If questions are like coupons then XTREME couponing is like... answering tons of questions (no, like, tons). You know what I'm talking about. When Nana is holding up the line with her fanny pack bursting with coupons and you're like C'MON NANA, THIS IS EMBARRASSING.
It's a tactic to drive long-term awareness and gain trust/credibility with developers.
Let's take Jon Skeet for example.
I first became aware of Jon early in my career finding his C# answers on Stack Overflow. According to his profile, Jon has:
- Reached (read: helped) over 370MM people
- Answered 35,000 questions
- Is the top contributor on StackOverflow
Jon works full-time on Google Cloud but on the side, he has also written a book, C# in Depth.
Do you think by racking up stored credit on attention that some C# developers who were helped by him wound up paying for the book?
Most definitely. It's now on the 4th edition since first being published in 2008. It's consistently one of the top bestselling books on C#. Plenty of reviews cite prior awareness of Jon from SO:
Jon is an xtreme couponer. He's also an individual (all the more impressive, if you ask me).
What about software companies? Any extreme couponers there?
Well, the LogRocket blog has over 3,300+ blog posts (mostly external).
It's consistently at the top of organic searches for tons of front-end JavaScript questions. According to semrush, it has almost 500k backlinks and 99% of its search traffic is organic (vs. paid, which I bet is for landing pages).
I don't have internal stats on what % of traffic clicks through the CTAs on blog articles and then eventually convert to paying customers. BUT it's definitely non-zero, as I found at least one mention of this explicitly in a ProductHunt review:
Answering questions is helpful. In return, some number of people will reciprocate by checking you out further. When done in a focused way, it can make you a trusted authority. Xtreme couponing is an answering economy of scale.
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
PS. You may ignore the people who are mad at Nana for holding up the line. Couponing isn't for them, it's for who you're serving.
