If you ever marketed a desktop plugin, which activities helped you with visibility and purchases?
I am possibly preparing for marketing my own tool (a Chrome extension) and collect the activities I can use for future visibility and possible purchases.
Right now, I am thinking about basics:
SEO within the plugin (name, description, description in the Chrome Store + visuals)
Listings in directories
Reddit mentions
Building in public
I am aware that it is not sufficient, and there will be much more work.
If you have any experience with marketing such a tool, do you have any suggestions on what worked best for you?
42 views
Replies
articles, LinkedIn posts
minimalist phone: creating folders
@julia_zakharova2 Cool! Actually, the LinkedIn article didn't come to my mind, and it is actually the platform I am aiming for! :D thank you :)
@busmark_w_nika Have you thought about targeting specific workflows instead of broad SEO? Like positioning it for a niche use case instead of a generic Chrome extension.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@vishal7017 Okay, it will be a LinkedIn extension. What do you exactly mean, because I do not understand quite well.
not my own experience, picked this up from a friend group of indie founders who've shipped extensions. consensus:
store listing carries it. keywords in the name itself, screenshots showing the result not the UI, video preview, and review velocity in the first 2 weeks. that early spike shapes how the store treats u for months.
google > the store for discovery anyway. ppl search "best chrome extension for X" and land on a blog post, so seo and comparison pages vs incumbents punch above their weight (this advice is gold for any product regardless of its nature)
video demos work because extensions r visual. one good tiktok or yt short can carry u for weeks.
reddit only if u show up where ur actual users hang out, not r/saas or r/startups. answer real questions, mention the tool when it's the answer(setting up a reddit that scans rss feeds for people complaining about your problem takes 2 hours and has insane roi for this)
skip directories and bip unless u already have an audience. real unlock is finding where ur icp complains about the problem and showing up there.
best of luck !!!
Hi Nika, not a desktop plugin, but a desktop program. Animo is an animated video generator.
What I did was open-source the code, build a community, and offer the program with updates as a paid, licensed version. That made my product very ranked on Google, and I started receiving a lot of traffic because of it. But other important distribution channels are the GitHub repository itself and more posts on Reddit
I would start narrower than “marketing a Chrome extension.”
The most useful thing is usually to pick one painful workflow and make all the early content about that workflow, not about the tool.
For example:
“I review 50 LinkedIn profiles a week and need a faster way to save good examples.”
- “I comment on prospects’ posts and need a way to keep context.”
- “I collect screenshots/posts/leads and lose them after a few days.”
Then the marketing becomes much easier: one workflow page, one short demo, one comparison article, a few real before/after examples, and comments in places where people already complain about that exact problem.
I would not spend too much time on broad directories early. They give a backlink, but usually not much learning. Real examples from early users are more useful because they become landing page copy, SEO pages, demos, and social posts at the same time.