
My new web marketing strategy: Begging - peterbe
http://www.peterbe.com/plog/new-web-marketing-strategy-begging
======
pan69
I can totally relate to the author of this post. People say that ideas are the
easy bit and that it's the implementation that is the hard part. Well, it's
actually slightly different than that. Ideas are easy, implementation is hard,
getting people the use it is nearly impossible.

You'd say; "then just make something that people want". It's not only the word
"just" that's thrown around lightly. Even making something that people want is
incredibly difficult. I'm slowly starting to believe that most successful
websites are mere flukes, coincidences, being at the right place at the right
time. That sort of thing.

I'd like to open a discussion here. You've made a side project, say it's a
website, and you're interested in driving traffic to it. Other than relaying
on posting a "Show HN", what strategies would you apply? Also, does someone
has experience with paid strategies and is willing to share some pitfalls and
do & don'ts?

~~~
jonathanjaeger
I run a music website on the side that I'm now completely rebuilding with a
tweaked a concept (a pivot, if you will) that will be geared towards creatives
and maintain by userbase -- I've had about 13,000 signups over a long period
of time. When I relaunch I'll have to go through the same thought process as
you, but first let me tell you what I've seen so far.

At my day job, I've run millions of dollars in paid user acquisition and lead
gen. What you have to realize is that when you're paying for users, you're
normally not going to get more dedicated users (simply interested people).
Organic users are usually higher quality leads than users from paid user
acquisition because they came to you as interested potential customers rather
than you convincing them through marketing messages and a well thought-out and
optimized landing page.

Paid acquisition can work really well for companies that have a high lifetime
value for a customer (LTV). That's why you see ecommerce companies, for-profit
colleges, insurance companies, and other similar high-priced products spending
millions in the display, social, and SEM space.

Then you see the Groupons and Living Socials of the world going for a landgrab
of users quickly (paying millions to acquire users at a moderate price). But
that moderate price still might not back out as the category gets less sexy.
You barely see ads on Facebook for these companies anymore because the cost of
acquisition is simply too high.

If you're going to do paid marketing, you have to really know your business
and how you will monetize your site/app to make some decent margin at the end
(selling data, premium subscription, advertising, etc.). I would only use paid
marketing to validate interest on a very small scale or as a small push at the
beginning to gain awareness.

If you're an app that requires a lot of users who will each monetize at a
small amount, you need to have a stellar product with some other distribution
mechanism (partnerships, viral coefficient greater than 1, unbelievable PR
machine, etc.).

~~~
peterbe
They say, a successful product must be either First, Best or Free. But that's
really really hard!

It's no excuse to give up and do nothing but a lot of stories of success
starts with a product that doesn't immediately "sell". Some things just take
to mature in peoples heads.

------
adrianmn
If you want to build a business and not side projects you need business
development and marketing.

There is a bias(extremely wrong in my opinion) in HN against this and that
product is everything but real world business doesn't work like that. Unless
you have a viral product(which still needs marketing to reach critical mass)
it is marketing that will make or brake it.

Also .io and other extensions might be trendy and fun to use but real
businesses use .com . If you target end users they will hardly remember the
tld of your website. How many services that end up in .io or other similar
ones do you use?

~~~
peterbe
I know I know but why should one not try?

Remember a side-project is, at least in my case, something you work on OUTSIDE
of regular work. I work on weekends, early mornings and late nights. When you
only have about 5-10 hours per week you have to cut corners and do what little
you can.

Also, in my case, I do everything myself. The client-side code, the server-
side code, the optimization, the system administration, and last but not
least, the marketing. It's not easy but I'll be damned if at least one of
these can't become a success.

------
sgaither
I'll be the one who says it... There are too many typos in this piece
(including the first paragraph) to take it seriously.

~~~
mcgwiz
As far as the blog article goes, IMHO the typos are irrelevant to the
expression of the idea of "begging"/being more transparent about marketing.

But with regard to the marketing effectiveness of the /yourhelp/ page, the
typos are problematic.

~~~
peterbe
Thank you! I'll take another closer look.

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ricardobeat
I want to say _thank you_ for implementing Mozilla Persona. Enough with crap
login forms or a hundred OAuth providers.

Hugepic is something I've looked for in the past, congrats on launching. One
little bug I found: the login button is misaligned (and is being affected by
the link hover style) <http://cl.ly/image/442S1B1E3A3R>

------
jadoint
I personally have a fear of making things nobody will use. I know that the act
of working on something is not a waste of time since you learn from the
process of building but I can't ignore the feeling that I wasted my time
anyway.

The way I do my projects now is that I try to get a core group of influential
people in their niche to get excited about the project I'm building and I
leave it to them to tell their friends about it. I've never spent a dime on
marketing. A lot of traffic to one of my sites comes from FB, for example, and
mainly from fan-created pages.

With the new project I'm currently working on, I noticed a group of users
trying to shoehorn their activities into an existing platform that didn't
exactly fit them. The first thing I did was to contact a lot of these people
personally and asked them questions about what they were doing. After getting
a fairly good idea, I then asked them if they were interested in testing
something that I'll make for them in the next few weeks which got a positive
response.

I spent a week building the core features that I thought were the most useful
for them. All the core features worked but since I ported a lot of existing
code from my old projects to speed things up, a lot of the other stuff was
broken but that's okay. I hate building useless stuff so I needed to know
right away if I was on the right track.

I invited the people I contacted to test it out. They didn't like it.
Discouraging but expected. After a weekend of tweaks and discussions, they
started getting more and more excited about the project as they started to see
things progress. I made sure I involved them in all of the design discussions
and tried to make them feel that this was their project as much as it is mine.
Basically, tons of buy-in which also works wonders for my morale to keep
going. They're excited, I'm excited, and now we're at the point where they've
decided that they're going to bring all of their activities over to the new
site.

It's a lot of upfront work to be sure, but this way, I can approach it more
from a systems analysis standpoint now than a marketing exercise later.

TL;DR Find a key group of prospective users and involve them in your project
from the beginning. Let them be a part of its creation, generate excitement,
then let the marketing take care of itself from there.

------
andrewfelix
Around the World is great! It just needs a flashier UI and introduction. It's
seriously addictive. Please don't give up on it.

If you want to explore it further next year hit me up for some graphic design
advice/help.

