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How to achieve explosive startup growth!

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
​
Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:
Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
​
Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!
– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:
  1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
  2. How many customers are available?
  3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?
You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:
  1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
  2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.
There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:
  1. How many people landed on the website?
  2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
  3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?
A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:
You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?
A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:
Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.
When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:
You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.
Problem questions. Use sparingly.
Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.
Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:
I removed the last sections because of the post character limit. Here are two:
submitted by alollou to startups [link] [comments]

Free marketing guide for startups: How to achieve explosive growth!

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
​
Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:
Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
​
Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!
– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:
  1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
  2. How many customers are available?
  3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?
You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:
  1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
  2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.
There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:
  1. How many people landed on the website?
  2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
  3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?
A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:
You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?
A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:
Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.
When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:
You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.
Problem questions. Use sparingly.
Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.
Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:
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Part 2. The scroll of Longinus: The Professors view on the scrolls authenticity has me very troubled

Part 1. The scroll of Longinus: We discovered a scroll containing an eye witness account of the crucifixion. I really hope it is not true
That damned scroll! I wish we never found it. At least then, the truth of the world we live in would never have been revealed, and we could continue our lives oblivious to that which is too big for us to comprehend.
I thought it would be a good idea to allow the world to see, and determine the authenticity of the scroll for themselves. Heck, even Professor Alfredo Diamos thought it would be a good idea, being a work of literature for all to be able to access. He compared it to texts such as the Iliad, or even the Historia Augusta; Works that claim to recount true events, but have been slightly twisted and exaggerated, thus compromising their reliability.
It was, as the professor had said, something that should be taken with a grain of salt. The author, Gratus Cassius Longinus, was very likely present at the crucifixion of Jesus. But the spider eyed being that he described, was; in the words of Diamos “undoubtedly a fixture of the imagination, with a sole purpose to terrify the early Christians”. Even the supposed “Curse” of Longinus, was simply his interpretation of living an unusually long life for the time. The carbon dating of the scroll does line up with the age of Longinus, but Diamos was almost certain even that was an exaggeration.
Being a semi-devout Christian myself, a part of me felt somewhat offended by this text of Longinus. I may not have been as in tuned with my faith as my wife and children were, but nonetheless it was a part of my life that I couldn’t simply ignore. This motivated me even more to agree with Diamos as to the ludicracy of Longinus’ claims.
What I am about to reveal to you in this text will greatly contradict everything that Diamos, and even my initial self, held as fact. What we thought to be pure speculation and exaggeration, turned out to be very much the opposite.
It all started after Diamos brought up the idea with me to release the text to the public.
The other ten of my colleagues who had also been given the translation of the scroll were much less eager than I was to share it, when Diamos had told them. They were old school, rather leaving the information in the circle of the historically educated. They argued with Diamos and I, that it was too soon to be released to the public, and should be subject to further study. They further argued that it was against law to release it.
I remember the anger that Diamos showed to them. Had he not spent nearly four years analyzing the scroll? It was, after all, he who was the researcher and Historian that connected the finding of the coins in the field to the Villa in Volterra. He was adamant that he had all the rights to release the information. It was amusing watching every word they tried to counter Diamos, be quickly rejected. He was not giving in.
One of them, by the name of Lorenzo Sartor; representative from the Italian ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiBACT), threatened to take this matter to court if Diamos would pursue it. He knew that Diamos did not have permission from MiBACT, to release this content. The whole Volterra project was, after all, funded by MiBACT. Diamos was merely hired to be one of the lead researchers of the project. Anything found, from mere stones to the scroll itself, was at the authority of MiBACT to make the decision as to what happens to the artefacts outside of the circle of the project. What Diamos was wanting to do, greatly violated the contract he signed to be a part of this project.
But stubborn Diamos, did not surrender. The outbursts between the two of them became very heated. It eventually was just too much for the others to handle, and they all left the room. I decided to join them, feeling so annoyed at how childish these two were acting. I waited outside the room, shaking my head in disappointment, as I heard the muffled shouts and sharp movements they made. The other ten had taken off to call for security, as they began to feel uneasy with Diamos’ demeanor. I knew he could be hot headed, but I was sharing that same unease. This arguing was simply uncalled for.
Then, the shouting suddenly stopped.
It was about time they decided to be more civil.
Something felt off. The sudden silence was too unexpected.
Diamos hastily opened the door of the meeting room, and the look of relief on his face when he saw me was similar to that of one finding water in a desert. He firmly grabbed my arm and dragged me into the room, before immediately locking the door.
I dropped my jaw at the sight that beheld me. Lying in a pool of blood, Lorenzo Sartor was motionless. There was a deep gash in his chest, with blood still oozing out. One of the rusty nails that had been found on the site was on the floor next to the corpse; the weapon of choice.
“What the hell have you done!” I exclaimed as I gagged at the horrid site.
“We have little time” Diamos replied, being unmoved by the act he had just committed. He was frantically on his laptop deleting emails, and files that were valuable to this whole project.
I struggled to bring words out of my mouth. I had never seen a recently deceased body before, and to see things go south so quickly was completely out of my minds comprehension.
Finished, Diamos closed the laptop and threw it to the ground, destroying it. He then came up to me and forced a USB into my hands.
“I am so sorry to do this to you Mike. I have no time to explain this all to you, but you WILL understand soon enough” he said pleadingly. He grabbed my shoulders and looked me dead in the eye “There are greater powers than you can comprehend at work here. You must open the USB when it is safe to do so”
“OPEN THE DOOR!” shouted security outside, startling us.
They were determined to enter the room and began to bash the door violently so that it might give way.
Diamos forced the USB into my pocket, before he pushed me to the floor, next to the corpse of Lorenzo. He grabbed the nail and held it against my head. I didn’t know what the hell he was going to do. Was he honestly going to kill me now after just handing me this all-important USB?
“Goddamit Mike!” Diamos frustratingly whispered “Beg for your life. It’s the only way you will save it”
My mind at this stage was spinning in circles. I felt more like a hostage than an ally of Diamos, who at that moment was nothing more than a mad man to me.
I yelled. I pleaded for help from behind the door. I begged Diamos not to kill me, as he pushed the nail closer to my face. The sincerity of my pleas had driven me to tears. I just wanted to see my family. Diamos was yelling some hot words, but my mind was too fried to even register.
The door finally gave in, and police stormed into the room, Guns drawn and shouting at Diamos to drop the weapon and surrender. Diamos looked at them with a stare of utter hate. He held me down as though I was a hostage, with the nail right against my throat.
“Come closer and he dies!” Diamos shouted.
The policemen were ready to fire at any given chance. They just had to be careful not to jeopardize my life with a wrong move.
Diamos then gave me one last pleading look, winking his eye and saying “Remember”. He then loosened his grip of me and charged towards the officers as they began to lay fire on him. In what seemed like a split second, Diamos was now lying dead on the ground, and I found myself being tended to by the officers, who helped me out of the room.
