I’m sure this is a challenge any creator faces sooner or later, and I’m sure it’s especially true for anyone self-employed, but I struggle terribly with marketing my stuff. Stuff as in my blog, my apps, my creative writing—myself even.
I’m lucky in the sense that I’m employed, and I don’t need to depend on my side-projects for income. It doesn’t even really matter that my portfolio is in dire need of a refresh and I struggle with presenting my work. Technically, it doesn’t matter how many people are using my apps, after all.
Practically, it sucks that hardly anyone seems to know about them—especially since the feedback I get from the people actually trying them is generally positive, and I genuinely believe they can have a positive impact on people’s lives! But I simply don’t know how to spread the word.
I do blog about them occasionally, like I just did with Quadrants. I have a dedicated Mastodon account for Mattrbld. Back when I released Qami, I wrote to a couple of publications, naïvely thinking they’d maybe do a feature on it. Obviously, I’ve linked my apps everywhere it makes sense. It doesn’t really seem to work.
Minimal, Sobering Data
I do run some very basic analytics for some of my applications (not this website though, which might be an oversight as I have no idea how many people even bother reading these posts, I guess that’ll be a to-do for the inevitable relaunch). The numbers are humbling. I’m reasonably sure the analytics don’t pick up every use, as I am respecting do-not-track requests and lots of people block analytics scripts with their ad-blockers, even if they’re self-hosted like mine are. Still, it’s a bit sad to see that nobody really seems to care about my apps (apart from Mattrbld which doesn’t have huge usage numbers, but at least sees some constant use).
Now, this could be because they’re just not very good, or don’t solve problems people have—that’s totally fair. It just doesn’t seem to line up with the feedback I’m getting from the people who do give my apps a shot (which aren’t just my friends and family, I swear 😉). Personally, I think it’s a visibility issue. People don’t know about my apps, so they can’t even check them out to see if they’re good or not.
Sticking Out from the Crowd
And who could blame them? We live under a constant barrage of advertisements and other information. There’s a billion people constantly screaming for our attention. So the quiet ones are left sitting in the back of the room, forgotten. I certainly don’t want to become one of those screamers in the front.
I do wonder if I could market my stuff a bit better, though. If you’re an independent artist / creator / maker, what do you do? Which things worked out for you, which did not? I’d be grateful if you could let me know on Mastodon.