

Ask HN: Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service? - bear330

A few months ago, I am impressed about this startup story (From an idea to our first customer in 7 days):
http://www.martinadamek.com/2010/02/02/the-startup-story-from-an-idea-to-our-first-customer-in-7-days/<p>I am inspired by it and tried to do a single simple service to market. I think Adwords is great, it brings customers from worldwide very soon. 
But now, I sadly found the service in that story closed because after ran out of Adwords credits, ALMOST NO ONE will go that site.<p>My experience is, even I post a good stuff to forums or blogs, the visitors will only increase to very high on that day. After few days later, nothing left, especially for a tool type service.<p>Any good suggestion for marketing a new startup service?<p>Thanks.
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coryl
1) Target bloggers who would use your service or write about your service. The
trick is finding them, and finding enough of them. Here's what you can try
that has had a bit of success for me: You google keywords looking for bloggers
who write about competing services. So if you compete with Chargify, you look
for "using chargify", "like chargify", "chargify vs", "saas billing" +
"chargify". Skim through the search results and titles, look for blogs and
click through. You want people who reviewed chargify, signed up for it,
compared it to another service, etc. Just copy the URL to your google doc so
you can contact them later, build up a list for now. Its best to go through at
least 5 google page results, more if your patient.

2) Once you've got a list ready, go through each blog post, read a bit so you
can refer to it, or filter if its not relevant. Find the contact page (CTRL +
F 'contact'), usually a form or email will be available. Your pitch will look
something like, "Hi my name is ____. I saw your blog post about how chargify
was _______. I found that a lot of saas app publishers really like how
chargify does x well, but were frustrated by (lack of feature, high cost,
etc.). I'm actually working on an app that....Do you think this is a service
you'd use? If not, thanks for your time. Or if you'd like to blog a review
about us, I'd be happy to tell you more."

3) Like all pitches, some will be ignored, some will be interested, some will
pay you right away. Reply promptly of course, within hours if possible.

4) You can try repeating the process of finding blogs through Technorati or
Google Blogs, though they have their own issues. Technorati only indexes
recent blog posts I believe. Google Blog search is filled with spammers.

5) Repeat the cycle by identifying different types of users who might use your
product. This can be difficult because you've probably ingrained the ideal
target market user into your psyche. It will also depend on the size and
diversity of your market in general.

Good luck.

------
PaulZhao
This goes more into web marketing, depending on what product you're selling.

If you're looking for just "sales", Adwords is great because you can target
very precisely who you want visiting your site, as long as you accumulate
enough data to understand what's working and what's not. I currently manage a
$150k monthly adwords account. For example, a small/mid sized account could
have 20k keywords, out of those, 1k will get clicked on per month, 200 would
be the "top 50% traffic" keywords, and out of the 200, maybe 50 will generate
sales/leads for you. Those are the things you need to understand on a monthly
basis, and as soon as you pick up the pattern for which words are the 200/50,
increase bids on the 50 and get rid of the ones you're spending a lot of money
on and not converting to sales/leads.

If you're looking for just traffic over a long term, I'd recommend the
following:

1\. SEO - if you can rank for popular keywords relevant to your site, you'll
have new visitors from search engines every day. Depending on your SEO
strategy, you can be targeting 5 "top tier keywords" that're tough to rank, or
100 "2nd tier keywords" that requires effort, but not all all-day every-day
type efforts. Or you could try to optimize dynamically for hundreds of
thousands of product names using good SEO practices on your dynamic pages.
Obviously link acquisition is a big part of it as well.

2\. Link acquisition - getting a link from a popular spot can cause you a
"spike" in traffic for a day or two, and if you can keep writing "link-
generating content", you can try to repeat the traffic spike from different
sources. There're some "theories" on what type of content people link to, such
as breaking news before everyone else, top 10 lists, controversy, useful free
tool, etc.

3\. Brand awareness - getting your name out so everyone (in your target
demographic market) knows your brand name. In that case, I'd recommend buying
banners - most work on a CPM basis, which is just a fancy term for "Cost per
1000 banner views". Depending on which source you go with, and how targeted of
a website/demographic you want to go with,1000 views of your banner will
usually cost you anywhere between 30 cents to $5.

Of course, all this depends on the product/service you provide. If all you do
is sell car batteries online, then there's no real reason for people to come
back to your site once they buy one.

Good luck, \-- Paul Zhao

------
LeBlanc
It sounds like the problem you are having is user retention. You get people to
your site, but they don't end up sticking around to use your tool/service on a
daily basis. This means that you do not have a strong enough value proposition
(or you are marketing to the wrong people, but more likely the former).

Try to get feedback from the people who tried your website but then left.
Repost to the blogs you posted to and try to see what the people who tried it
think, and why they didn't up leaving.

Also, make sure your website is solving a real problem. Your site may be
'useful' but unless it solves a problem that currently really really
frustrates people, nobody is going to want to spend the effort to go to your
site and use your tool unless the problem is solves is really big, and your
solution is awesome.

I could give more specific advice if I knew anything about your site. Good
luck!

~~~
bear330
Thank you very much. What kind of advice would you give if I am trying to
build another <http://www.korekt.me/>? I think if we can find some solutions
for this site, we will find some general solutions.

(or the problem might be that proofreading service not really frustrates
people?)

------
dmor
There is a lot to say about this, depending on your product and your market
(which I haven't seen). Here are a couple key thoughts:

* Adwords are great, but spending money before you know what kind of conversion you are able to get from natural SEO isn't a good idea. You can always buy traffic, make sure you have the right funnel first - image it is a pipe you are trying to make as wide and friction-free as possible. I think Adwords works great if you are selling a product similar to something already in the market

* forums, blogs, etc. have a very short lifespan so you should expect you will get peaks from high buzz items (like a post doing well here on HN) and it will trail off after that, if you can retain 5-10% that's great. You have to consistently crank out new relevant content.

 _

~~~
bear330
Thanks for your suggestion first.

My product is a tool that you can select some part of web page to convert it
into various formats (CSV,TXT,Images...etc.). It is still under development.

I think this service is a little like <http://www.korekt.me/>. Someone will
need it, but scattered worldwide. How to reach them is hard.

I am thinking what I can do after public it.

------
pwim
It seems the site mentioned in the article, <http://www.korekt.me/>, suffered
from the same problem. It looks like they have given up. To build a successful
service is a lot of work, and takes quite some time.

~~~
bear330
Yes, that problem is I trying to know how to solve.

This site really solve a problem (so customer pays for it), but in my opinion,
the natural of this type of service is low user retenion. How to reach as much
as possible customers is critical.

Some types of services will make people say: "that's good service, maybe I
will use it someday", then put it into bookmarks only.

The real customer even don't know that service (after ran out of Adwords
credits). I think <http://www.korekt.me/> is like that.

------
hackerking
get it hooked up to goolge index, that can take a few months tho, kinda goes
of the point a bit i think soz, but then keep write a blog about your service
the hits will come im sure.