Everything was a blur after this, and I could not remember much at all, whilst I was in the ambulance and taken to the hospital. My family were called up and they soon flew to Italy to be by my side. I was not so much in physical harm, but rather mentally. I had never experienced something so extreme as this. What was meant to be a simple meeting about the contents of the scroll, ended up with the murder of Lorenzo Sartor, and the death of Professor Diamos. I was in denial that something so fucked up could have happened. I honestly never thought Diamos had that in him. I greatly admired him during this project, and to witness his downfall was very troubling.
What would come next would be an extremely drawn out inquest to the death of Lorenzo Sartor and what had happened in that room whilst I was with Diamos.
I told them the truth. How I was outside the room when Lorenzo was killed, and then taken hostage, held up with the nail. They wanted to know everything, and the MiBACT representatives who were very much a part of the inquest, were particularly hard to please with my answers. They held an obvious suspicion towards me.
They knew that I was on the same page as Diamos in releasing the document to the public without MiBACT consent, and consistently brought it up. I openly admitted that I did share the same belief, though I never acted on it, nor was I as extreme with it as Diamos had been. As soon as I realized the illegal nature of this proposed release of information, I left it merely as a dead idea. They could not do anything to me because of this. Plus, with myself being held “Hostage” by Diamos, they were all inclined to believe me when I said that Diamos did so to me as a result of me siding with Lorenzo.
I was soon dismissed, being forced to hand over my copies of the transcript of the scroll of Longinus, and stood down from the whole Volterra Project. Further investigations on Alfredo Diamos’ Hard Drives and research papers were conducted by the Police in conjunction with MiBACT.
The biggest truth that they had failed to release from me was that I was given a USB by Diamos. I had not had the chance to access what was hidden within whilst I was in Italy, and especially during the investigations. It would not be until I returned home to Sydney, Australia that I could finally be safe and far from unfriendly eyes to be able to open the USB.
I plugged the USB into my laptop and opened up the files. There were two documents on the USB. One titled “The translated scroll” and the other titled “For Michael Brown”
I was completely thrown off guard to see my name on this document. It was the sole document on the whole USB that I was not aware of, and it was directly meant for me. Diamos must have been planning to give me this for some time. This was very, very strange.
I opened the document and began to read it.
There was not too much information, so it is attached below.
My dear Michael, If you are reading this I am most likely in custody or dead. Please, for your own safety, get as far away from Italy as you can. There is no more need for you to be there. This situation has become very dangerous.
I trust you to be able to understand and be on my side of this whole conflict, as you were the only human among all of them.
There was a reason that it took me four years to decipher the scroll. Because it pretty much confirmed a recent horror that I had been experiencing. This Gratus, saw Jesus as a horrible spider eyed creature. Well, I don’t know if it is a coincidence or not, but why have I been seeing flashes of these creatures before the scroll was even found? Before I even saw a description of them from another witness. People like Lorenzo Sartor, and the ten who were a part of the research team that had access to the scrolls contents, all gave me these frequent flashes of a horrible monster. I did not know what was wrong with me, and I decided to keep my mouth shut and see it through.
Then the scroll was found, and what Longinus described absolutely chilled me to the bone. This was exactly what I too was seeing flashes of. Not a full constant image as he did, but flashes between the human and the spider form.
I was worried, and what could have been released within a month, I decided to hold onto for as long as I could, to gather more information about it. The quieter I was on this front, the better.
During this time, I thought a lot about why these things were so interested in the villa and the scroll. Everyone who had come to the site on behalf of MiBACT, I was given the flashes of those creatures. It seems like they have temporarily taken over MiBACT for the purpose of the Volterra project. I have worked with them many times in the past, and never did I have any flashes of horrid creatures. Not to mention that most of the faces that I was seeing were completely new to me. They must want to claim the scroll for themselves. Perhaps they are afraid that the sole account of their greatest deception to humanity, would be read and many would begin to realize the truth. Better for them, that any possibility of bringing down their hard work of unifying the world, be hindered. Because if the information of the scroll does get exposed and does gain the right momentum, the chance of humanity uniting against them greatly increases.
I must admit, that I did lie to you Michael. There was a part of the scroll that I did not add to your transcript on purpose. It was the part that mentions the way to kill these things. The three nails that Gratus had apparently used to nail Jesus to the cross, supposedly had a power that could end them through their human disguise. Apparently, Gratus had them hidden in separate locations. One of them was among the ruins in Volterra, which is currently in my possession, and I plan to use to test its power in the near future. The other two however, are not mentioned. The scroll cuts off abruptly as Gratus begins to reveal the location of the second. I believe that something was after him. That was why his handwriting was so hastily written.
If I managed to kill one of them, and you see that it was a nail that did the job, than that should be enough evidence for you to know that the other two nails are likely going to have the same powers. Unfortunately, the one found in Volterra will be sacrificed as a result, for they will obviously seize it after my arrest, and there is no point in attempting to reclaim it from them.
I do not understand why I can see these things as Gratus described them, and I hope that I’m not the only one who does. Perhaps even you might, but I doubt this. It just completely baffles me that I share the exact same ability that was mentioned in the scroll.
Perhaps, unlike Gratus, who was able to see their true form constantly, thus gaining their own awareness of his awareness, I am unable to be detected as he was. Never had those dark black eyes locked onto my soul as they did to him. To them, I am just another petty human, used to do their tasks for them.
You, like I said earlier, were the only other human present who had access to the scrolls. I know this for certain, as you were free of the consistent flash of a monster. You remained human always, in my eyes.
That is why I trust this information and the attached document containing the transcript of the scroll to you. I am certain that they will confiscate the original documents I gave you once I have been taken into custody. You must expose this. And not only that, you must get the attention of Gratus. I believe that by anonymously posting the transcript of the scroll, you will gain the attention that is needed, without putting yourself in jeopardy, as well as potentially reach out to the author, who I am now inclined to believe is still alive.
If everything we think we knew to be true about the world is wrong, in which I strongly believe, after my recent occurring flashes of the described creature, then Gratus must be found. He knows the location of the last two nails. We need these to destroy them. But not only do we need the weapons but we need the words. It is of the highest priority that you post the transcript Michael. I believe it has the chance to snowball out of control in our favor.
I am sorry that this has all been thrown onto you so hard. As I write this, I am uncertain that you will even be able to get to see it. But if my plan of deceiving them by being an enforcer of the unreliability of the authors works, then there is hope that this USB may reach your possession at the right time.
The true motivations of these yet unknown organisms, is still to be revealed. Perhaps we are all the fools and these creatures really are God and his Angels trying to help humanity along. But seeing how much they want to cover up the truth of their disguise and deception to humanity, I have no doubt that there is something sinister to their motivations. I am very much inclined to share the same view as Gratus on this.
Michael Brown, you may very well be the most wanted man in the universe with the knowledge you have just been given. In all seriousness, the fate of humanity and the next step to exposing the truth of these creatures is in your hands. Find Gratus and do whatever it takes to stop them.
Best wishes
Alfredo Diamos.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Was he actually serious? How did the speculative professor turn into the adamant believer? He was good at concealing his act, that’s for sure. I would never had thought him to be so inclined to believe.
It was a lot to digest. For one as educated and respected as Alfredo Diamos, to be so certain of the truth of Gratus’ claims, shook the very foundations of everything that I thought was plausible. This would have been absolutely absurd if it came from anybody else. He surely must have been desperate to expose the truth if he was willing to sacrifice his life for it.
As much as it scared me to do so, I felt obliged to follow his instructions in posting the information and trying to contact Gratus.
The last thing I needed, was for my family to get caught up in this chaos, so I left them and ventured west to a town called Bathurst, where I purchased a new laptop with the sole purpose of uploading the transcript of the scroll. The further away I was from home, and with a disposable laptop, the likelihood of the source of the information being traced back to me was greatly limited.
I opened up various sites, from Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, Imgur, Twitter, Quora, Yahoo, emails; basically anywhere I could think of, I shared the file.
Each time I clicked upload, I felt a part of my soul depart my body. The terror that was going through me was simply unbearable. I could almost taste blood in my mouth, as I was so nervous and scared with what I was doing.
Once it was all completed, I immediately destroyed the laptop and disposed of it in a dam on some private property.
The waiting game had begun.
submitted by jaymicafella to nosleep [link] [comments]

Are you unsure how to get your first 1000 customers? Here is a list of the 12 marketing channels. For each distribution channel, I included proven strategies to help you get your first 1,000 customers.

