you know what would be a great publicity stunt? Get accepted into TC50, then launch early, then get auto-kicked out from TC50....and THEN get a ton of coverage for being the site that got kicked out of TC50.
You go to TC50, you are one out of 50, you do this thing, and you are the only one they talk about. And hell after TC50 launches, you'll still get covered all the place as a sidenote.
Seconded. However, in Google AdWords, you have the luxury of sending your soon-to-be-customer to a landing page. You can change anything about that landing page without impacting the experience of your site for "normal" users.
With TechCrunch, they're likely going to be sending folks straight to the front page. Which means optimizing for the 100,000 ADHD squirrels hopped up on crystal meth means pessimizing for all those forgotten sobs paying you money.
Worse, they might not even send people to your homepage.
When Techcrunch wrote up Twiddla, they linked directly to a meeting room that they'd created. So the first several thousand people got to see a horribly overloaded web conference, with everybody drawing at once.
Fortunately, we noticed it as soon as the article came out, so we were able to redirect traffic over to the homepage, but still the first dozen comments on the TC article were not very nice.
Exactly. You captured the jist of the article perfectly, @patio11. You've got a chance to learn from your users that are likely to bounce. you've got to simply the page, and you've got to find a way to get as many potential qualified leads to opt-in to you reaching out to them later somehow.
hey pdcan. We try to be as agnostic as possible in the book (Complete Web Monitoring) - the idea is that you can apply a total web monitoring strategy (which includes how to just .. "be" on the web) to just about everything.
anyhow, glad you're enjoying it!
(ps, I'm @seanpower, the co-author of the post and book)
You go to TC50, you are one out of 50, you do this thing, and you are the only one they talk about. And hell after TC50 launches, you'll still get covered all the place as a sidenote.