

Quick, Free, and Easy Ways to Market Your Startup - inglorian
http://blog.yakgroups.com/2009/12/free-easy-and-quick-ways-to-market-your.html

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patio11
Participation on forums as a method of direct customer acquisition _doesn't
scale_. This isn't to say that it is valueless, but if you're recruiting your
new trial users by individual persuasion you had darn well better me selling
at Big Freaking Enterprise price points. Otherwise you are spending a huge
amount of effort buying yourself a below minimum-wage job. Unless something
has changed drastically in American college students in the last five years,
you are probably not selling them enterprise software.

Ditto Q/A websites. By the way, you know they're essentially just massive
funnels for low quality UGC to choke search engines with, right? (I will give
an honorable exception to StackOverflow because some of their answers actually
contain useful information that could not be gleaned from a Google search, and
the embedded MMORPG is kind of fun.)

Put the content on your own darn page and disintermediate the middle man. (SEO
is free (well, freeish) and _effective_ , although it is neither quick nor
particularly easy.)

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shmichael
There is a tradeoff between quick, free, easy and _effective_. Its impossible
to learn such techniques on a blog, because any quick, free & easy method
would draw the crowds, rendering it ineffective.

Besides, the author's suggestions involve spending time answering and
searching forums. Not my definition of "quick".

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tub109
I agree. It is not the "quickest" way to market by any stretch of the
imagination. The author was probably trying to make the point that if you have
more time than resources (ie money, contacts) here are methods you could try
to get you started.

Maybe the title could have better indicated who was the intended audience: the
startup truly just starting up.

Reading around a bit it is clear they fall into this category and are
experimenting with different techniques and blogging about them. So maybe it
wouldn't be worth the time investment for a startup even a bit further along,
but maybe worth it for a startup to get their pageviews from 0 to...not 0.

