
Ask HN: How to outsource marketing for my bootstrapped 'lifestyle business'? - manishsharan
I am bootstrapping my &#x27;lifestyle business&#x27;. I have a good product in a mature market: traction will be slow to come  and I am running  low on my savings and I don&#x27;t want to blow them on expensive adwords. SEO with long tail keyword will take a long time to convert. I am thinking I should take a contract job 9-5 and outsource marketing and promotion to someone else. I know this is a bad idea but bills have to be paid. Has anyone done this before ? who do you outsource to ? What does it cost ?Please share.
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dangrossman
Are you doing any sales/bizdev work at all? Like identifying potential
customers, and calling them? Or e-mailing them? Or finding forums your
customers spend time at, and participating there? Making deals with other
products your customers use to cross-promote?

Writing on a blog nobody reads isn't going to do much for you. The way content
gets backlinks typically involves the people who write it hustling just as
much to get those links: posting them themsleves, talking to influential
people who can share them, running contests and giveaways, guest posting for
exposure. Content creation is less than half of the work of successfully using
content marketing for customer acquisition.

You can't really outsource this stuff at the beginning IMO. Nobody else is
going to have the knowledge and the passion to get those early customers for
you. You need to be in the loop personally to hear the rejections and see how
your product is being used to know how to move it forward and how to market it
more effectively.

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Gustomaximus
> I don't want to blow them on expensive Adwords

As a marketer this bothers me. While I assume I am completely oversimplifying
this statement, an ongoing bug bear of mine is business that treats marketing
as an expense. Marketing is an investment. It should be treated and monitored
as you would your investments. Adwords ads are not expensive, they have a
positive or negative ROI/ROMI. It doesn't matter if a click cost $1 or $1,000,
its about the following profit you get back from that click. You need to
understand how you track + what your avg revenues and margins are. Adwords
(and other channels) should never be expensive, they should be positive or
negative returning assets.

Your questions;

> Has anyone done this before? I've on both sides of contracting marketing. It
> makes sense to pay for specialization if you can earn a reasonable salary
> elsewhere.

> who do you outsource to? Depends on what you need? Be careful going cheap.
> There is no industry accreditation and many people jump in selling promises
> they cant deliver. ALso yyou sound like you need someone that can advise you
> as much as 'do as I say' type contractor. Look for experience and someone
> that can show you specifically why they succeeded when they took of other
> marketing gigs. Don't go for the cheapest or biggest promise as an absolute.

> What does it cost ?Please share. As above, you can do affiliate type deals
> where you only pay for success. Or you may pay $5 to $500/hr depending on
> what you look for. Try not to go in too light on spend. If you want to spend
> $500 on advertising anyone decent will cost more than that alone setting up
> a solid performing campaign. People often test with small amounts, hire some
> low cost person and then decide 'marketing doesn't work'. You need to do a
> shotgun type approach where you blast tests across a bunch of
> channels/approaches, see where the profit pattern is for you to chase. Also
> when you budget budget a decent spend in addition to a person. I see
> businesses hire a marketing person and then allocate not budget. Thats a
> waste of money unless they are literately after a blogger/web developer in
> one and that's all you want.

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manishsharan
I am discovering the hard way that adwords and seo are slow to convert. And
there is so much content on almost every keyword out there and most of that
stuff is regurgitated content. But those content have backlinks and so my blog
posts never make it to google first page.

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webstartupper
Marketing is about figuring out what channel best works for your business and
then scaling it up (what Dan said). Unfortunately, you cannot outsource this,
until you have figured the channels out and chosen a few to focus on. Once
done, you can then get someone who has experience in optimizing that channel
and scaling the campaign up efficiently.

Adwords is amazing for validating your idea, but with the increased
competition, it is becoming too costly if your LTV is not very high.

SEO takes a very long time (three years) as your domain needs to build
authority. I would not bother about it at all, till I achieve product-market
fit.

Look for other channels that your competitors are ignoring - channels like
forums, or facebook ads, cross-promoting with a complementary product. Spend a
fixed amount on each channel - say $500. You can then figure out which channel
works best for your business.

As an example, for my self funded business, I did all the marketing and dev
work for a year and a half. I tried adwords, facebook & twitter ads, buying
banners on various relevant websites and forum postings. Once I had figured
out the channel that converted the best (in my case forum sales threads), I
hired someone for doing all the work in that channel.

If you want some suggestions on channels which might work, don't be afraid to
mention your business here.

~~~
manishsharan
Thanks, I would appreciate all suggestions. My company is
[https://videocloudmanager.com](https://videocloudmanager.com) and I am in
online video platform market.we provide video hosting for business.

~~~
vineet
If this is a mature space because the channels are well defined. So the
question is where do you expect paying users to come from? Have you gotten any
successes with this approach? (Once you do, then it will make sense to get
someone else to outsource the work to).

If you are building a video hosting service for businesses, do you know what
they think of your business?

One suggestion would be getting someone unbiased to look at your competitors
websites and your website and to pick who the top 2-3 solutions that they
would evaluate.

If bills have to be paid, then pick up a job. But before you spend it on
someone else, make sure that you are spending it on something that will have
results.

One thought is if your product is in a mature space, I would recommend
innovating with the channel. Maybe target a lower cost do-it-yourself
customer? You will want your marketing (design, pricing, outreach/ads, and
feature additions) to line up with that.

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mknappen
Take the job. Spend 30-60 minutes per day on marketing activities before or
after work.

