Ask HN: Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service?

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A few months ago, I am impressed about this startup story (From an idea to our first customer in 7 days): http://www.martinadamek.com/2010/02/02/the-startup-story-from-an-idea-to-our-first-customer-in-7-days/

I am inspired by it and tried to do a single simple service to market. I think Adwords is great, it brings customers from worldwide very soon. But now, I sadly found the service in that story closed because after ran out of Adwords credits, ALMOST NO ONE will go that site.

My experience is, even I post a good stuff to forums or blogs, the visitors will only increase to very high on that day. After few days later, nothing left, especially for a tool type service.

Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service?

Thanks.

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1) Target bloggers who would use your service or write about your service. The trick is finding them, and finding enough of them. Here's what you can try that has had a bit of success for me: You google keywords looking for bloggers who write about competing services. So if you compete with Chargify, you look for "using chargify", "like chargify", "chargify vs", "saas billing" + "chargify". Skim through the search results and titles, look for blogs and click through. You want people who reviewed chargify, signed up for it, compared it to another service, etc. Just copy the URL to your google doc so you can contact them later, build up a list for now. Its best to go through at least 5 google page results, more if your patient.

2) Once you've got a list ready, go through each blog post, read a bit so you can refer to it, or filter if its not relevant. Find the contact page (CTRL + F 'contact'), usually a form or email will be available. Your pitch will look something like, "Hi my name is ____. I saw your blog post about how chargify was _______. I found that a lot of saas app publishers really like how chargify does x well, but were frustrated by (lack of feature, high cost, etc.). I'm actually working on an app that....Do you think this is a service you'd use? If not, thanks for your time. Or if you'd like to blog a review about us, I'd be happy to tell you more."

3) Like all pitches, some will be ignored, some will be interested, some will pay you right away. Reply promptly of course, within hours if possible.

4) You can try repeating the process of finding blogs through Technorati or Google Blogs, though they have their own issues. Technorati only indexes recent blog posts I believe. Google Blog search is filled with spammers.

5) Repeat the cycle by identifying different types of users who might use your product. This can be difficult because you've probably ingrained the ideal target market user into your psyche. It will also depend on the size and diversity of your market in general.

Good luck.

This goes more into web marketing, depending on what product you're selling.

If you're looking for just "sales", Adwords is great because you can target very precisely who you want visiting your site, as long as you accumulate enough data to understand what's working and what's not. I currently manage a $150k monthly adwords account. For example, a small/mid sized account could have 20k keywords, out of those, 1k will get clicked on per month, 200 would be the "top 50% traffic" keywords, and out of the 200, maybe 50 will generate sales/leads for you. Those are the things you need to understand on a monthly basis, and as soon as you pick up the pattern for which words are the 200/50, increase bids on the 50 and get rid of the ones you're spending a lot of money on and not converting to sales/leads.

If you're looking for just traffic over a long term, I'd recommend the following:

1. SEO - if you can rank for popular keywords relevant to your site, you'll have new visitors from search engines every day. Depending on your SEO strategy, you can be targeting 5 "top tier keywords" that're tough to rank, or 100 "2nd tier keywords" that requires effort, but not all all-day every-day type efforts. Or you could try to optimize dynamically for hundreds of thousands of product names using good SEO practices on your dynamic pages. Obviously link acquisition is a big part of it as well.

2. Link acquisition - getting a link from a popular spot can cause you a "spike" in traffic for a day or two, and if you can keep writing "link-generating content", you can try to repeat the traffic spike from different sources. There're some "theories" on what type of content people link to, such as breaking news before everyone else, top 10 lists, controversy, useful free tool, etc.

3. Brand awareness - getting your name out so everyone (in your target demographic market) knows your brand name. In that case, I'd recommend buying banners - most work on a CPM basis, which is just a fancy term for "Cost per 1000 banner views". Depending on which source you go with, and how targeted of a website/demographic you want to go with,1000 views of your banner will usually cost you anywhere between 30 cents to $5.

Of course, all this depends on the product/service you provide. If all you do is sell car batteries online, then there's no real reason for people to come back to your site once they buy one.

Good luck, -- Paul Zhao

It sounds like the problem you are having is user retention. You get people to your site, but they don't end up sticking around to use your tool/service on a daily basis. This means that you do not have a strong enough value proposition (or you are marketing to the wrong people, but more likely the former).

Try to get feedback from the people who tried your website but then left. Repost to the blogs you posted to and try to see what the people who tried it think, and why they didn't up leaving.

Also, make sure your website is solving a real problem. Your site may be 'useful' but unless it solves a problem that currently really really frustrates people, nobody is going to want to spend the effort to go to your site and use your tool unless the problem is solves is really big, and your solution is awesome.

I could give more specific advice if I knew anything about your site. Good luck!

Thank you very much. What kind of advice would you give if I am trying to build another http://www.korekt.me/? I think if we can find some solutions for this site, we will find some general solutions.

(or the problem might be that proofreading service not really frustrates people?)

There is a lot to say about this, depending on your product and your market (which I haven't seen). Here are a couple key thoughts:

* Adwords are great, but spending money before you know what kind of conversion you are able to get from natural SEO isn't a good idea. You can always buy traffic, make sure you have the right funnel first - image it is a pipe you are trying to make as wide and friction-free as possible. I think Adwords works great if you are selling a product similar to something already in the market

* forums, blogs, etc. have a very short lifespan so you should expect you will get peaks from high buzz items (like a post doing well here on HN) and it will trail off after that, if you can retain 5-10% that's great. You have to consistently crank out new relevant content.

Thanks for your suggestion first.
My product is a tool that you can select some part of web page to convert it into various formats (CSV,TXT,Images...etc.). It is still under development.
I think this service is a little like http://www.korekt.me/. Someone will need it, but scattered worldwide. How to reach them is hard.
I am thinking what I can do after public it.

It seems the site mentioned in the article, http://www.korekt.me/, suffered from the same problem. It looks like they have given up. To build a successful service is a lot of work, and takes quite some time.

Yes, that problem is I trying to know how to solve.
This site really solve a problem (so customer pays for it), but in my opinion, the natural of this type of service is low user retenion. How to reach as much as possible customers is critical.
Some types of services will make people say: "that's good service, maybe I will use it someday", then put it into bookmarks only.
The real customer even don't know that service (after ran out of Adwords credits). I think http://www.korekt.me/ is like that.

get it hooked up to goolge index, that can take a few months tho, kinda goes of the point a bit i think soz, but then keep write a blog about your service the hits will come im sure.

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