40+ Creative Ways to Promote your Startup Online in 2020

How to promote my startup online? This is the very first question comes to the mind of every startup marketer or founder during the promotion of their startup or product. It is very hard to put the word out about a new product in the starting, but if you follow the right strategy then you can easily make your startup or product go viral in a month or even in few days. There are thousands of startup directories available online for the promotion of new startups or products but only a few of them will get you results. Most of these startup directories are dead now and they are not getting any traffic. Submitting your startup to all these useless directories can be very time consuming and less productive, so to solve this problem we have created a list of active startup directories. All these chosen startup directories, websites and tech blogs have a huge user base which will drive enormous traffic to your startup along with other benefits like early adopters, subscribers, beta testers, social media followers, sponsors or even investors.

Benefits of startup promotion through startup directories & tech blogs

If you are lucky enough to get your startup or product featured in some of the popular startup directories or tech blogs like Product Hunt, Tech Crunch, Hackers New etc., It will provide you lots of benefits, some of which are given below.

Traffic & Ranking – Featured Startups or Product receives a huge traffic boost, which further improves their online presence including the search engine rankings.

Early Adopters & Subscribers – The traffic which your startup receives after getting featured in a startup directory, is targeted traffic ( these are the people which are really interested in your startup or product). There is a very good chance that you will get enough number of early adopters and subscribers which help you in improving your product at the early stage.

Social Media Benefits – It will help in increasing the social media presence of your startup and your own personal social accounts because the people on the internet are crazy about innovative folks and their innovations.

Other Benefits – Including above mentioned benefits, you will also receive tons of other useful emails regarding sponsorships, partnerships or even offers from various investors etc.

List of top 65 websites to promote your startup

All the websites in this list are categorized into different groups like startups directories, tech blogs etc. The top 3 (Hackers News, Product Hunt, Reddit)  are the most beneficial websites for promoting any startup or product. Try to submit & get featured your startup or product in these top 3 first, it will give your startup a killer head start.

Hackers News

Hackers News is a community of tech Lovers, startup enthusiasts, investors and other professionals from the tech industry. It is a widely used platform where its community members share tech news, startup stories, product launches, discussions, job postings and lot more useful information. Startups which gets featured on the homepage of the hackers news receive enormous traffic, including news subscribers, customers, early adopters and more perks.

How much traffic your product receive if it hits the homepage of Hackers News?

If anybody gets featured on the homepage of the Hackers News, then they get enough traffic to crash their web server in a single day. You will get near about 10,000 to 60,000 visitors of referral traffic from Hackers News. This traffic surge will give additional benefits including more social media engagements, increase in your social media followers etc. If you need more details about how much traffic you will get from hackers news then you can read this guy’s experience with HN submission.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a platform where users can share and discover new products daily. Registered product hunt users can use the voting function to upvote the submitted products, hence the popular products always stay on the top of the list. Thanks to the advance ranking algorithm of the product hunt which delivers the best products on the homepage daily. Hundreds of products are submitted to the product hunt every day, only the best ones get featured on the homepage. The featured products receive lots of traffic, subscribers or even customers from the product hunt community. Product Hunt is the best platform for launching your new product or startup online without even spending loads of money on expensive ads.

How much referral traffic does a product receives from product hunt?

All the products featured on Product Hunt receive a different amount of traffic according to their position in the featured products list and total time spent on the homepage of the Product Hunt website. The featured products receive around 1500 visits to massive 10000 visits. You can read this article if you need more details about product hunt submission.

Reddit

Reddit is among top 10 websites of the world, it has millions of registered users. This site is further divided into small communities called subreddits, each subreddit revolves around a specific niche like health, tech, politics etc.  It has various subreddits related to startups and business where you can submit your startup and get valuable feedback about it.  You can try your luck by submitting your startup to the following subreddits.

Similar to these popular subreddits you can find other related subreddits according to your requirements and submit your product or startup there.

Designer News

Designer News is a community of designers and developers, if your startup belongs to design industry then this place can bring you some awesome feedback about your product. Featured links will receive around 1000 to 5000 visitors from the designer news community. You can read this article if you need more details about how much traffic you will get from Designers news on getting featured there.

Tech Blogs & Websites

We have compiled a list of high authority tech blogs which accepts startup submissions also. Promoting your startup in these type of websites will give a huge ranking boost to your startup if gets featured by any of these tech blogs. Your startup must be very innovative and unique to get featured by one these blogs, average quality startup submissions are never get accepted on these.

Design & Development Communities

If your startup is about design or development, then you can use any of the following listed communities to promote your startup or product online. On getting featured on these websites will drive highly targeted traffic towards your startup’s website.

Startups Directories

Startup directories are mainly meant for showcasing new startup releases in various categories. We have created a list of most active and popular startup directories along with their twitter followers and Alexa rankings. There are thousands of startup directories available online but we have included only best ones on the list. These are the most active startup directories with good userbase and a decent amount of daily traffic. All the directories in this list are worth submitting your startup.

Startups & Investor Networks

These are special kind of platforms where you can create your company`s complete profile including detailed information about its funding, investors etc. Normally you will not get any traffic benefits from these websites but still, they are a good place for spreading the name of your startup.

Other websites to submit your startup or product

Along with normal startup directories, you can also submit your startup to the various business to business websites for example product discovery websites, alternative product websites or product review websites etc.

Bonus Tip

Write an interesting story about your startup journey and publish it on the medium.

Conclusion

Please remember one thing, submitting your startup to all these directories will get good results only if your startup is unique and innovative. Average quality startup submissions are rejected or they get a minor response from the audience.
Best of luck with your next startup submission.
Please feel free to comment if you have any suggestions to improve this list in future.