Tactical Tips for Startup Marketing
1. Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable and unambiguous. The “.com†domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there’s no website on a domain doesn’t mean it’s “availableâ€. Available means something you can register immediately, or that has a price that you’re willing to pay attached to it. Don’t wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have no indication that it’s for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time.
2. Put a simple website up. Doesn’t have to be fancy. The goal is to put enough content on the site to start the Google sandbox clock. Don’t worry about the site not saying much (nobody’s going to be looking at it anyways). Make sure to use a decent content management system (CMS) and not Dreamweaver or (shudder) FrontPage. Just because you can hand-craft HTML doesn’t mean you should for your startup website. The structure and features of a CMS are going to be important someday. Trust me.
3. Get some links into the new startup website. If you have a personal website, link to it from there. If you have friends/associates/family with websites, cash in some favor chips and get them to link to it. The goal is to get the Google crawler to start indexing your site. You only need one decent link to get things going. To check whether your site is being indexed by Google, do a search like site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough).
4. Setup a twitter account. Name of the account should match your company/domain name. Link to your twitter account from your main site and to your main site from your twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural skepticism of the value of twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But, go ahead and grab your twitter account anyways. You can resume your skepticism after you do that).
5. Add e-mail subscription. Let people sign-up to get an email when you’re ready to show them the product. A simple email signup form is sufficient.
6. Get a nice logo. Run a quick contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs and you’ll wind up with something decent enough. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as part of the final deliverable. If you've got design skills yourself, or know somebody really good that can do it, even better.
7. Setup a Facebook business page (known as a “fan†page) for your startup. You’re not going to get many fans in the early days. That’s OK. Just get something out there. Add a simple description of your startup, link back to your main website. The usual stuff.
8. Create a clean Facebook URL. Facebook doesn’t allow simple/vanity URLs (unless you're big and established). So, to make things easier on yourself (and your users), setup a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook page. For example, here’s what I did: facebook.hubspot.com (notice that when you visit this link, it takes you automatically to the ugly Facebook URL). Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it’s done through whoever your registrar is for your domain).
9. Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don’t use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com — or if you’re proficient and can install WP locally, make it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com. The reason is that you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it towards your main website. And, chances are, WordPress.com doesn’t need your help on the SEO front.
10. Write a blog article that describes how you got to this point. What problem you’re hoping to solve. Why you picked this problem. It should feel a little uncomfortable revealing what you’re revealing. If you have tendencies towards being in “Stealth Modeâ€, read “Stealth Mode, Schmealth Modeâ€. With inbound marketing, you’re going to need to get used to revealing things that might be uncomfortable. Get over it.
11. Setup Google Alerts for at least the following: Your company name, link:yourdomain.com and “industry termâ€. Try to find a good balance for your industry term so you don’t get flooded with alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens†option in Google Alerts so you’re not waiting around for new alerts to show up).
12. Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find 3 more. Of these 6, pick the two that you think are the most marketing savvy. They should have a Website Grade > 90, a blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a twitter account that they actually post to, etc. These are the competitors that you’re going to start “trackingâ€. Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts.
13. Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right)? Mention your new startup, and add a link to your startup website to one of the three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don’t go with the default of “My Websiteâ€. The anchor text should be your startup name and maybe a couple of words of what it does. You can look at my profile to get a sense: Dharmesh Shah - LinkedIn (note: I don't accept LinkedIn invites from people I don't know. If you're looking to get to know me, follow me on twitter @dharmesh).
14. Get business cards printed. Don’t go overboard, but don’t use a “free†option (because it’s not really free, it’s just subsidized). I don’t believe much in business cards, but you need them to simply avoid the 30 seconds of discussion as to why you don’t have a card when people ask you for one at conferences and meetings and such. They’re worth the price to avoid that uncomfortableness.
15. Use the Twitter Grader search feature to find high-impact twitter users in your industry. Start following them. You want to start forging relationships. Start building your twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people or play other games just to get your follower count up. That’s not going to matter. Get some high quality relationships going. If you’re really serious, start using an app like TweetDeck so you can more easily monitor the needed conversations.
16. Create a StumbleUpon account. Specify your areas of interest (part of registration). Spend 10 minutes a day (no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those that are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don’t submit your own stuff — just start contributing.
17. Subscribe to the LinkedIn Answers category that best fits your area of interest. Answer one question a day that you feel like you’ve got some expertise in. Don’t self-promote. You’re seeking to build credibility and trust — not sell anything.
18. Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feed, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff†comments. If you don’t have something useful to add to the conversation, don’t comment).
19. Start building some contacts on Facebook. Organize your users into groups (one for your business and another for friends/family). This will come in handy later. Don’t spam people and ask them to visit your website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
20. Grade your website on Website Grader. Fix the basic things. You should be able to get a 50+ just by doing the simple things it suggests. [Disclaimer: I wrote Website Grader].
21. Get Some Analytics: Install some web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywors are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's ok to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it).
Stay tuned for a revised edition in a few weeks as I think about this more (and watch my actual behavior). Also, if you’re interested in startups, you can follow me on twitter @dharmesh.
What have I missed? What ideas do you have on tactical things for startup marketing? What do you do?
Also, to find more conversation about startups, request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group (60,000+ members). Just mention that you read the blog, and I'll approve you quickly.
Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches
1. Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable and unambiguous. The “.com†domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there’s no website on a domain doesn’t mean it’s “availableâ€. Available means something you can register immediately, or that has a price that you’re willing to pay attached to it. Don’t wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have no indication that it’s for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time.
2. Put a simple website up. Doesn’t have to be fancy. The goal is to put enough content on the site to start the Google sandbox clock. Don’t worry about the site not saying much (nobody’s going to be looking at it anyways). Make sure to use a decent content management system (CMS) and not Dreamweaver or (shudder) FrontPage. Just because you can hand-craft HTML doesn’t mean you should for your startup website. The structure and features of a CMS are going to be important someday. Trust me.
3. Get some links into the new startup website. If you have a personal website, link to it from there. If you have friends/associates/family with websites, cash in some favor chips and get them to link to it. The goal is to get the Google crawler to start indexing your site. You only need one decent link to get things going. To check whether your site is being indexed by Google, do a search like site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough).
4. Setup a twitter account. Name of the account should match your company/domain name. Link to your twitter account from your main site and to your main site from your twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural skepticism of the value of twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But, go ahead and grab your twitter account anyways. You can resume your skepticism after you do that).
5. Add e-mail subscription. Let people sign-up to get an email when you’re ready to show them the product. A simple email signup form is sufficient.
6. Get a nice logo. Run a quick contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs and you’ll wind up with something decent enough. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as part of the final deliverable. If you've got design skills yourself, or know somebody really good that can do it, even better.
7. Setup a Facebook business page (known as a “fan†page) for your startup. You’re not going to get many fans in the early days. That’s OK. Just get something out there. Add a simple description of your startup, link back to your main website. The usual stuff.
8. Create a clean Facebook URL. Facebook doesn’t allow simple/vanity URLs (unless you're big and established). So, to make things easier on yourself (and your users), setup a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook page. For example, here’s what I did: facebook.hubspot.com (notice that when you visit this link, it takes you automatically to the ugly Facebook URL). Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it’s done through whoever your registrar is for your domain).
9. Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don’t use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com — or if you’re proficient and can install WP locally, make it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com. The reason is that you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it towards your main website. And, chances are, WordPress.com doesn’t need your help on the SEO front.
10. Write a blog article that describes how you got to this point. What problem you’re hoping to solve. Why you picked this problem. It should feel a little uncomfortable revealing what you’re revealing. If you have tendencies towards being in “Stealth Modeâ€, read “Stealth Mode, Schmealth Modeâ€. With inbound marketing, you’re going to need to get used to revealing things that might be uncomfortable. Get over it.
11. Setup Google Alerts for at least the following: Your company name, link:yourdomain.com and “industry termâ€. Try to find a good balance for your industry term so you don’t get flooded with alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens†option in Google Alerts so you’re not waiting around for new alerts to show up).
12. Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find 3 more. Of these 6, pick the two that you think are the most marketing savvy. They should have a Website Grade > 90, a blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a twitter account that they actually post to, etc. These are the competitors that you’re going to start “trackingâ€. Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts.
13. Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right)? Mention your new startup, and add a link to your startup website to one of the three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don’t go with the default of “My Websiteâ€. The anchor text should be your startup name and maybe a couple of words of what it does. You can look at my profile to get a sense: Dharmesh Shah - LinkedIn (note: I don't accept LinkedIn invites from people I don't know. If you're looking to get to know me, follow me on twitter @dharmesh).
14. Get business cards printed. Don’t go overboard, but don’t use a “free†option (because it’s not really free, it’s just subsidized). I don’t believe much in business cards, but you need them to simply avoid the 30 seconds of discussion as to why you don’t have a card when people ask you for one at conferences and meetings and such. They’re worth the price to avoid that uncomfortableness.
15. Use the Twitter Grader search feature to find high-impact twitter users in your industry. Start following them. You want to start forging relationships. Start building your twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people or play other games just to get your follower count up. That’s not going to matter. Get some high quality relationships going. If you’re really serious, start using an app like TweetDeck so you can more easily monitor the needed conversations.
16. Create a StumbleUpon account. Specify your areas of interest (part of registration). Spend 10 minutes a day (no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those that are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don’t submit your own stuff — just start contributing.
17. Subscribe to the LinkedIn Answers category that best fits your area of interest. Answer one question a day that you feel like you’ve got some expertise in. Don’t self-promote. You’re seeking to build credibility and trust — not sell anything.
18. Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feed, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff†comments. If you don’t have something useful to add to the conversation, don’t comment).
19. Start building some contacts on Facebook. Organize your users into groups (one for your business and another for friends/family). This will come in handy later. Don’t spam people and ask them to visit your website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
20. Grade your website on Website Grader. Fix the basic things. You should be able to get a 50+ just by doing the simple things it suggests. [Disclaimer: I wrote Website Grader].
21. Get Some Analytics: Install some web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywors are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's ok to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it).
Stay tuned for a revised edition in a few weeks as I think about this more (and watch my actual behavior). Also, if you’re interested in startups, you can follow me on twitter @dharmesh.
What have I missed? What ideas do you have on tactical things for startup marketing? What do you do?
Also, to find more conversation about startups, request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group (60,000+ members). Just mention that you read the blog, and I'll approve you quickly.
Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches
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