Ideas To Gain Initial Traction For Your Business

Concentrate on your story, not your features. 

Nobody cares about your product’s features; people care about your product’s story. Many companies talk about features, saying, “We’re the only dating site that connects to your social networks via AP!” Who cares? Who wants to read a tech spec? Nobody, that’s who.  

Concentrate on the story your product tells. We started BrandYourself.com when my co-founder, Pete, couldn't obtain a college internship because he was being mistaken for a drug dealer on Google. We created a ....

By: Patrick Ambron

Select Your Company’s Growth Engine
According to Eric Ries, there are three engines of growth startups can use, including viral, sticky, and paid. To select your startup’s primary engine of growth, you must first determine the projected customer lifetime value (CLV) of an average user of your product.

For example, if you create an iOS app that costs the user $1.99 and you have no additional ways to generate revenue from that user the CLV is about $1.40 after Apple takes its cut.

Understanding your CLV helps you determine what growth engine is viable and provides structure to your brainstorming activity around specific tactics you can implement to drive user adoption. Dave Owens, author of Creative People Must Be Stopped, says...

By: William Griggs

PR is the Key: Use early adopters and bloggers to promote your brand.  

It appears plenty of mystery exists around gaining early traction. However based on the above analysis, these top tips may help you gain your early traction:

+ Encourage content creation
+ Get a sweet four letter domain name
+ Build a sophisticated mailing campaign
+ Get published in a newspaper article read by your target market
+ Get the most out of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
+ Utilise the network effect
+ Be the first and be integrated into a daily tool (eg be that button on the top of every web browser)
+ Use early adopters and bloggers to promote your brand
+ Leverage prior experience (and networks)
+ Find a low cost of customer acquisition before others do

Time is money they say, in this case as a startup you don’t have neither time or money so don’t waste time of your own or employees doing things that can easily be automated. For example a Facebook status update every 2 hours can be automated with great ease – you can easily put content up for the whole week/month in advance.

Create epic content
As I mentioned above, the long tail traffic is a big source of traffic but it converts poorly. In addition it doesn’t really assist with any of your other strategies. When you create epic content it will do a lot more including:

• help build your social media following because people will be drawn to follow your advice.
• help with your “reaching out” efforts (more on this in parts 2 and 3) by building a body of work respected by influential peers.
• help build your authority over time to a point where people send you traffic via word of mouth, social media, forum mentions etc.

Rob Walling

Inform everyone you know about your business and give them a reason to participate.  Whichever route you choose you must not make your business an extended pitch for your product. You’re gently pulling people in, not begging them to visit your site. If you get too overt about your intentions it will turn people away. With a little creativity you can easily get click throughs without begging.

Social proof typically comes from four different sources: advisors, customers, the media, and investors.

Having credible advisors is a welcome sign to investors that your idea has merit. Often, a company’s advisors have secured investment in the past and bring that positive influence to the business. Their name is important to them, so their support really boosts....

Wil Schroter
Founder & CEO

Traction Verticals : first inflection point is unpredictable.

The second major thing I've learned from interviewing people on getting traction is that initial traction can happen in a lot of different ways, often unpredictably. (The first thing was that entrepreneurs usually have movement ideas even though they often think they have powder keg or empire ideas.)

Given that the first inflection point is unpredictable, it makes sense to consider....

By Gabriel Weinberg 

It is absolutely vital to have a preplan of action in advance of your launch date, for example if your company was going live in 1 month; you must have preplanned “what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it” every single day, every hour and every minute of that day. This means you waste no time yet you hold yourself accountable and you can look back to what you did. It helps in later stages because the things that worked within your list can be rinsed and repeated whereas the things that didn’t can simply be scrapped and replaced with new strategies or tasks… Trial and error with every method.

If your venture is to go anywhere u must have a strong USP.

From family to friends to peer to the person you saw walking down the road, make sure they all know your business exists - once you've told them depending on how close you are to the person ask them to also pass on your business to their contacts... So your effort of directly marketing it to 100 people can result in 500-1,000+ people knowing about your business.

If you don’t know Sean from his blog or tweets, he lead marketing from launch to IPO filing at LogMeIn and Uproar. His firm, 12in6, then worked with Xobni (Khosla), Dropbox (Sequoia), Eventbrite (Sequoia), Grockit (Benchmark)…  the list goes on. 12in6 “helps startups unlock their full growth potential by focusing on the core value perceived by their most passionate users.” 

Here’s an outline and transcript of Part 1.

Half the marketing battle is the product
Must-have products make marketing much easier
How PayPal built a must-have product
Understand the must-have users
How to get to product/market fit
How not to get to fit

.......

NIVI    VentureHacks

The excitement of a deal, particularly to investors, is always around the momentum of a business.  Traction is the very heart of a startup. When you're building from scratch and trying to convince the world that your idea has merit, the proof of your ability as an entrepreneur to be successful is in the traction you generate for your business.

There are many types of traction....

Wil Schroter

First building a community before the product even existed and then scaling that community to 40,000 subscribers and $100,000 in revenue in its first 10 months.

Wonder how he did that?

Social Growth Hacking will enable you to do two things simultaneously:

Test your idea
Build an early community
To Franco these are the two most important things you should focus on in your early days. This will build a strong foundation that will become your jumping board for scaling up growth later on.

