This summer I released the bot for the Telegram messenger. The bot wasn’t monetized in any way, and the goal was not to make money on it. Therefore, I did not want to invest in promotion. I have tried various methods of promotion that do not require financial costs. Here I would like to share successful and unsuccessful cases.
Bot directories
If you try to search in the search engines for a bot, then in most cases you will get to sites with bot directories. There are catalogs where your bot will be placed for free, some ask for placement from 500 to 1000 rubles. The promotion budget I had was 0 rubles, so I used only the free catalogs. But a miracle did not happen, the bot was not added to any new chat.
Entertainment sites with custom content
There are many entertainment resources where the content is generated by users, and these same users decide where the content will move on: lost among the same others or get on the main page of the site. To post content on entertainment resources do not need the skills of a copywriter or designer, and creating a post does not take much time. I tried several sites:
- pikabu.ru. Writing a post took no more than an hour, but gave the largest influx of users. I already told in more detail about it earlier on Habré.
- vc.ru. The resource works according to the same scheme as picabu, new posts fall into the “fresh” section, and the best of the “fresh” hits the main one. Before publication, I noticed such a nuance: on weekdays, the flow of new articles is simply huge, and on weekends - one in a couple of hours. I decided to post a day off. Due to the fact that new articles did not appear, my post hung for several hours at the very top of the “fresh” one. I think this also allowed him to gain the necessary number of views in order to move to the main one later.
- yaplakal.com. Each community has its own rules and concepts. A post on yaplakal in 15 minutes flew into a deep minus, and the account was blocked for spam.
Professional User Content Sites
Creating posts on entertainment resources is not difficult and does not take much time. The situation with professional resources is much more complicated. Here you will not manage a couple of offers about your product. Community members need to be interested in an article that is consistent with the community theme. This is more time consuming and requires skill. Nevertheless, I tried to publish on habr.ru, and the article had several thousand views.
Contact in PM administrators of large chats
Telegram has many large public chats. Many have more than a thousand participants. Collections of these chats can be found in the same telegram directories. I was looking for groups in which there was no ban on voice messages and bots were not added with similar functionality. I wrote to the administrator in a personal message with a proposal to add my bot to their chat. About one in three agreed. This method is quite time-consuming, but its advantage is that many active users will see the work of your bot. That is, the bot will advertise itself.
Summary
And in the end, how did the promotion of the bot affect the metrics? The bot is used to convert voice messages to text, so it has two important metrics: how many chats it was added to and how many voice messages it processed.
Description of jumps on the chart:
1.09 - Published a post on pikabu.ru
12.10 - Published a post on vc.ru
10.22 - I wrote messages to administrators of large chats
The graph shows that in the days of publication of articles there is an increase in the number of chats in which the bot was added and an increase in the number of voice messages received. On the day when I wrote to chat administrators with a proposal to add a bot, the changes on the blue graph are almost not noticeable, but the number of processed voice messages has increased.
It is generally accepted that to promote a product, you must have money for advertising, PR, marketing knowledge, be able to negotiate and interact with people in order to interest them in your product. Most likely, this will speed up the recruitment of users, but even without any of this, you can try to look for promotion methods that are available to you.
In conclusion, I would like to supplement the article with information about traffic from Habr, so I leave links to the bot:
t.me/VoiceMsgBot
teleg.run/VoiceMsgBot
Or search for Telegram by name: @VoiceMsgBot