Seeding Your Content
Don't visit these sites and just post a link or salesy message
back to your site - that's spammy and you'll get flagged quickly.
Instead, find a way to create valuable content for your target
audience within those communities and then leave contact
information that includes your website. It's a numbers game - the
more people who love and share the content, the more potential
leads you'll generate from people who are genuinely interested in
your cotent.
For Slideshare, here's an excellent
example of a deck that is all about who you are, but also provides
interesting data around growth hacking (it is a little long, I'd
recommend 30 slides max).
For Quora, as a founder you should be answering (or posting) questions everyday. The point is to to focus on providing content that's useful for your audience. Link to your product, but be as objective as possible. Here's a great example of a specific answer:
If there aren't any questions that you want to answer, create them and answer them yourself. Don't forget about other services like Yahoo! Answers as well. Just having a link back to your site from these platforms is worth the time spent.
For Wikipedia, you probably won't be able to create a page exclusively about your startup, but you can update other related pages or create a page about a specific topic. Companies like TechCrunch do this each time they publish an article - for example with the Pinterest page, they've "updated" the resources several times right after publishing a new post about it:
If you're focused on a startup or early tech adopters crowd, Hacker News can bring some incredible traffic, and has done a great job promoting some of my content from other places (although it's tough to know what will take off and what won't). Criticism should also be expected and it's best to acknowledge all "suggestions" and explain your thought process or how you plan to resolve the issue - this makes for a great follow up post a few weeks down the line!
Meetup.com (and similar services like eventbrite.com) is one of those services that will do the job of driving traffic to your meetup if you create one. Find a topic your users would be interested in, and bring them great content. If your biggest potential userbase is people on Etsy, then start the NY Etsy Meetup and bring in people who've launched successful products on that platform.
This is also an excellent place to do in person for customer development. You're able to hear first-hand the language your audience uses to describe the problem and get a sense of how they really feel about your product.
Skillshare allows you to teach a skillset to anyone, anywhere. So you might have interest in taking part of the community that's developing around that and help promote your personal brand and projects there.
Newsletters are still a HUGE driving force. If you have an event or content piece you'd like to share, try submitting it to curated newsletters like Startup Digest or Gary's Guide.
Email signatures are another great place to promote your startup without being too pushy. Hotmail was able to grow virally just by adding "PS. Get your free email at Hotmail" to the signature of each person. If you're trying to get people to use your product, put a simple "sign up for x at y" in your signature on every email. Its not too pushy, and over the course of a few weeks you can get potentially hundreds of free users.
