100 Free Places to Promote your Kickstarter Campaign

7 min readAug 13, 2018

As a Kickstarter campaign owner, the statistics are against you.

Only 40% of all Kickstarter campaigns reach their goal!

In order to succeed, promotion is essential.

Good promotion strategy for crowdfunding usually involves spending a substantial amount of money — whether that’s paid (Facebook) ads or advertising listings on popular sites.

To save you money, we’ve gathered a list of 100 free places to promote your campaign and boost your chance of reaching your target goal and beyond.

Good sites will help you build brand awareness besides driving a decent amount of traffic to your Kickstarter.

Want 50+ more for free?

See our guide on The Top 150+ Influencers to Promote your Startup or Crowdfunding Campaign

Important — Before Making Contact

Relax, take a step back and prepare your initial contact

As the founder of Hyperstarter and a promoter of Crowdfunding campaigns, 9 times out of ten we are usually just sent a “cut and pasted” long description of the campaign and a link. It’s not a great first impression and in no way encourages us to post the link!

The perfect place that will promote you has an audience that is relevant and has a readership that is substantial.

Make sure you’re asking questions like:

Relevance — will their readers like your project?
Readership — how much traffic does the site get?
Relationships — do you know someone who can make an introduction?
Reach — will the influencer reach prospective backers? Website, newsletter, RSS and social media?

Important — Prepare a Pre-Launch

Prepare for a Pre-Launch (AKA Soft Launch)

Firstly you should be reaching out to friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances etc., basically anyone you think would be supportive of your pre-launch.

Make a landing page to collect emails, email campaigns to target potential backers and a presence on the web is a must.

There’s no rule to say you can’t use social media before your product is launched. Posting rough designs, marketing videos, prototypes and work in progress is a great way to connect with your customers plus they can be sent to influencers as “exclusive” forms of promotion if you get a mention.

Targeting influencers at the pre-launch stage is even better as you can get in contact with people who believe in your product before it’s even launched.

The HUGE Kickstarter Promotion List

Note: The list is in no particular order. I’ve tried to give the direct link to the influencer’s submission or contact page.

Alot of the sites will feature you if you’re campaign is interesting and relevant to them.

Onto the list of some great ways to promote a Kickstarter project.

Product Hunt

It’s notoriously hard to get listed on this site, but there may be a way round by offering a “Product Hunt exclusive”. To get noticed you could offer Product Hunters early access or an exclusive discount. Otherwise, pitch yourself on Twitter by giving out your url, using a short description of your product (make it catchy) and using @producthunt in the tweet.

Gadget User (Paid)

Create an exciting giveaway for your product to an engaged and large tech-gadget audience that’s hungry for unique and cool gadgets. Gadget User’s contests go viral because of their growing platform of real tech followers. The email list is provided at the contest’s end date, ensuring you keep the subscribers. People who remain on your email platform will convert to customers. And the best part is, you can market to this new list forever. Read our review of Gadget User and How to Make your Product go Viral.

The Gadget Flow (Paid)

With 25M monthly visitors that are Eager to discover great New Products The Gadget Flow is the world’s leading product discovery platform. You should definitely give it a try. Read our guide on Using Gadget Flow for Crowdfunding Projects.

Kickstarterforum

Run by influencer Salvador Briggman, Kickstarterforum is a huge Crowdfunding community which allows you to pitch your ideas at pre-launch level and also promote your project for free after it’s launched. There is also an extension of sites such as Crowdfunding PR and Crowdcrux.

Kicktraq

Kicktraq is like Google Analytics for Kickstarter campaigns. It’s more of a tool that tracks data, issues forecasts and showcases the most popular campaigns. Paid services range from advertising with a banner or being featured on their “Active Projects” list.

Cool Backer

CoolBacker curate the coolest projects that are currently seeking backers, or have been successfully funded and are ready to order.

Social Media Forums

Thrillist

Thrillist write articles on a number of lifestyle subjects from Food to Dating. If your campaign covers any of these topics, shoot off an email to the editors or if you see your country / region listed on their page, connect with them directly.