tl;dr - I'm often asked by startup cofounders three questions:
  1. "What are the different marketing channels?"
  2. "How do I get my first 10/100/1,000 customers?"
  3. "There are sooo many marketing channels. What channels should I focus on first?"
I wrote this guide to explain the 12 major marketing channels. You'll find three strategies/case studies per channel to help you get your first few customers. I then talk about the two types of marketing channels.
Finally, I end by helping you know how to prioritize the channels using the "ICE framework." ICE is the prioritization method used in startups like Facebook, Uber, and Pinterest. I've used it for small startups (under 10 employees) and even a non-profit, so it should work for your startup.
This article was originally written on my website (which you can view here), so my apologizes if the formatting isn't perfect. Got questions? Feel free to drop a comment and I'll do my best to answer it!
Enjoy the read :).
Right now, your startup has one mission.
It isn’t to become the next $1 billion startup. (Though that may come in time). It isn’t to make a difference in the world. (Though you may make a meaningful impact). Nor is it to raise your next round of venture capital. (Though your team may need to do so to complete your mission).
Your mission right now, if you choose to accept, is to find a scalable business model.
As a part of finding a scalable business model, you need to tap the right marketing channels. That’s it.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. What works today may not work tomorrow.
Not too long ago, marketers were all raving about:
  1. Use social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and MySpace.
  2. Writing articles daily on your blog.
  3. Using QR codes to promote your business.
While specific trends and tactics come-and-go, marketing channels will always be around.
If you want to get more customers, it’s helpful to understand each marketing channel. And not only should you know how a marketing channel works, but why it works.
In this article, I’ll share with you the twelve major marketing channels. I’ll then provide a few case studies and strategies for you to test to grow your business.
Note: The book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth shaped much of this article. If you want to become better at getting and retaining customers, I recommend reading both.

Here is a list of the 12 major marketing channels of mass distribution:

  1. Business Development and Partnerships
  2. Paid Advertisements
  3. Sales
  4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  5. Virality and Network Effects
  6. Community Marketing
  7. Content Marketing
  8. Email Marketing
  9. Engineering as Marketing
  10. Press
  11. Social Media
  12. Trade Shows and Offline Events
Warning: The following advice may lead to insane amounts of business growth. Please consult a lawyer, attorney, or doctor before attempting this at home. Each marketing channel has different pros and cons. Your mileage may vary.

1. Business Development and Partnerships

Business development is often a gray and ambiguous term. Some equate it to sales. Others simply say any partnership is business development.
Here’s how I define business development.
*Business development is creating long-term value for your startup by partnering with anyone in your market. *This includes other businesses, influencers, and media outlets.
The focus of this channel is on the exchange of value through the partnership. This channel also includes partnerships from influencer marketing and affiliate marketing.
The goal of each partnership is long-term value.
It should not be a one-and-done transaction. Sure, you might get some money from your first co-promotion. But the highest ROI comes from finding new opportunities from the same partnership.
As a result, partnerships often are a slower channel to scale.
The partnership may or may not include paid compensation.
Keep in mind the relationship will change if you pay the other person. Further, there may be certain expectations a person has about the partnership. This expectation may also change by industry.
For example, an influencer is more likely to promote a blog article for free. But I’ve had a few influencers request I pay them to promote my article. The same influencer who was willing to promote an article for free may expect payment for directly promoting your product.
Offering payment when the party does not expect it may be offensive. And in another scenario, it’s a delightful gift.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for partnerships:
  1. Find similar companies and offer one product as an add-on bonus. Chris Gimmer shares his story on Snappa’s partnership with LeadPages here.
  2. Find large companies that have app directories or marketplaces. First, integrate your tool with their tool. Then submit your application to directories. Examples include Shopify’s App Marketplace, Intercom’s App Store, and Zendesk’s App Directory. This was a core part of the early growth for CartHook and for BoldCommerce.
  3. Put together a product bundle for news sites and conferences. Learn how Noah Kagan did this with AppSumo by partnering with Imgur and Reddit here.

2. Paid Advertisements

At the dawn of the Internet, people rallied around old marketing channels with new names:
  1. Influencer marketing (celebrity endorsements began in the 1760s).
  2. Content marketing (Ben Franklin printed Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732).
  3. Email Marketing (mail order catalogues began in 1498).
Then advertising began to move online. Old advertising channels like billboards, newspaper ads, and radio commercials are now a thing of the past.
Or are they outdated?
Believe it or not, according to the OAAA, out-of-home advertising reach a new record high of $8 billion in 2018:
Image
(Image Source)
I bet you didn't see that one coming.
Paid advertising has several mediums, which I’ll categorize by offline and online ads. Offline ads include TV ads, radio ads, billboards, magazine ads, newspaper ads, and bus ads.
Online ads are also called pay-per-click (PPC) ads. This includes:
  1. Search engine ads (ads on Google, Bing, and other search engines)
  2. Social media ads (ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, and other social media sites)
  3. Display ads (banner ads you see displayed on websites).
  4. Media ads (ads and product placements which are in video games, movies, and other media).
  5. Email ads (ads you see when using your email, such as Gmail).
  6. Newsletter ads (ads in email newsletters)
The benefit of paid advertising is if you have an unlimited budget, it’s easier to scale this channel. It’s an excellent channel to test your messaging, get feedback, and iterate quickly.
But as fast as advertising comes, so too it also disappears fast.
There’s a limited window of exposure because ads rent space. Marketing on other channels gives you an asset that stays up as long as you keep them up.
As your ad spend scales, it becomes more expensive and harder to track. In turn, paid ads can also cover up underlying problems.
Andrew Chen, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, shared how a startup’s paid cost to acquire a customer can be off as much as 2-5 times what it should be. (Source)
Further, you often do not build a relationship with the customer.
As a result, advertising works best for impulse buys or products which offer fast value to the customer.
For SaaS startups, paid ads are often a secondary channel that supports content marketing.
But for eCommerce products, paid advertising is often the first scalable marketing channel. This is because eCommerce will likely sell products which bring delight faster.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for paid advertising:
  1. Media outside the home often will not sell every available ad spot. If it’s not sold, it’s a lost opportunity. This allows you to negotiate for remnant advertising. Tim Ferriss has an excellent article on this here. I used this approach to get $10,000 in billboard space for $2,000. If you run other ads, use your successful campaigns to inspire your billboards.
  2. Create a single keyword ad group (SKAG). [1] Run ads to a dedicated landing page on that topic, optimizing the landing page for SEO. This allows you to continue getting traffic after turning off ads and create a message match to improve conversions. I’ve seen click-through rates (CTR) between 1-9% on SKAGs. For one client, after removing the three worst campaigns, all SKAGs were over 3% CTR. Unbounce has an excellent resource on the importance of message match here.
  3. Create a normal social media post and work with relevant influencers to promote your post. Then promote using an ad so you leverage the social proof from the influencer’s promotion. Learn how to work with influencers on my old marketing site here. And learn how to edit Facebook ads and keep your social proof here.
_[1] Unfamiliar with SKAGs? Let’s say you wanted to sell Ultimate Frisbee discs. In one ad keyword group, you would use three keywords: _
  1. _+ultimate +frisbee _
  2. _“ultimate frisbee” _
  3. _[ultimate frisbee]. _
If an unrelated keyword pops up such as “ultimate frisbee rules,” you move it to your negative keyword list. And if a relevant but unrelated term pops up such as “best ultimate frisbee brands,” you can create a new SKAG and send traffic to a new landing page.

