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.

Metrics are obviously a very valuable area for start-ups, if you don’t believe in metrics and think you’re idea wins just because its great then you better start searching for your next day job. Dave McClure has done a great talk on start-ups several times over, you can check out a video and corresponding slide show at:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5336115 http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

And besides, it’s a pirates acronym, so it’s got to be great. But translating these from concept to actual technology metrics is also something that needs discussion. You can’t exactly say we’re going to use Google Analytics and let it magically tell you everything, furthermore all of the web developers out there talking about tweaks on Google Analytics do little to actually tell you what you need to know.

Google analytics is great out of the box, the basic tracking tag on every page will do a lot for you. Unfortunately most people never get beyond this. There are two key items with tracking that you can do that will let you get a bit further. There’s also plenty more on the reporting side, but we’ll get to some of that later. On the tracking side the first item is event tracking. This is perhaps most commonly used for tracking various Javascript events that occur during a visit, however it can also be a bit more flexible towards tracking values. A very simple example might be:

_ga._trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value)

Or a real life example of this, might be on a FAQ screen, clicking the link to an anchored section of the page:

_ga._trackEvent('faq', 'anchor click', $(this))

But events by their sheer nature give a bit more flexibility with that value field. In the case of a user sending a message

Google’s documentation is pretty good when it comes to how to create an extension that opens a full page and has large functionality. But if you’re more interested in transforming an existing bookmarklet into an extension there’s not great quality on it. The steps themselves are really quite simple. The big key that’s not heavily documented is creating a background html that creates an event listener. After the jump is a full sample that would then call your javascript to activate the bookmarklet:

I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.

The more I’ve been exposed to it the more the way a company conducts interviews is a very strong reflection of how the company’s current state is. If you experience a very half hazard interview it’s likely a result that the person interviewing is half hazard in other aspects of their day to day. If you experience that someone is very set in their mind in what they want, and expecting a very cookie cutter answer, it’s a reflection of how they think. There are some cases in which the interviewers simply do not know various methods/styles as such I’d like to address what I feel should be appropriate interviewing process. I’ve been in situations where more of this process was followed than not, and in those cases bad hires were the exception not the norm. The biggest unknown after that was how long until someone was fully integrated into the culture and not a noob but a veteran in some area that others deferred to.

On an entirely separate blog I have a full write up on seduction. The other posts contain steps for how a guy would seduce a girl, I think it’s actually quite pertinent to selling sighing business. Before you start making to many assumptions about the other post let me explain a little further, but dorm the selling side within business.