Comment on How to develop a marketing strategy (suggested by Steven Krein)

I’m also looking for some of the same ideas for launching a site… some good ideas for generating the initial buzz around a site launch.

Marketing your site/idea is cheapest than what it used to be years ago, while in 1999 people were spending $$$ on throwing launch parties and hiring expensive PR firms to market their ideas, today almost anyone can achieve this within few simple steps, but beware theses simples steps takes time and usually need persistence.

During this explanation I’ll be using a supermarket as a metaphor, that way I will be able to better explain the fundamental of Online Marketing.

To easily describes the Marketing effort, I would break down the process in 2 majors stage (Here comes the metaphor), Try to visualize your idea as a Store.
First thing you need to do is seduce your customer and bring him to your store, but once your customer is in the store your second step will be to sell him the product you’re trying to market. While this sound logic and easily achievable, many fails to actually accomplish this.

What you need to do to bring the customer to your store and have a look at your product/idea?
One of key success is to raise your brand awareness – Customer tends to be attracted to successful companies, why is that? Because successful companies are usually made of successful peoples and successful products.

- Setup your website with a nice and clean layout/logo, your site should have all the information available about your product, demo, explanation, contact page with your email addresses and other way of communication (Don’t be scared to share your phone/fax/Real address, that’ll communicate you’re serious).
- Setup a blog for your product, While your website offers statics and professional information regarding your products, you need to build loyalty toward your brand/product. In order to do so you need to engage the customer on a personal level. Share your thoughts and your experience on your blog, Never hide anything, that is called “trust”.
- Networking – Use every social platform to market your product. Join 3 or 4 main social network such as “Facebook”:http://www.facebook.com, “Myspace”:http://www.myspace.com and others. Integrate your layout/logo and start to network with other users, with the time your userbase will grow and most important, people will reach your site and blog. Try to avoid spamming, networking and “making friends” takes time, but after a while you will be rewarde greatly.
- SEO – You should outsource this task to some specialist or employ someone to do it in-house, Search engine optimization is about improving the volume and the quality of your traffic. Write great content, post it on “Digg”:http://digg.com/”del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/magnolia/Reddit (while these site are controversial since they bring a spike in traffic without really contributing to the natural growth of your site, the After-effect of theses site is great, few weeks after you make it to Digg homepage, bloggers will post articles about you, people will link to you and usually 1-2% of your visitors will stay and stick around, that is only if you provides them with interesting content and a great product to write about). Exchange Relevants links with other sites, post daily on your blog, write articles for other sites which links to your site, all theses methods usually will improve your site ranking. A great resource for SEO specialist: http://www.seomoz.org
- Submit your ideas to blogs that profiles company such as yours. Like “Techcrunch”:http://www.techcrunch.com, “Gigaom”:http://www.gigaom.com, “Mashable”:http://www.mashable.com and so on… I’d make sure that the mail I’m sending will hold an interesting and short pitch, bear in mind that theses blogs reviews hundreds of companies a week and it’s hard to make it to their front page. I’d also try to concentrate in sending mails to hundreds of smaller blogs, while a link from techcrunch can be nice, imagine what can do 500 hundreds links from smaller blogs to your SEO And to your traffic. You could enventually post few PR release to PR site such as PRweb.com and others.
- You could use paid advertising to bring more customers and tracks the conversion rate.
- Use a viral marketing, people usually like to invite their friends when they stumble upon a great product, ease their pain and offers them easy invite tools.
- Ask your customers to help you, Don’t be afraid to ask your customers to help you, they usually will contribute if the product is good enough. They can generate the buzz required for your product and help you promote the idea.

These methods usually build your identity online, be open, use your mail/Skype/Msn to chat with as much as people you can, listen to their feedbacks, learn from past ventures/experience of other entrepreneurs.

Once you generate the right traffic to your site, you need to retain it and make your visitors sign up for your product, this is the second stage:
- Integrate a good statistics tool, such as Google Analytics or Clicky. You need to tracks everything, see whats the best landing page, your conversion rate, whats your exit page, populars keywords, and always adjust yourself. If a link isnt generating enough clicks, then move it, change its description, add an image. Sometime small changes can do the work and generate 10 times more traffic.
- Produce Great content. In order to retain your customer, produce great content. Produce great content. Produce Great content. Produce Great content (hope you understood it by now).
- Focus on building a great product, there is no magic solution here. A great product will attract more customers. Make it viral. With the support of your customers, your traffic will boost.

I’d recommend to read “Guy Kawasaki blog”:http://blog.guykawasaki.com and “Seth’s Blog”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog.
If you’d like to discuss more marketing practices, you can contact me at adam at Octabox dot com.