources to build this”.

Here’s the deal:

Your side product marketing doesn’t have to be expensive or labour intensive. It can be as simple as an excel sheet. 

Take a look at Greenlane Search Marketing‘s side project – Rank Tank. Those DIY tools didn’t cost a fortune to build, but take a look at the number of keywords it’s ranking for:

If that doesn’t convince you how about this stat instead:

62%. 

That’s the percentage of Crew’s revenue driven by their side projects – How Much Does a Website Cost – a week following its launch on Product Hunt.

Here’s what Ali Mese of Growth Supply had to say on finding side project ideas….