Werd

They’ve been at it fo 10 years now, helping to fund a ton of products.

Bless This Stuff

Similar to Thrillist, this is an online “Web Magazine for guys. Men’s Style, gadgets, gear, technology, vehicles. Stuff we drool about”. Quite a few KS projects are featured on the site. Mighty Goods are similar too.

Not Cot

A community of creative’s, design lovers and trendsetters. There is a small box in the top left corner, where after joining/signing in you can submit your image, link and category theme with a description. Also, something similar is Icanhascheezburger (Geek Section) , if your project is geeky / creative why not try to submit here too.

Consumerist

A non-profit organisation, showcasing consumer news which features Crowdfunding stories from time to time. Good is another alternative magazine type site with a growing readership.

The Awesomer

A site that features everything that’s “awesome”. From tech to design to music, this site shows anything that’s interesting. If you have a site already (with a link to your campaign) then select “Product” otherwise choose “Other” and describe your product in the description box.

Oddity Central

Have a strange or odd campaign? Then this should probably be your first port of call really where they list articles, images and videos on the site. If you are promoting a gadget then Geeky Gadgets would be a useful contact.

Design Taxi

Design Taxi focuses on Design, Art, Photography, Advertising, Architecture, Style, Culture, Technology and Social Media. As they state on their site, they “serve millions of tech-savvy tastemakers and decision-makers”. This is Colossal is a similar site too, where they’ve mentioned artistic type campaigns in the past.

Mashable

Mashable covers consumer based start-ups or topics which are of interest to their reader base. Like Technorati and Product Hunt, send them something interesting, keep it short and to the point. A similar site is the *huge* Boing Boing, Booooooom and The Next Web which features KS projects now and again.

Killer Start-ups

Killer Start-ups has been around for years featuring innovative projects, not just limited to Crowdfunding.

Technorati

Using the “tips” section, this is another huge site which is very hard to get into. Perhaps creating an interesting sales pitch will help you to get noticed. Also, if you’ve got a campaign that solves a problem then submitting to Addictive Tips would be worthwhile too.

Core77

“Core77 provides a gathering point for designers and enthusiasts”. They accept a URL and short description, which is then reviewed by Editors and submitted for inclusion on their blogs. Paste is an online magazine that has featured KS campaigns in the past.

PSFK

An online resource for creative professionals, focusing on design, advertising, retail, tech, travel, arts and culture. You might also want to consider the “Raw” section of Abuzeedo, which could feature your Crowdfunding project by using an introduction graphic with a click through to your campaign page

The Startup Pitch

With a tag that reads “Come pitch your startup to the world”, this site relies on simple pitches to promote your campaign. Please note, that this is a free and paid service. Free submissions can take up to 2 months for approval, so maybe it’s best for long term campaigns.

All Top Start-ups

Focusing on business and technology, All Top Start-ups promote upcoming projects and startup businesses on their homepage and social media outlets.

Beta List

Aimed at “early adopters”, based on your company’s url. This site focuses on projects which are not yet live and ones that are looking for new signups.

Gajitz

Focusing on tech and gadget products only. Take note of their criteria conditions where they “feature innovative, offbeat and exceptionally creative works that will inspire our readership”. Bookmark the Daily Tech site as they used to accept Crowdfunding submissions, but temporarily took the submit form offline.

Cool Things

Bringing you the coolest things out right now, which can range from news stories to products. Note they only feature products that fit within their editorial guidelines. Swiss Miss is an alternate site who mentions campaigns that she likes on her blog.

Incredible Things

Similar to “The Awesomer”, here only incredible products are featured via the “Send us a tip” page. They do have quite alot of products that are from Kickstarter. Yanko Design is a great influencer, as they support young designers and established companies alike with their projects.

Roundup

Take your time and go through the list we created. Put effort and market your business at as many relevant sources as possible!

A clap, share or comment below would mean a lot to me.

Also if you’d like more 50+ Influencers more? See our free guide on The Top 150+ Influencers to Promote your Startup or Crowdfunding Campaign