Joel Liu's Bookmarks tagged marketing →  View Popular

-Before your product is listed on an affiliate network, you need to put down a significant investment- mid to high $XX,XXX as a prepayment to the network

-Especially for a webapp, there could be issues of rampant fraud-affilites using VCCs to sign up and so on- this is something you will need to be proactive about filtering out

-Products that do well on affiliate networks have a large target market- if your webapp is niche affiliates won't bother to take the time to set up campaigns to promote your product

Regards to fraud, that's definitely a real issue.

Regards to niche, from what I've learned from doing some affiliate work and research, niche is extremely important and much desired by affiliates - even though my product isn't narrowly targeted - just saying..

If you want to do viral marketing, you can try to come up with a viral ad, but you'll probably fail. You're better off building the viral right into the product, creating a product that spreads because you designed it that way.

Viral marketing only works well when you plan for it, when you build it in, when you organize your offering to be spreadable, interesting and to work better for everyone involved when it spreads. If I don't benefit from spreading it, why should I spread it? I won't. If you don't benefit from your users spreading the idea, it might spread, but it won't help you much. So both elements have to be present.

The "build a great product and they will come" myth is bullshit 99% of the time (unless you have a built in marketing engine-- SEO or viral). Balsamiq won the same reason that 37s did (and JoelonSoftware for that matter)... They had a great story, told it well, and the story happened to resonate/be interesting to their exact target market (web geeks / entrepreneurs).

Bravo!

But try to build great software for supply chain management, or managing a beauty parlor and let me know how "everything else will follow" there. There's a reason that SalesForce.com (which, arguably, has/had a great product) has spent 60-70% of their topline on sales and marketing.

• Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others.  This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly.  This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.


• Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1.  We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more.  This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.


• Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site.  We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out.  This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!).  In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.

• Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage.  By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.


• Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level.  We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others.  If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.


• Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites.  Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site.  This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility.  This would be the ultimate win.

This is painful for developers to hear, because we love code. But all that brilliant code is totally irrelevant until:







1. people understand what you're doing
   
2. people become interested in what you're doing
   
3. people get excited about what you're doing
   

I started my social media career at Hitachi Data Systems (I’ll actually be speaking to Hitachi in Tokyo this coming week) and eventually become the online community manager. One of the keys to being a successful community person is to be a resource (or lethal generosity) to the entire industry you want to serve –rather then just a vendor pitching jockey.

In the spirit of sharing, over the past few weeks in client calls, I’ve referenced these posts several times, one of the challenges of my blog layout is that it’s difficult to find the most visited or commented posts, here’s some I think you’d enjoy.

Here's two of our graphs from May 8th 2007 -- five months after we moved out to San Francisco and had been working on the product full-time:

- Second, in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks.

Plain and simple, it's going to take time for people to start using your product -- there are exceptions, but it's generally not the norm. So you need to expect that, and be willing to give it time. If you give up within a month or two, your product definitely won't be successful.

Once you launch, people start to know about you. If you launch early, you can start earlier on the process of acquiring users. Don't launch with a crappy product -- launch as soon as what you have is better than what is out there. But don't wait for a perfect product -- launch as early as you can, get user feedback, and keep improving the product.

And now I tell this story to everyone who needs swag. In
fact I tell this story every time we’re talking about telephone menu systems.
Or customer service. By providing remarkable customer service, they’ve gotten
me to remark about it.

When customers have a problem and you fix it, they’re
actually going to be even more satisfied than if they never had a problem in
the first place.

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to actually make
something go wrong, just so we have a chance to demonstrate our superior
customer service. Many customers just won’t call; they’ll fume quietly.

But when someone does call, look at it as a great opportunity
to create fanatically devoted customer, one who will prattle on and on
about what a great job you did.

The bottom line is that this is not good for business, and
it’s not even good for your emotional well-being. When you win a victory with a
customer by firing them, you still end up feeling riled up and angry, they’ll
get their money back from the credit card company anyway, and they’ll tell a
dozen friends. As Patrick McKenzie writes,
“You will never win an argument with your customer.”

There is only one way to survive angry customers
emotionally: you have to realize that they’re not angry at you; they’re angry
at your business, and you just happen to be a convenient representative of that
business.