

Ask HN: Inbound marketing - Publish and they will come? - fezzl

My startup is in the b2b social commerce space; we are building an onsite widget for retailers to thoroughly socialize their storefronts. Basically, access your social graph while shopping to obtain advice and recommendations and view archives of your friends activities on the website (likes, reviews, comments, purchases, contemplated, etc.).<p>We are approaching the public Beta phase and would like to create some awareness early on. We have a blog, we published slides, datasheets, white papers, looking into eBooks as well, etc. Then we tweet about them, post on Facebook, Digg, Slideshare.<p>Would this be sufficient? Is this what inbound marketing is all about? Anyone who has had success with inbound marketing, mind sharing your experiences?<p>P.S.: We're totally bootstrapped, just a bunch of college kids hacking away at stuff. We just want some highly-qualified leads for Beta testing; paid advertisements are quite beyond our needs right now. Even AdWords makes us think twice.
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klous
I'd suggest starting conversations via email and twitter with influencers or
possible customers in your market. Show you have something interesting and
unique worth writing a blog post or tweet about.

For additional advice, this would be a good question to post to Quora.com.

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fezzl
Hi, thanks for the tips. When you say "influencers", do you mean
bloggers/tweeters with a lot of followers?

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klous
Followers / readers is one metric that contributes to their level of
influence, see klout.com regarding this. But I was speaking of Influencer
Marketing in more general terms. see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing>