3. Sales

Effective marketing is nothing more than salesmanship in ink. While marketing sells on many-to-one, sales specialize in hand-holding customers one-on-one.
Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and turning them into paying customers.
Now perhaps you’re wondering, “If marketing is effective salesmanship at scale (many-to-one), why should I hire a salesman?”
Contrary to what most SaaS entrepreneurs believe, sales is a primary scalable channel.
First, sales can accelerate the process marketing starts. Without a proper nurture sequence in place, it can be slow moving a prospect down your funnel. A salesman or woman specializes in moving them faster through the funnel.
Second, big customers often need a sales process. When you’re selling a high-end or enterprise product, it’s common to have a salesman giving the customer the red carpet treatment.
*While sales will help speed up landing big customers, it’s not without a major cost. *
Most suggest hiring at least two sales reps. If they work on a team, one will generate and qualify leads while the other closes them. If you favor competition, you can put the two against each other. Two full-time salaries are more than what you’d pay for most marketing agencies.
How cheap can your product be and afford to have a sales team?
If you have a repeatable sales model, a sales rep has three limits:
  1. The number of calls or demos in a day.
  2. The demo-to-close ratio.
  3. How much you’ll pay to keep the salesman.
Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, a SaaS founder, enthusiast, & investor offers this advice:
(Source)
But that’s not all!
If you maximize your current leads and play your cards right, you can bring in a sales rep for a $99/month product.
Lemkin continues:
But, still, we dropped the price point (necessary) for inside sales to $99. And it worked. Why?
I’m not saying you can build a whole inside sales team around a $1,000 ACV or $99 price point. You can’t. The lowest you can probably go on average is $3,000, based on the math above, and that’s if you are hyper-efficient.
If you aren’t, bump that up to a $5k ACV to account for overhead, waste, turn-over, etc.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for sales:
  1. Find people who shared a how-to article related to your product on Twitter. You can use Buzzsumo or Ahrefs to do this. Find their email using a tool like VoilaNorbert. Send them an email and pitch your product. Bryan Harris and two of his students did this to pitch their services, which you can check out here.
  2. Find a list of your competitors. Use a tool such as NerdyData or BuiltWith to find customers who use your competitor. [Send them an email](growthramp.io/articles/email-outreach-program) asking if they’ve experienced common problems with the product. If possible, leverage the names of similar customers you have to the prospect. Nathan Barry did this to take ConvertKit from $1,300 to $725,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Learn how he did that here. More on how to use NeryData here.
  3. If you’ve pre-sold your product, create a customer persona for each person who bought your product. Then use LinkedIn search to find similar people and pitch your product. You can find their email on their profile when you click contact info. If you get real fancy, you can create a video pitch on how your product will benefit them. Learn how Devesh got over $13,000 in recurring revenue doing something similar here.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you have a question on how to do something, where do you turn for an answer?
More than likely, you will turn to a search engine.
This channel includes traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Most SEO agencies and consultants focus on Google’s search engine because it provides the most traffic.
It also includes popular, but niche search engines like Amazon and YouTube search optimization.
*Scaling SEO can be slower than other marketing channels. *
The key to getting faster results for SEO comes from mastering three areas:
  1. Doing keyword research to find high volume, low difficulty keywords.
  2. Creating the content on that topic which benefits both the customer and Google.
  3. Getting enough links from authoritative websites to be an authoritative article on that topic.
Keyword research helps you learn how often people search for a phrase. It will also inform how competitive it is to get search traffic from that keyword phrase.
In my article, “No Keywords Easy to Rank For? I Call ‘Bullcrap,’” I outlined a simple process to find high volume, low difficulty keywords. Here’s a quick summary of the process:
  1. Do a Google search for your keyword or topic.
  2. Take the first 3-5 articles listed on Google.
  3. Put these into an SEO tool that finds the keywords the page ranks for, such as Ahrefs.
  4. Sort the keyword list by volume.
  5. Filter out keywords not in the top 20 spots. You should also remove keywords with too high of a difficulty score. For Ahrefs, my recommendation is 30 or less for new websites.
When doing keyword research, it’s also important to understand a person’s intent when searching for a phrase. Understanding search intent will inform how long it will take to make a sale.
If someone searches “What is copywriting?” in Google, they are likely looking for basic information. But if that person looks up “copywriting services in Spokane”, they probably want to buy copywriting services from an agency in Spokane.
*Next, you’ll want to create in-depth content to answer people's questions and objections on that topic. *
To do this, content strategists often source ideas from other content. For example, you could:
  1. Go to your customers and list out the questions they have.
  2. Go to Quora and search for questions on your topic.
  3. Go to Reddit and look for articles with a high number of upvotes and comments.
  4. Go to relevant Facebook groups and look for questions people have.
  5. Go to relevant Discord and Slack groups and look for questions people have.
Once done, share everything relevant to this topic. Articles on Growth Ramp often are between 1,500 and 3,000 words.
*After you’ve created your content, you may need some authoritative links. *
Why are links important to improve SEO?
I’ll answer this question with another question.
When you write a research paper, how do you know the information is accurate? You cite your sources. On the web, people cite sources by linking to different pages.
Google’s search engine puts pages with the most relevance to your search higher up. That’s why you want in-depth content. But Google also prioritizes relevant content with more links.
So if an authoritative site like Harvard University or Microsoft cites your article, Google will likely rank it high in their results.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for SEO:
  1. After doing competitive research, create landing pages that compare you to your competitors. Potential customers will want to know how you are different from other products out there. It’s one of 10 questions we’ve found customers ask before buying a product. These pages will allow you to educate the customer and add your voice to the conversation.
  2. Create a survey using a tool like Pollfish. Write an article on the original research and promote it. In a 2015 survey by BuzzSumo and Moz, the team found research-backed articles get a lot of traffic and links. This is how Orbit Media got over 430 links in six months.
  3. Similar to what I wrote in “No Keywords Easy to Rank For? I Call ‘Bullcrap,’” you can find easy-to-rank keywords by analyzing your competitor’s content. Plug a competitor into an SEO tool like Ahrefs. Then filter any keywords with a keyword score of 30 or less. You may also want to search for a broad keyword in the results too. Organize the list by traffic, and voila! Instant fast ranking results.

5. Virality and Network Effects

Virality isn’t just when your cat video hits the front page of Reddit or Youtube. It’s about optimizing the time it takes a customer to invite or refer more friends to your product. This is known as a viral loop.
A viral loop happens in three ways:
  1. A customer discovers your product and enjoys it.
  2. This customer then shares your product with other people. Ideally, they share it with your potential customers.
  3. A potential customer buys the product, enjoys it, and shares it with their friends and coworkers.
The more customers who share your product who become customers, the better the viral loop. To measure your viral loop’s effectiveness, you can use a viral coefficient.
David Skok, a venture capitalist at Matrix partners wrote an excellent article on understanding the key variables of viral marketing.
Viral loops are most common in referral systems and network effect products like Facebook and LinkedIn. Network effects occur when there is an increase in value with each new customer using your product.
Virality and network effects are not the same.
Many things can have viral effects without having network effects. Buzzfeed and Upworthy are relentless at improving virality. But that does not mean they have network effects.
And products with network effects don’t always have viral effects. Any of these marketing channels could bring people into the network effect. Facebook used community marketing to get an Ivy League college student to join in its early days. A B2B marketplace might use content marketing to attract their audience.
Unfortunately, while getting free users is valuable, it’s also hard to create viral loops and network effects.
It’s difficult to engineer a viral loop for any product. And virality is even more difficult for SaaS products.
Andrew Chen suggests a viral product should be:
  1. Social in nature.
  2. Has high retention with daily usage.
  3. Applies to many job titles within an organization, so that anyone can use it.
  4. Invites travel through a new channel with a compelling pitch.
  5. Targets extroverts.
Network effect products must have certain features built into the product to create a network effect. At that point, you need to seed the network.
A network has almost no use when no one uses it. How valuable was the fax machine to the first person who bought it? And even with 100 fax machines, if these users do not send messages to each other, the machines were glorified paperweights.
Viral loops and network effects are valuable. The VC firm NFX argues that 70% of the value in tech comes from network effects. Both viral loops and network effects can bring in free customers. The challenge is getting those customers in the first place.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for virality and network effects:
  1. Attract customers with a tool that works without a network effect, then keep them engaged with your network. Chris Dixon talks about the philosophy of this approach here.
  2. There are many ways to solve the chicken-or-egg problem in marketplace network effect startups. Here are 19 tactics to try.
  3. To improve your referral campaigns, provide a reward to both parties. Dropbox’s referral program is a famous example of two-sided rewards. Learn about their referral program here and here.

