Yeah I’ve been fighting that good fight for a couple years now.
Hackaday did help me, very early in the Tindie history, when I launched eeZee Propeller. Otherwise, I don’t get any coverage from them.
I haven’t checked lately but most of my traffic has been from my own already established blog. My popular pages are the ones where I’m providing really useful answers/solutions. I basically advertise on my own site to Tindie. I get some action from Twitter, but I only have 1200 followers and probably most of those don’t care a whit about what I’m selling. Facebook is useless. Google+ is even more useless.
There’s something to be said for building up a following. OpenMV Cam is an example. It’s been in work for awhile and had coverage from several big blogs (HaD and others), I’ve covered it several times on my blog, I’ve tweeted, etc. The interest has grown, we’ve set up a google group, I’m finally making them available for beta testing firmware and advertising on my blog. The interest is a trickle, but we are building up to a funding campaign. Where twitter has worked best so far is when I spend a lot of time on it, engaging with lots of folks, and also tweet numerous times about the same product (OpenMV)
Advertising has never been worth it for my low cost, thin margin stuff. Spend lots of money on Adwords or Reddit and get some clicks, and hardly any purchases. Might work better for higher cost devices like yours.
I’ve contemplating using Instructables as a way to showcase my stuff… but that seems smarmy somehow.
I’ve also thought about contacting various well-read blogs and letting them review the device(s).