startup hustle

With the launch of the new iPhone App Store, a new platform has been created to reach millions of tech savvy users. With new platforms, comes new marketing channels. While the cost of entry is higher to build an app for the iPhone, that also limits the number of competitors.

You have three options when building an iPhone app:

1. Build an app that promotes your service (MLB has a paid app for scores and stats)
2. Build an app that replicates your service (ebay, facebook, paypal and myspace all do this)
3. Build an independent app (an app that is not tied to a current product or service)

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And this is coming from a startup marketing manager. I have worked on quite a few startup products through the years and I keep witnessing the same trend. The startups that actually solve an issue or provide a unique service, don’t really need my help. I might give the initial push, but the product itself creates the snowball effect.

I’m not suggesting you get rid of your marketing guy completely. You will need someone to schedule all the interview appointments with the media.

The hardest part is getting your product to those few outlets that will start the avalanche.

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After I wrote about my frustration with Alexa, they did a major algorithm change that rendered my post less relevant. The rant was about Alexa’s lack of calculating major traffic shifts with a couple of sites I work on. Compete on the other hand did recognize the traffic increases.

Alexa made major updates to the way they calculate rankings by including more data then just the toolbar. While many sites were complaining about ranks dropping, Startup Hustle jumped almost 100,000 positions from 271,000 to 178,000. Two other sites that I spend a majority of my time marketing saw increases as well.

While I keep a record of all major competitors and their rankings, the only rank I really question was yCombinator.com. The home of YC News only has an Alexa ranking of 77,000, which seems rather low considering their rank before the algorithm change and Compete numbers.

I often kept track of my competitors traffic movements using Alexa. When I started my internet marketing career, Alexa was the king of web traffic tracking. Then Compete came along, but I stayed with Alexa as that was the most used and excepted metric for web traffic.

As I was updating my weekly web traffic numbers (Alexa is weekly, Complete is monthly), I noticed some concerning issues. My rank in Alexa had been dropping for months, just a little each week. Since my traffic for the most part has been steady, I wasn’t super concerned. In the past few weeks my traffic has been great, actually breaking new records. Unfortunately my Alexa continued to drop, in roughly the same increments every week. Regardless if my traffic was steady or improving dramatically, Alexa did not seem to notice. If I can gain traffic and customers, while Alexa shows no change, are my competitors making swift movements unnoticed? Alexa is a ranking, not a solid metric like visits. A ranking is affected by many more variables than are in your control. It is best to compare yourself to others in your companies industry.

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Last week I calculated the return on investment (ROI) of a large CPC campaign over multiple engines for a startup I am currently working on. I realized that I dont check the ROI often enough, and none of my colleagues at other startups seem to either. When your startup is profitable and you have been using the same marketing mediums over a course of half a year, you might get a little “lazy” on optimizing your marketing through ROI.

I work on multiple startups and with many internet marketers that handle the daily tasks at these young companies. As I learn new tactics and methods I try to pass them on. Unfortunately, the common tasks that should be completed on more of a monthly or quarterly basis slip through the cracks.

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Startups often want to use viral marketing (aka word of mouth) because it is free, the public does most of the work for you and people are more likely to use a product recommended by a friend. My experiences with viral marketing often involves a startup asking me to turn on viral marketing like a light switch. The problem is viral marketing is not like pay per click, there is no “on” button. Viral marketing is closer to search engine optimization (SEO) because it involves multiple factors that have to be in unison.

The major lapse in viral marketing is the product was most likely not built for a viral audience. Viral marketing and word of mouth are just buzz. Business to business products are not generally viral. I’m not saying they can’t be, I’m just saying they are not by nature. Electronics on the other hand have a much better chance of producing viral growth.

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Sites are always trying to rank higher in search engines. The best way to rank well is to have well written, original content that sites want to link to (this is the non-spamming technique). This is why many web optimizers push you to have a blog on your site. A blog will generate new, original content (hopefully). The problem is, depending on your sites focus, there are only so many articles that you can write that are quality and relevant to your business.

There is another way to generate new, original pages and your website members will do it for you. A member profile can be a very powerful SEO tool. I like to call it “Profile SEO” or “Name SEO“. If you search a name in Google, like mine, you will find profiles that I have signed up for (Linkedin and the Go BIG Network) as well as profiles that I did not create (Spock). These profiles are an excellent long tail SEO tactic for a website. Anyone who searches my name to find out more about me will most likely check these sites first.

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The percentage is actually 88.5% but 90% is more intimidating in the headline. You should only be worried if you are selling a product that has poor a pay per click (PPC) record. Then again if you are selling a product that does poorly in PPC you better sell it through a different marketing medium.

When I first read about the high percentage of internet searchers that don’t use PPC I was a little concerned. The majority of startups I work with either use or have tried paid search. Most of the time it works well and I have never entered a market that didn’t receive some activity.

The major assumption from this report is most searchers use the organic listings. Thus putting more emphasis on search engine optimization tactics. Which is much more difficult and takes time.

Here you can find the Search Fact Pack 2007 from Ad Age.

Guerrilla marketing is one of the more creative outlets that startups can use to get noticed. One of my business partners, Gabe Shultz of Bored Sketchbooks fame, came up with a great guerrilla marketing idea that involves using his companies lost and found (and I’m suppose to be the marketing mind between the two of us).

When an item is found that is deemed lost, that item is returned to the receptionist. The receptionist will take a picture of the item and email everyone in the company looking for the owner. If you turn in an item with a large URL printed the front of it, you can get that URL in front of many eyeballs, depending on the size of the email list of course. The picture above is from the actually email sent out.

I know what you are already thinking, but my company (or most companies) don’t take pictures of lost and found items. A more typical response is to send a text email letting everyone know an item has been found. If the most recognizable characteristic of that item is a URL (as the example in the picture above), how will the receptionist report it? Most likely by including the URL in the body of the email, which is even better than the picture because it will be easier to put in a browser.

Now that is guerrilla marketing.