6. Community Marketing

Community building involves building direct relationships with your customers and potential customers. Developing deeper customer relationships can result in increased activation, retention, and referrals.
One challenge of community marketing is not having an existing audience to start your community.
If you don’t have an established audience, you can become a prominent member of another community. Then use relationships you build in other communities to start your community. Forums, Facebook groups, and Reddit communities (called subreddits) are some of the fastest ways to build relationships in your industry.
Building a community is difficult, but the rewards can be massive. Reddit, Wikipedia, and Stack Exchange are startups built on the community they created.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for community marketing:
  1. What’s successful in one community will often be successful in another community. Find what top influencers share on social media and adjust it to fit your context. With the right message, you can promote the same message in other communities.
  2. Use communities to promote your community. The Facebook group Client Science promotes its community by writing articles on Reddit. You can check out their articles posted by BenJackGill. This article received over 700 upvotes.
  3. Create a community on a different type of channel for people already in a community. Reddit has many Discord and Slack groups. /startups has a startup Discord server. At the time of this writing, they promote this community at the top of their subreddit. /bigseo has an SEO Slack group. At the time of this writing, they promote this community in the sidebar of their subreddit. You can do the same by creating a community for a subreddit.

7. Content Marketing

When was the last time you read an article online? How about the last time you heard a podcast? Or perhaps watched a video?
Content marketing spans a wide range of mediums. It includes articles like the one you’re reading to infographics, videos, and podcasts.
When done right, content can help you:
  1. Educate the market.
  2. Build an email list of excited customers.
  3. Land publicity.
  4. Build relationships.
  5. Build your brand.
And so much more. Popular venture capitalists like Mark Suster, Paul Graham, and James Currier are well-known because of their blogs.
Further, you always have the content. Once you spend on advertising, that’s it. But you can get customers from content for years to come.
Unfortunately, content marketing often requires knowledge of another channel to become successful. As such, it’s often slower than other acquisition channels. That is unless you have a solid content promotion system in place.
SEO and social media tend to be the two most common ways of getting traffic to your content. Email marketing is also common to get people to become repeat visitors to your content. But you can also create a paid content funnel using ads, an article, and premium content to get an email address.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for content marketing:
  1. Want to find content practically guaranteed to go viral? Go to Reddit and search for your topic. Find articles with a ton of upvotes and comments (aim for at least 100 upvotes, or 250 for bigger subreddits). Write a similar topic on your blog, putting your spin on the topic. Then promote it on Reddit and other sites.
  2. Search for “top X blogs” or “best X blogs,” where X is your industry. Offer to sponsor these bloggers money to review your product. Learn how Noah Kagan paid bloggers $500 to review Mint.com from 0 to 100,000 in six months here.
  3. According to BuzzSumo, two types of content that get a ton of traffic and links are research-backed articles and opinionated journalism. If you can’t get enough survey responses, you can use sites like Pollfish for this information. Learn how Orbit Media got 430 links in six months here.

8. Email Marketing

Email marketing is often declared to have the highest ROI for marketing channels.
Image
(Image Source)
Not only can you use it to find new customers, but you can also use it to engage (activation), retain, upsell (revenue), and generate referrals.
Because messages from your company are right beside updates from friends and family, email often feels very personal. When done wrong, the email will also make people feel angry, damage your brand, and decrease future email deliverability rates.
Keep in mind it’s also difficult to get a large enough email list to acquire customers. By itself, email marketing cannot grow unless you have some mechanism for others to share and join your newsletter.
But it is possible to start just by emailing a few interested friends. Newsletters like The Hustle, Startup Digest, and Product Hunt all began as emails sent to friends. Each of these newsletters has several thousands, if not millions, of people.
Typically marketers pair email marketing with SEO or content marketing to build a list.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for email marketing:
  1. Emails that tell your customers the value they get from your product often do well. Can you estimate the money earned or the time saved by using your product?
  2. Consider running a giveaway to build your list. All you need to do is give away a product, tell people about the giveaway, and collect everyone’s email address. Bryan Harris used a giveaway to get 2,239 email subscribers in 10 days. Learn more about that here.
  3. Advertise on newsletters that are complementary to your product. Chances are if someone subscribes to one newsletter, they would love to subscribe to another newsletter like it. Alternatively, you can do a shout-out for each other’s newsletter. This is ideal when the two newsletters are about the same size.

9. Engineering as Marketing

Do you have a team of engineers? You can leverage their skills by building free tools and products to reach your customers.
This a major competitive advantage because you’re giving something free that your competitors charge for.
Free tools are often easier to market than your paid products. As a result, you can get a ton of inexpensive leads. That said, this approach requires you to market the new tool too.
Some common tools include calculators, WordPress plugins, and educational microsites. You can then collect leads through these tools and get people to buy your product. Sometimes a side project becomes successful enough to be the main product.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for engineering as marketing:
  1. From 2006 to 2011, HubSpot's Website Grader was used to grade more than 4 million websites. Learn more about this project here.
  2. Look at your most popular articles. See if you can turn that article into a lead-gen product. Chris Gimmer did this with StockSnap, which he used to launch Snappa. Learn more about how he did that here.
  3. Once you have a tool, don’t overlook other ways you can use it to promote other marketing campaigns. WP Engine has a speed test tool. After you opt-in, it takes you to a thank you page with other valuable resources. You can check it out here.
(Continued in comments below).
submitted by jdquey to SaaS [link] [comments]

Are you unsure how to get your first 1000 customers? Here is a list of the 12 marketing channels. For each distribution channel, I included proven strategies to help you get your first 1,000 customers.

tl;dr - I'm often asked by entrepreneurs three questions:
  1. "What are the different marketing channels?"
  2. "How do I get my first 10/100/1,000 customers?"
  3. "There are sooo many marketing channels. What channels should I focus on first?"
I wrote this guide to explain the 12 major marketing channels. You'll find three strategies/case studies per channel to help you get your first few customers. I then talk about the two types of marketing channels.
Finally, I end by helping you know how to prioritize the channels using the "ICE framework." ICE is the prioritization method used in startups like Facebook, Uber, and Pinterest. I've used it for small startups (under 10 employees) and even a non-profit, so it should work for your startup.
This article was originally written on my website (which you can view here), so my apologizes if the formatting isn't perfect. Got questions? Feel free to drop a comment and I'll do my best to answer it!
Enjoy the read :).
Right now, your startup has one mission.
It isn’t to become the next $1 billion startup. (Though that may come in time). It isn’t to make a difference in the world. (Though you may make a meaningful impact). Nor is it to raise your next round of venture capital. (Though your team may need to do so to complete your mission).
Your mission right now, if you choose to accept, is to find a scalable business model.
As a part of finding a scalable business model, you need to tap the right marketing channels. That’s it.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. What works today may not work tomorrow.
Not too long ago, marketers were all raving about:
  1. Use social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and MySpace.
  2. Writing articles daily on your blog.
  3. Using QR codes to promote your business.
While specific trends and tactics come-and-go, marketing channels will always be around.
If you want to get more customers, it’s helpful to understand each marketing channel. And not only should you know how a marketing channel works, but why it works.
In this article, I’ll share with you the twelve major marketing channels. I’ll then provide a few case studies and strategies for you to test to grow your business.
Note: The book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth shaped much of this article. If you want to become better at getting and retaining customers, I recommend reading both.

