Early Adopters: How To Get The First Users To Your New Site | Hacker News Reader

Early Adopters: How To Get The First Users To Your New Site

startbreakingfree.com

53 pointsbarmstrong23 comments

I think the 37Signals and Joel Spolsky examples are a little misleading. Maybe this goes without saying, but when blogging to get traffic, be sure to remember your desired audience. 37Signals and Spolsky's audience is web developers, like many HN readers, so they can promote their apps on a tech blog. If your audience is grandmothers or tweens, don't expect to get much traffic from your blog about Rails programming.

Indeed, you should probably have a blog about grandchildren or boy bands.

This is a valid point. Your blog should ideally be related to the business you are launching. Luckily, this frequently happens just because people's interests tend to line up that way.

But even if they don't, you'll get some interest from people just because they know who you are and are interested in what you're doing. And they may know know someone who would be interested in it...etc. So the permission asset is a pretty flexible tool, but obviously most valuable when it's on topic.

My blog is about 99% not relevant to the interests of my typical customers, but it is still useful as a friendcatcher. There are a couple hundred people who care about what my business is doing, as a consequence of blogging and other social activities over the years. This gives me an automatic boost to marketing of new sites/products/etc. For example, in 2010 when I get my new site off the ground, I can with a high degree of confidence predict that it is going to pick up a few dozen links in the first week from people who know me and care about what I'm doing separately from their (lack of) desire for my new site.

Nothing says you can't also have a customer-focused blog, too. I got around to installing one on my site a few months ago but haven't found time to write for it in a compelling manner yet. That will be another topic for 2010.

I'm not sure I agree with #2 unless your competition is really truly despicable. I think that if you use that method against something that's really popular, it will come back to bite you.

I disagree. The name of your competitor is one that draws the eye of people that are interested in the niche that you and your competitor fill, and if you really are better than them (or at least have different flaws), then it's likely some of that traffic will stick.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that "COMPETITOR sucks, use this instead" is a great direction to come at writing ads from, but rather something more like "COMPANY provides SERVICE better than COMPETITOR" might be effective.

This is a lesson from Politics, if you focus all your energy into attacking your opponents it doesn't mean people will choose you, it just means people will choose not to choose.

This tactic does not extend to business. You don't 'win' by having the most users, you win by making the most money, and having a wide open market is stupid and dangerous for a company. This is the major failure with Apples 'PC and Mac' advertisements, it doesn't tell us why we should buy a Mac, just why we shouldn't buy a PC. This tactic presently works for Apple because the people who know the difference between a PC and a Mac are likely aware of the pros for Apple, they just need to be overwhelmed by the cons of a PC.

For a new product, your consumers have no knowledge of your pros, and slandering your opponents does nothing except clue them into their failures. The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage.

Great point. It works as a gimmick to get a click, but after that you need to focus on your benefits probably.

The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage.

Oh come now, you can't think of any examples where left-wing parties have used slander against right-wing folks? I do seem to recall some negative, and frequently untrue, things being said about George W Bush, or Sarah Palin.

Attacking the opposition is a common tactic among all political parties in all countries. If it goes too far it can turn off some moderate voters, but at reasonable levels it seems to work reasonably well. It's far less common when marketing products -- I'm not quite sure why this is, but possibly because it's easier to come up with positive things to say about your own product ("It has shiny new features X, Y and Z!") than to come up with positive things to say about a politician ("... uhhhh.... hope!")

I agree that the person you're responding to was a bit biased politically. However, I don't feel that the comment was meant to be a discourse on politics as much as it was to illustrate a point about business practices. Thus, I'm willing to let it go.

I have seen left-wingers pull similar tactics, it isn't an exclusively right-wing tactic. I've likely only been through a fraction of the national elections that others on here have, I was only stating cases where I've exclusively seen the tactics (two conservative campaigns in the UK that both times helped plant Tony Blair in the PM seat, similarly I've seen the conservative campaigns for Canada that have ineffectively gained Stephen Harper seats by reducing opposition votes, but despite several elections hasn't gained him a majority and he keeps with the same tactics, and I was in Canada during the latest US elections and saw similar tactics being performed on a national scale, I have however see democratic senators and governors pulling similar tactics on channels broadcast in Ontario)

I didn't mean to say this was an exclusively right-wing tactic by any means, I believe it's a moronic strategy and I've largely seen it performed by right-wing candidates who have high voter-loyalty, but I'm sure left-wingers with high voter-loyalty pull similar tactics when they can. I dislike bringing politics to HN, and that wasn't my intent, it was meant as an allegory for product marketing as essentially that's all politics is doing, advertising a 'candidate' product.

