If you have an hour to spare its well worth it to look back and look back at my series on startup/bootstrapped marketing. But if you’re short on time and want the high level summary here’s the quick recap:

Part 1 - Focus on SEO

• Ensure you have a sitemap; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=183668
  • Submit it to google
  • Submit it to yahoo
  • Submit it to bing

A short while backed I talked about tactically measuring metrics for your site/company. Recently I talked a bit about methods of marketing. A large key to getting the most out of your time and money is to properly report against the intersection of these two items. First I’m going to make the assumption you’ve read those posts, if you haven’t go back and do that. Next this is heavily on the assumption that you’re using Google Analytics as your primary tool for measuring metrics and have setup goals appropriately.

I had a recent request on how to setup a funnel in Google Analytics. If you’ve missed by first post on some tips for Google Analytics first check that out. With most websites today there is some portion of the site that is event and not page based, meaning you have some workflow on the page based on Javascript. If this is the case you’ll want to fake a page view instead of an event in order to entirely use it in funnels and goals.

A personal recommendation is actually to use both, goals and funnels. The key a funnel is that you need to have successive steps that occur in some order. With regards to metrics tracking this is absolutely needed, but typically you may have 1-2 total funnels with many steps in your site versus goals where you could have 10-15 single goals. For Registry Stop we’ve structured our site so that our earlier stage goals become the same as steps in later stage funnels. For us in almost all cases the first part of the funnel is the visit, the second is registering for an account. We do have independent goals for visits and registrations as well, but we do not have funnels on those goals.

In a couple of various places I’ve seen light requests of how to put autocomplete in for a Django web application. Here’s a really light weight version with a view and autocomplete functionality using:

• Django
• JQuery
• JQuery UI

For a view to search within your django model it would look something like:

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from django.utils import simplejson
def autocompleteModel(request):
    search_qs = ModelName.objects.filter(name__startswith=request.REQUEST['search'])
    results = []
    for r in search_qs:
        results.append(r.name)
    resp = request.REQUEST['callback'] + '(' + simplejson.dumps(result) + ');'
    return HttpResponse(resp, content_type='application/json')

For the jQuery autocomplete and call:

At a recent meetup I talked a bit about how I’d been using blog posts on other blogs, both free and paid for as a primary user acquisition tool. I was very shocked, when several were surprised and curious on the method for this. In tech startups coverage is common, but its usually just that press, not paid for press. I must say I love how the tech community doesn’t force people to pay to get the word out, but it is very much a competition; that might be just as much work as paying.

In contrast the wedding industry is very much a pay to play space. If you give some money you can get some attention.

We’ve talked some about SEO, media/blog posts, adwords, no one of these is a magic bullet. Some work better for different reasons. As I mentioned in the first post, if you haven’t checked out the post on tactically measuring metrics then please do. If you have followed those steps and explore each of these options, then you should have an idea of which one works well for you and which doesn’t. The final piece of marketing may be a bit harder to measure, but is going to do great things towards growing your brand to users and visitors.

For this third part on the series I’m going to dive into what people perhaps most traditionally think of with marketing startups, online advertising. Online advertising can work, but its definitely not cheap and it does take a good about of pounding at it to know what works. I’m going to break up the three key types of advertising, based on the way I’ve utilized them and evaluated them recently.

For the second part of the series we’re going talk a bit about finding the influencers in certain industries. We’ll get to more traditional means that people think of later, and if you’ve missed our first post that dealt mostly with SEO make sure you check it out first. In most online ventures there’s a key set of influencers, often times these are blogs or podcasts. Blogs can receive a huge readership, which are often very loyal.

This is the first of a 4 part series on marketing for startups/bootstrapped companies. Much of the learnings from this are a result of experiences with Registry Stop. The key to each of these is going to be measuring and reacting to your efforts. If you need help on this, check out previous post around metrics for startups.

So without further adieu, on this initial post of the series we’re going to talk a bit about the biggest free way to get traction and traffic for your startup. The best way to aquire free traffic to your site, is to ensure your site is optimized for search engines or more commonly SEO. Sure you can pay $3 for your ad to show up on certain keywords, but why spend the $3 per click if you can simply ensure you’re the first search result. There are slightly different methods for this for each search engine, but we’ll cover a broad set of items to pay attention to.

Most all development projects start with a hunch at a problem. Seldom do you have the opportunity of enough resources prior beginning building to fully vet all assumptions and define all requirements. Or at the very least if you do, you’re not in startup mode. For this reason the very first thing you build is often not the perfect solution. If you’re lucky its a start at a solution, and even if its not, if you’re close users will tell you what they want.

What this leaves you with is a couple of key items. First is get to the minimum product you can to vet your idea. Most commonly known as Minimally Viable Product. This should be the minimum product you need to vet your idea, and add some form of value for users. Once you’ve created this, don’t refine, don’t keep iterating, launch. More time won’t let you perfectly solve the problem, getting it in front of users will help you solve things perfect.