Here is a list of the 12 major marketing channels of mass distribution:

  1. Business Development and Partnerships
  2. Paid Advertisements
  3. Sales
  4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  5. Virality and Network Effects
  6. Community Marketing
  7. Content Marketing
  8. Email Marketing
  9. Engineering as Marketing
  10. Press
  11. Social Media
  12. Trade Shows and Offline Events
Warning: The following advice may lead to insane amounts of business growth. Please consult a lawyer, attorney, or doctor before attempting this at home. Each marketing channel has different pros and cons. Your mileage may vary.

1. Business Development and Partnerships

Business development is often a gray and ambiguous term. Some equate it to sales. Others simply say any partnership is business development.
Here’s how I define business development.
*Business development is creating long-term value for your startup by partnering with anyone in your market. *This includes other businesses, influencers, and media outlets.
The focus of this channel is on the exchange of value through the partnership. This channel also includes partnerships from influencer marketing and affiliate marketing.
The goal of each partnership is long-term value.
It should not be a one-and-done transaction. Sure, you might get some money from your first co-promotion. But the highest ROI comes from finding new opportunities from the same partnership.
As a result, partnerships often are a slower channel to scale.
The partnership may or may not include paid compensation.
Keep in mind the relationship will change if you pay the other person. Further, there may be certain expectations a person has about the partnership. This expectation may also change by industry.
For example, an influencer is more likely to promote a blog article for free. But I’ve had a few influencers request I pay them to promote my article. The same influencer who was willing to promote an article for free may expect payment for directly promoting your product.
Offering payment when the party does not expect it may be offensive. And in another scenario, it’s a delightful gift.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for partnerships:
  1. Find similar companies and offer one product as an add-on bonus. Chris Gimmer shares his story on Snappa’s partnership with LeadPages here.
  2. Find large companies that have app directories or marketplaces. First, integrate your tool with their tool. Then submit your application to directories. Examples include Shopify’s App Marketplace, Intercom’s App Store, and Zendesk’s App Directory. This was a core part of the early growth for CartHook and for BoldCommerce.
  3. Put together a product bundle for news sites and conferences. Learn how Noah Kagan did this with AppSumo by partnering with Imgur and Reddit here.

2. Paid Advertisements

At the dawn of the Internet, people rallied around old marketing channels with new names:
  1. Influencer marketing (celebrity endorsements began in the 1760s).
  2. Content marketing (Ben Franklin printed Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732).
  3. Email Marketing (mail order catalogues began in 1498).
Then advertising began to move online. Old advertising channels like billboards, newspaper ads, and radio commercials are now a thing of the past.
Or are they outdated?
Believe it or not, according to the OAAA, out-of-home advertising reach a new record high of $8 billion in 2018:
Image
(Image Source)
I bet you didn't see that one coming.
Paid advertising has several mediums, which I’ll categorize by offline and online ads. Offline ads include TV ads, radio ads, billboards, magazine ads, newspaper ads, and bus ads.
Online ads are also called pay-per-click (PPC) ads. This includes:
  1. Search engine ads (ads on Google, Bing, and other search engines)
  2. Social media ads (ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, and other social media sites)
  3. Display ads (banner ads you see displayed on websites).
  4. Media ads (ads and product placements which are in video games, movies, and other media).
  5. Email ads (ads you see when using your email, such as Gmail).
  6. Newsletter ads (ads in email newsletters)
The benefit of paid advertising is if you have an unlimited budget, it’s easier to scale this channel. It’s an excellent channel to test your messaging, get feedback, and iterate quickly.
But as fast as advertising comes, so too it also disappears fast.
There’s a limited window of exposure because ads rent space. Marketing on other channels gives you an asset that stays up as long as you keep them up.
As your ad spend scales, it becomes more expensive and harder to track. In turn, paid ads can also cover up underlying problems.
Andrew Chen, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, shared how a startup’s paid cost to acquire a customer can be off as much as 2-5 times what it should be. (Source)
Further, you often do not build a relationship with the customer.
As a result, advertising works best for impulse buys or products which offer fast value to the customer.
For SaaS startups, paid ads are often a secondary channel that supports content marketing.
But for eCommerce products, paid advertising is often the first scalable marketing channel. This is because eCommerce will likely sell products which bring delight faster.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for paid advertising:
  1. Media outside the home often will not sell every available ad spot. If it’s not sold, it’s a lost opportunity. This allows you to negotiate for remnant advertising. Tim Ferriss has an excellent article on this here. I used this approach to get $10,000 in billboard space for $2,000. If you run other ads, use your successful campaigns to inspire your billboards.
  2. Create a single keyword ad group (SKAG). [1] Run ads to a dedicated landing page on that topic, optimizing the landing page for SEO. This allows you to continue getting traffic after turning off ads and create a message match to improve conversions. I’ve seen click-through rates (CTR) between 1-9% on SKAGs. For one client, after removing the three worst campaigns, all SKAGs were over 3% CTR. Unbounce has an excellent resource on the importance of message match here.
  3. Create a normal social media post and work with relevant influencers to promote your post. Then promote using an ad so you leverage the social proof from the influencer’s promotion. Learn how to work with influencers on my old marketing site here. And learn how to edit Facebook ads and keep your social proof here.
_[1] Unfamiliar with SKAGs? Let’s say you wanted to sell Ultimate Frisbee discs. In one ad keyword group, you would use three keywords: _
  1. _+ultimate +frisbee _
  2. _“ultimate frisbee” _
  3. _[ultimate frisbee]. _
If an unrelated keyword pops up such as “ultimate frisbee rules,” you move it to your negative keyword list. And if a relevant but unrelated term pops up such as “best ultimate frisbee brands,” you can create a new SKAG and send traffic to a new landing page.

