Free course: How to buy ads for your startup w/ founder of MixRank (YC S11) | Hacker News Reader

Free course: How to buy ads for your startup w/ founder of MixRank (YC S11)

mixergy.com

64 pointsil20 comments

The HN title is misleading. From the site:

What you’re watching above is the first few sections of the course.

You have to be a paid member to get access to the FULL course.

Apologies for the confusion. I believe this is a free, full 40 minute course that covers a lot of the content about researching and optimizing media buys. It's not like a 2 minute preview/trailer or anything like that.

The second part of the course is available to Mixergy subscribers only, as is all of their other premium content.

I didn't have enough time to cover everything, so I would be happy to answer questions or expand on anything in the comments here.

The main theme is that buying display ads isn't just for brands any more- any small startup can do it profitably and get massive ROI from a budget of just a few hundred dollars.

You should watch the course on "How to use blogging to building traffic, brand awareness, and SEO juice for your product" :-)

In other words: Do a series of blog posts about this on the Mixrank blog!

It was mentioned that ROI tracking stems from the urls created using the google url builder tool.

Do you have any insights on how to best set up the funnel tracking with google? The interview briefly mentions seeing the help docs from google (is there a better resource you use?).

In my experience, google misses some sales and perhaps you have developed some best practices, thanks again!

I'll try to write a blog post about this soon. Basically, you want to be sure to track every ad separately all the way down the funnel. So you want to set up goals in Google Analytics as normal, but then create a custom report segmented by the utm_source or utm_content variable.

This was the reason why I bought Mixergy membership. We already pursue this strategy for our products and so it was great to see some tips how to improve what we are doing. Definitely one of the best courses on how to get traffic to your site. Well done Ilya!

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. First thing you should ask yourself, do you really need ads for your startup ? If your startup is not compelling enough to get the tech media attention, is it really a good idea to invest in ads ? Good ads that work like ads on thedeck are expensive and typically not a good idea for small startups here are some suggestions:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Ride_the_Blog_Wave.php

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-...

I believe 37signals is buying ads now.

Jason talked about it in his Mixergy interview.

The first thing you should ask yourself is "can I spend money to acquire users?" The second thing you should ask yourself is "is it a price that makes it worthwhile?"

The Deck is probably not a good investment for an early stage startup, but The Deck isn't where you go if you're measuring conversion based ROI on an ad campaign either. Companies that use The Deck are buying brand recognition from an audience that they feel should know about their business. This is an entirely different advertising goal than Ilya is talking about.

I think even with brand awareness, you still have to measure that, there still has to be a ROI, even if the return is just increase awareness.

I think this is a broad generalization. I work on two different projects that both invest heavily in Google AdWords and both have revenue small enough to be considered a "start-up."

If a start-up is focused on a particular vertical, or is a solution people are actively searching for, or has a revenue model built in from day 1, then advertising makes a lot of sense.

I wouldn't call it an either/or question -- tech media (for example) is going to hit a really specific band of end consumers. Is that the entire universe you want to go after? If so, great, but if you're looking to hit a really broad spectrum of consumers you need to combine a range of techniques -- tech media, blogs, social, SEM, general media, etc.

Each one has strengths and weaknesses -- as well as "tricks" like they're talking about in the video. Display, for example, can get you really, really broad coverage. And it's SUPER cheap. But you have to know how to target and measure it, and whether it can meet your goals.

The cool part is all of these techniques can really reinforce each other.

How did you manage to confuse getting attention from the tech media with gaining customers?

@il: Thank you, this is really insightful content.

I might be digressing here, but since you've offered to answer a few questions, here goes - I'd love to know what categories / sites I want to be looking at if my product's a small business CRM (like Highrise). To be more specific, it's a CRM tool that integrates deeply with Google Apps.

Maybe it's just me, but identifying a list of target categories that fits your audience well seems just as hard as optimizing the spend, especially when the audience isn't exactly niche.

You want to segment your audience really finely and then build out a target list based on that. Who is your CRM for? Technology startups? Computer repairmen? Telemarketers? And then work backwards from there to keywords/sites that you think would be most relevant.

General comment on display advertising -- it can be surprisingly effective for consumer brands in particular (b2b can be really tough). It sounds like Mixrank is talking about a specific technique (direct site buys), which can work great. There are additional techniques you can use (retargeting, audience buying, automated optimization) which include transparency (to varying degrees) and direct ROI, which you can get started on really quickly.

Boo - this isn't free - it is a few sections with a paid sub to watch the rest - please fix the title.

This seems like borderline spam to me.

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