Insulting your opponent only goes so far, and I know here in Canada the conservative campaign didn't drive up their votes (I believe on average they lost votes over last year, but gained in percentages) it did however drive down their opponents. Yet it actually delivered decisive control of government to the smaller parties like the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP who can cause a majority vote for anyone they side with.

For example, if Apple enters the netbook market it can't follow the same advert campaign against Windows as Chrome OS will present a decisive third party that, like the NDP were pulling in the recent vote in Canada, can play the "well we don't suck, and we're not a complete ass" card of being 'the good guy'.

I couldn't think of a better allegory for not insulting your opponent, I suppose the simplest reasoning is this: It's childish, and you're allegedly an adult.

Agreed. Speaking poorly of others says more about you than anything else. The problem is that the impression is hardly favourable.

I almost stopped reading at that point...

A very wise and extremely successful businessman I know has as one of the core values of his businesses that we DO NOT BAD MOUTH THE COMPETITION!.

Employees caught spreading rumors about competitors are reprimanded.

Why?

Because it makes the business look insecure. Your goal should be to be so much better than your competitors that there is no need to even address the issue. Trash talking your competition might net you some really short-term users/customers...but if you're not actually better, this bump will be very short lived.

good suggestions. rank for long/medium tail keywords is incredibly important. it just takes time and concerted effort to do the work to promote your site and most people, particularly developers/hackers don't want to spend time on 'chores' like that.

Agreed...as a hacker I definitely avoided marketing for a while and felt it was "beneath me" or something. I think you still have to be careful, most of the stuff in the "internet marketing" community for example is ridiculous and scammy. But you definitely can't ignore marketing as an entrepreneur.

here is the question about the long tail words, do you need decent page rank for just your main site's homepage, or do you need page rank for all those other pages too?

They don't need page rank, even your home page doesn't if it's long tail enough.

Once upon a time I was tutoring people in finance. I registered the domain name HoustonFinanceTutor.com since that's where I lived. Within a few weeks I was #1 in Google for the search "houston finance tutor". It was a brand new website with zero page rank. It ranked there just because i had the keywords in the domain name, and this on-page factor was enough. Play around with it...

Not a terribly useful article.

2. Tell people your competition sucks - unethical.

4. Seed your site using Mechanical Turk - unethical, depending on the type of site you have.

5. Have a blog - should be 'Have a Popular Blog'

He leaves out useful techniques like twittering about your new site using popular hashtags associated with its subject. Or posting it on Facebook, creating a fan site and encouraging your friends to spread the word.

Telling your people your competition sucks isn't unethical, you're just making them aware that you can provide them with more value. If you can't live up to your claims, you'll feel the backlash.

I can see that using Mechanical Turk could be unethical for certain sites (e.g: dating sites), but it could also be pretty useful, and was something I hadn't thought of at least.

Also, I don't see how your complaint about #5 applies to blogs but not twitter or facebook sites.

Instead of saying the competition 'sucks' I would instead explain why my product is superior to their. Accentuate the positives of your product, not the negatives of the competition (which, if they have already used the competitions they already know well enough).

As for #5, yes for a Facebook group it would need to be popular. But with twitter you can attach relevant hashtags to your post, resulting in it showing up in searches as well as for those that follow you.

I think it's kind of funny that "needing good content" is listed as a "con" in #3.

Valid point :) I guess I was saying that with your brand new site, you might not have good content yet if it's supposed to be user generated. So it's a con because it's a chicken/egg problem.

That's a fair explanation. I think I understood the spirit in which that point was intended; it just stood out to me because of how often people harp on content being #1. I liked the post overall, for sure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com