3. Sales

Effective marketing is nothing more than salesmanship in ink. While marketing sells on many-to-one, sales specialize in hand-holding customers one-on-one.
Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and turning them into paying customers.
Now perhaps you’re wondering, “If marketing is effective salesmanship at scale (many-to-one), why should I hire a salesman?”
Contrary to what most SaaS entrepreneurs believe, sales is a primary scalable channel.
First, sales can accelerate the process marketing starts. Without a proper nurture sequence in place, it can be slow moving a prospect down your funnel. A salesman or woman specializes in moving them faster through the funnel.
Second, big customers often need a sales process. When you’re selling a high-end or enterprise product, it’s common to have a salesman giving the customer the red carpet treatment.
*While sales will help speed up landing big customers, it’s not without a major cost. *
Most suggest hiring at least two sales reps. If they work on a team, one will generate and qualify leads while the other closes them. If you favor competition, you can put the two against each other. Two full-time salaries are more than what you’d pay for most marketing agencies.
How cheap can your product be and afford to have a sales team?
If you have a repeatable sales model, a sales rep has three limits:
  1. The number of calls or demos in a day.
  2. The demo-to-close ratio.
  3. How much you’ll pay to keep the salesman.
Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, a SaaS founder, enthusiast, & investor offers this advice:
(Source)
But that’s not all!
If you maximize your current leads and play your cards right, you can bring in a sales rep for a $99/month product.
Lemkin continues:
But, still, we dropped the price point (necessary) for inside sales to $99. And it worked. Why?
I’m not saying you can build a whole inside sales team around a $1,000 ACV or $99 price point. You can’t. The lowest you can probably go on average is $3,000, based on the math above, and that’s if you are hyper-efficient.
If you aren’t, bump that up to a $5k ACV to account for overhead, waste, turn-over, etc.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for sales:
  1. Find people who shared a how-to article related to your product on Twitter. You can use Buzzsumo or Ahrefs to do this. Find their email using a tool like VoilaNorbert. Send them an email and pitch your product. Bryan Harris and two of his students did this to pitch their services, which you can check out here.
  2. Find a list of your competitors. Use a tool such as NerdyData or BuiltWith to find customers who use your competitor. [Send them an email](growthramp.io/articles/email-outreach-program) asking if they’ve experienced common problems with the product. If possible, leverage the names of similar customers you have to the prospect. Nathan Barry did this to take ConvertKit from $1,300 to $725,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Learn how he did that here. More on how to use NeryData here.
  3. If you’ve pre-sold your product, create a customer persona for each person who bought your product. Then use LinkedIn search to find similar people and pitch your product. You can find their email on their profile when you click contact info. If you get real fancy, you can create a video pitch on how your product will benefit them. Learn how Devesh got over $13,000 in recurring revenue doing something similar here.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you have a question on how to do something, where do you turn for an answer?
More than likely, you will turn to a search engine.
This channel includes traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Most SEO agencies and consultants focus on Google’s search engine because it provides the most traffic.
It also includes popular, but niche search engines like Amazon and YouTube search optimization.
*Scaling SEO can be slower than other marketing channels. *
The key to getting faster results for SEO comes from mastering three areas:
  1. Doing keyword research to find high volume, low difficulty keywords.
  2. Creating the content on that topic which benefits both the customer and Google.
  3. Getting enough links from authoritative websites to be an authoritative article on that topic.
Keyword research helps you learn how often people search for a phrase. It will also inform how competitive it is to get search traffic from that keyword phrase.
In my article, “No Keywords Easy to Rank For? I Call ‘Bullcrap,’” I outlined a simple process to find high volume, low difficulty keywords. Here’s a quick summary of the process:
  1. Do a Google search for your keyword or topic.
  2. Take the first 3-5 articles listed on Google.
  3. Put these into an SEO tool that finds the keywords the page ranks for, such as Ahrefs.
  4. Sort the keyword list by volume.
  5. Filter out keywords not in the top 20 spots. You should also remove keywords with too high of a difficulty score. For Ahrefs, my recommendation is 30 or less for new websites.
When doing keyword research, it’s also important to understand a person’s intent when searching for a phrase. Understanding search intent will inform how long it will take to make a sale.
If someone searches “What is copywriting?” in Google, they are likely looking for basic information. But if that person looks up “copywriting services in Spokane”, they probably want to buy copywriting services from an agency in Spokane.
*Next, you’ll want to create in-depth content to answer people's questions and objections on that topic. *
To do this, content strategists often source ideas from other content. For example, you could:
  1. Go to your customers and list out the questions they have.
  2. Go to Quora and search for questions on your topic.
  3. Go to Reddit and look for articles with a high number of upvotes and comments.
  4. Go to relevant Facebook groups and look for questions people have.
  5. Go to relevant Discord and Slack groups and look for questions people have.
Once done, share everything relevant to this topic. Articles on Growth Ramp often are between 1,500 and 3,000 words.
*After you’ve created your content, you may need some authoritative links. *
Why are links important to improve SEO?
I’ll answer this question with another question.
When you write a research paper, how do you know the information is accurate? You cite your sources. On the web, people cite sources by linking to different pages.
Google’s search engine puts pages with the most relevance to your search higher up. That’s why you want in-depth content. But Google also prioritizes relevant content with more links.
So if an authoritative site like Harvard University or Microsoft cites your article, Google will likely rank it high in their results.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for SEO:
  1. After doing competitive research, create landing pages that compare you to your competitors. Potential customers will want to know how you are different from other products out there. It’s one of 10 questions we’ve found customers ask before buying a product. These pages will allow you to educate the customer and add your voice to the conversation.
  2. Create a survey using a tool like Pollfish. Write an article on the original research and promote it. In a 2015 survey by BuzzSumo and Moz, the team found research-backed articles get a lot of traffic and links. This is how Orbit Media got over 430 links in six months.
  3. Similar to what I wrote in “No Keywords Easy to Rank For? I Call ‘Bullcrap,’” you can find easy-to-rank keywords by analyzing your competitor’s content. Plug a competitor into an SEO tool like Ahrefs. Then filter any keywords with a keyword score of 30 or less. You may also want to search for a broad keyword in the results too. Organize the list by traffic, and voila! Instant fast ranking results.

5. Virality and Network Effects

Virality isn’t just when your cat video hits the front page of Reddit or Youtube. It’s about optimizing the time it takes a customer to invite or refer more friends to your product. This is known as a viral loop.
A viral loop happens in three ways:
  1. A customer discovers your product and enjoys it.
  2. This customer then shares your product with other people. Ideally, they share it with your potential customers.
  3. A potential customer buys the product, enjoys it, and shares it with their friends and coworkers.
The more customers who share your product who become customers, the better the viral loop. To measure your viral loop’s effectiveness, you can use a viral coefficient.
David Skok, a venture capitalist at Matrix partners wrote an excellent article on understanding the key variables of viral marketing.
Viral loops are most common in referral systems and network effect products like Facebook and LinkedIn. Network effects occur when there is an increase in value with each new customer using your product.
Virality and network effects are not the same.
Many things can have viral effects without having network effects. Buzzfeed and Upworthy are relentless at improving virality. But that does not mean they have network effects.
And products with network effects don’t always have viral effects. Any of these marketing channels could bring people into the network effect. Facebook used community marketing to get an Ivy League college student to join in its early days. A B2B marketplace might use content marketing to attract their audience.
Unfortunately, while getting free users is valuable, it’s also hard to create viral loops and network effects.
It’s difficult to engineer a viral loop for any product. And virality is even more difficult for SaaS products.
Andrew Chen suggests a viral product should be:
  1. Social in nature.
  2. Has high retention with daily usage.
  3. Applies to many job titles within an organization, so that anyone can use it.
  4. Invites travel through a new channel with a compelling pitch.
  5. Targets extroverts.
Network effect products must have certain features built into the product to create a network effect. At that point, you need to seed the network.
A network has almost no use when no one uses it. How valuable was the fax machine to the first person who bought it? And even with 100 fax machines, if these users do not send messages to each other, the machines were glorified paperweights.
Viral loops and network effects are valuable. The VC firm NFX argues that 70% of the value in tech comes from network effects. Both viral loops and network effects can bring in free customers. The challenge is getting those customers in the first place.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for virality and network effects:
  1. Attract customers with a tool that works without a network effect, then keep them engaged with your network. Chris Dixon talks about the philosophy of this approach here.
  2. There are many ways to solve the chicken-or-egg problem in marketplace network effect startups. Here are 19 tactics to try.
  3. To improve your referral campaigns, provide a reward to both parties. Dropbox’s referral program is a famous example of two-sided rewards. Learn about their referral program here and here.

6. Community Marketing

Community building involves building direct relationships with your customers and potential customers. Developing deeper customer relationships can result in increased activation, retention, and referrals.
One challenge of community marketing is not having an existing audience to start your community.
If you don’t have an established audience, you can become a prominent member of another community. Then use relationships you build in other communities to start your community. Forums, Facebook groups, and Reddit communities (called subreddits) are some of the fastest ways to build relationships in your industry.
Building a community is difficult, but the rewards can be massive. Reddit, Wikipedia, and Stack Exchange are startups built on the community they created.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for community marketing:
  1. What’s successful in one community will often be successful in another community. Find what top influencers share on social media and adjust it to fit your context. With the right message, you can promote the same message in other communities.
  2. Use communities to promote your community. The Facebook group Client Science promotes its community by writing articles on Reddit. You can check out their articles posted by BenJackGill. This article received over 700 upvotes.
  3. Create a community on a different type of channel for people already in a community. Reddit has many Discord and Slack groups. /startups has a startup Discord server. At the time of this writing, they promote this community at the top of their subreddit. /bigseo has an SEO Slack group. At the time of this writing, they promote this community in the sidebar of their subreddit. You can do the same by creating a community for a subreddit.

7. Content Marketing

When was the last time you read an article online? How about the last time you heard a podcast? Or perhaps watched a video?
Content marketing spans a wide range of mediums. It includes articles like the one you’re reading to infographics, videos, and podcasts.
When done right, content can help you:
  1. Educate the market.
  2. Build an email list of excited customers.
  3. Land publicity.
  4. Build relationships.
  5. Build your brand.
And so much more. Popular venture capitalists like Mark Suster, Paul Graham, and James Currier are well-known because of their blogs.
Further, you always have the content. Once you spend on advertising, that’s it. But you can get customers from content for years to come.
Unfortunately, content marketing often requires knowledge of another channel to become successful. As such, it’s often slower than other acquisition channels. That is unless you have a solid content promotion system in place.
SEO and social media tend to be the two most common ways of getting traffic to your content. Email marketing is also common to get people to become repeat visitors to your content. But you can also create a paid content funnel using ads, an article, and premium content to get an email address.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for content marketing:
  1. Want to find content practically guaranteed to go viral? Go to Reddit and search for your topic. Find articles with a ton of upvotes and comments (aim for at least 100 upvotes, or 250 for bigger subreddits). Write a similar topic on your blog, putting your spin on the topic. Then promote it on Reddit and other sites.
  2. Search for “top X blogs” or “best X blogs,” where X is your industry. Offer to sponsor these bloggers money to review your product. Learn how Noah Kagan paid bloggers $500 to review Mint.com from 0 to 100,000 in six months here.
  3. According to BuzzSumo, two types of content that get a ton of traffic and links are research-backed articles and opinionated journalism. If you can’t get enough survey responses, you can use sites like Pollfish for this information. Learn how Orbit Media got 430 links in six months here.

8. Email Marketing

Email marketing is often declared to have the highest ROI for marketing channels.
Image
(Image Source)
Not only can you use it to find new customers, but you can also use it to engage (activation), retain, upsell (revenue), and generate referrals.
Because messages from your company are right beside updates from friends and family, email often feels very personal. When done wrong, the email will also make people feel angry, damage your brand, and decrease future email deliverability rates.
Keep in mind it’s also difficult to get a large enough email list to acquire customers. By itself, email marketing cannot grow unless you have some mechanism for others to share and join your newsletter.
But it is possible to start just by emailing a few interested friends. Newsletters like The Hustle, Startup Digest, and Product Hunt all began as emails sent to friends. Each of these newsletters has several thousands, if not millions, of people.
Typically marketers pair email marketing with SEO or content marketing to build a list.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for email marketing:
  1. Emails that tell your customers the value they get from your product often do well. Can you estimate the money earned or the time saved by using your product?
  2. Consider running a giveaway to build your list. All you need to do is give away a product, tell people about the giveaway, and collect everyone’s email address. Bryan Harris used a giveaway to get 2,239 email subscribers in 10 days. Learn more about that here.
  3. Advertise on newsletters that are complementary to your product. Chances are if someone subscribes to one newsletter, they would love to subscribe to another newsletter like it. Alternatively, you can do a shout-out for each other’s newsletter. This is ideal when the two newsletters are about the same size.

9. Engineering as Marketing

Do you have a team of engineers? You can leverage their skills by building free tools and products to reach your customers.
This a major competitive advantage because you’re giving something free that your competitors charge for.
Free tools are often easier to market than your paid products. As a result, you can get a ton of inexpensive leads. That said, this approach requires you to market the new tool too.
Some common tools include calculators, WordPress plugins, and educational microsites. You can then collect leads through these tools and get people to buy your product. Sometimes a side project becomes successful enough to be the main product.
Here are some strategies and case studies you can use for engineering as marketing:
  1. From 2006 to 2011, HubSpot's Website Grader was used to grade more than 4 million websites. Learn more about this project here.
  2. Look at your most popular articles. See if you can turn that article into a lead-gen product. Chris Gimmer did this with StockSnap, which he used to launch Snappa. Learn more about how he did that here.
  3. Once you have a tool, don’t overlook other ways you can use it to promote other marketing campaigns. WP Engine has a speed test tool. After you opt-in, it takes you to a thank you page with other valuable resources. You can check it out here.
(Continued in comments below).
submitted by jdquey to Entrepreneur [link] [comments]

quora digest emails not showing video

How To Stop Emails From Quora Digest - YouTube How To Unsubscribe From Quora Emails - YouTube How to Use Quora - YouTube How To Delete Quora Account Permanently - YouTube HOW TO SHOW MORE THAN 100 EMAILS PER PAGE IN YOUR GMAIL ... How to delete a Quora Account 2017-2018 - YouTube Get Rid of Annoying emails - Unsubscribe to Unwanted ... How to Get Marketing Clients with Cold emails (5 Step Process) Getting ZERO Views On Your TikToks? Here's How to Fix that... - YouTube

The same thing happens to me. I click on a link from a daily Quora Digest e-mail (e.g., “What are the biggest myths about working at Google?”) and my browser opens and displays that clicked question page, but about half of a second later, the page... Quora est un endroit conçu pour apprendre et partager ses connaissances. Il s'agit d'une plateforme sur laquelle on peut poser ses questions et entrer en contact avec des personnes qui apportent leur contribution en partageant leurs idées uniques ... Bei Quora kannst Du Wissen erwerben und teilen. Quora ist eine Plattform, auf der man Fragen stellen und sich mit anderen Menschen verbinden kann, die ihre ganz eigenen Erfahrungen und Einblicke in Form von hochqualitativen Antworten beisteuern. D... They did not. So in my case, the solution was to toggle the Developer Options. They are now back on and the email header details are still showing as normal. Conclusion: Some upgrade was made to the native email program on the phone, such that if Developer Options were on, email header details were not being displayed properly. Toggling that ... What is Quora, how to get started, main policies and guidelines. Using Quora Asking and answering questions, following topics/users, reporting content, sending messages. Best Practices and Policies Quora's main policies, best practices. 2. Right Way: Reply with “Unsubscribe” or “Remove Me” in the subject line. Some companies do not use sophisticated email service providers, and have a more manual email marketing workflow. Today, I received an email “weekly digest” from Quora, and for the 7th time, clicked the “do not send me weekly digests” link and was told that no more digests would be sent to the email I ... If you can confirm that the website in question is working for others but not for you, then it’s possible that the public IP address your ISP provided you (or your whole ISP) has been blocked for some reason. You can try contacting them and letting them know about the problem. It’s not a very likely solution, but they might be able to help. Quora هو مكان لاكتساب ومشاركة المعرفة. إنها منصة لطرح الأسئلة والتواصل مع الأشخاص الذين يساهمون برؤى فريدة وإجابات عالية الجودة. هذا يمكّن الأشخاص من التعلم من بعضهم البعض وفهم العالم بشكل أفضل. I’m going to have to guess what the issue is here, but if it’s that you’re receiving emails from Quora and don’t want them any longer, I think I can help. Quora emails are notifications as opposed to promotional, informational or “keep in touch” e...

quora digest emails not showing top

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How To Stop Emails From Quora Digest - YouTube

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quora digest emails not showing

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