So how you can build early traction for your startup...

By Agnieszka Nazaruk

Set an aim for them to recommend people, if they get X amount of people they get rewarded with an incentive… create a domino effect, your site itself can give an incentive doesn’t mean you need to spend money for the rewards to hand out.

Spread rumors, new venture that is launching, online hype is the best growing strategy for business now a days – its not about going out there with leaflets these days… leak information, well at least make it seem like its leaked by leaking it yourself so people feel they getting this “exclusive” information.

Must have an element that gives the large amount of opportunity seekers to get involved, opportunity seekers will only tell more opportunity seekers and this is how you gain great traction initially for your business.

Who wants to go to a website that nobody visits? Nobody signs up? You must show you have sign ups even if you don’t… Get your own employees to sign up 50 times a day if they have to, if you’re a blogger for example – show activity by adding comments yourself to blogs. If you own a dating website; start by adding profiles yourself in the dozens (be sure to get the persons permission first).

Indirect way to gain users is to improve your website for the better, continuously analyze what your users want in the start and improve the site – when they come back and see changes they will feel like there words have been heard therefore pass on this “better version” website to friends/family.

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3 Reasons why email database is not good idea.
As an internet or affiliate marketer sooner or later or right from beginning you would like to embark your email campaign. And if you don't have mailing list you'll try to find for a shortcut, you search online and get several companies who will boast that they have one of the biggest mailing list already available all you have to do is pay them and they will send your promotional emails to their list.
Now I want to make clear why you should not do this mistake of purchasing that kinda service.

That's 100% true, many of these companies are bogus(not all of them are bogus). In fact they don't have any email lists they just ask for money and then generate click over your tracking code via software. And you finally end up asking yourself why not a single purchase though I got several hits.

Now you have found a company which is not surely bogus and does have working email lists with them. So you'll spend a lot of time and energy preparing a good looking promotional letter hoping that you will generate sales but receive no sales. This happens because your mail end up in people's spam or junk folder reason is quite clear though these people have big email lists but they lack permission of delivering promotional message.

Probably you have found a company that not only have working mailing list and even permission to send promotional messages. But if cost per message is high then its not good idea to purchase such lists. Why? In marketing world when you start for a new venture it is assumed that you should not consider conversion rate more than 1%, assuming this fact we suppose you buy 1000 emails for $45 then it might be the case that hardly 500-600 will open it out of which 100-300 will read it completely 100-200 will show interest and 1% of it'll purchase.

Final word of day is it does takes time and money to build your own list but such list is more trustworthy than
any other list you'll purchase from anywhere else. So its better to spend you time and effort to build your list than finding such shortcuts.
About the Author

 

Now you've learned that an email campaign is a great way to promote your business or affiliate products. Your next task is to build a list to which to send emails. The question is, where do you get the list from? Many people think that things would be easier if they just buy an email marketing list. Don't be one of the people who make that mistake. You may have seen the ads that offer to give you thousands of email address for a low cost. If you fall for the hype and purchase one of these lists, you'll most likely be labeled as a 'spammer' right after you send out your first batch of emails. buy email marketing list Most of the messages will most likely end up in the junk box and you won't reap the desired benefits from your efforts. More than likely, about 70% of the addresses are bogus or duplicated; While the other 30% haven't given anyone permission to email messages to them. Some people use a rental list from various submission services. These can end up costing between 20 and 30 cents for each email. So what can you do? Perhaps reading the next 7 ideas will get the ideas flowing about ways you can build your own targeted list. Keep in mind that you're primary goal should be to send emails to people who really want to hear what you have to say. The big question is 'where do you find these people?'. Your best bet is to begin with a diverse list of marketing methods and watch your web traffic. Below you'll see a list, shared by an existing email marketing company, of the things that will help ensure you have success building your email marketing list. 1. Use Your Webpage - On every page of your website you should request that individuals sign up. You can offer your online electronic magazine, your newsletter, your offer for a free report, ebook, or some other item that has real value to the reader. 2. Consider Direct Mail Marketing - Use snail mail to send postcards or flyers to all of your potential customers. In the design of your mail item, include a request for people to visit your site and sign up for the valued information you're offering. 3. Think about using Telemarketers - You could use a telemarketing service or agent to contact your potential clients. Your telemarketers should require email addresses. You can offer incentives, like free trials, a contest, or something else they'd want, to those who give their email address. 4. Use a Broker - There are websites that offer a brokerage service. They usually have heavy traffic. You'd like your service and offer a sign up for their information. This usually costs between $.10 and $.15 for each email message 5. Use good ole' pavement action - You can have students who are off in the summer or one of their breaks to go door-to-door offering information in exchange for their email addresses.

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Affiliates are people that essentially function as salespeople or advertisers and marketers who are paid only on achievement. But, that does not mean that they are necessarily the right crowds for you. This alone is a positive since as we all know small business is the backbone of any healthy economy. You must be sensible about while using the fees in the business enterprise as a way to be sure you will be able to manage it. You would enjoy conversion of visitors into customers and would simultaneously enhance brand value of the organization.

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In this, the first of this two-section article set, you'll gain from our dialog the sorts of mailing records, and two of the best places to purchase records. In the second part you'll take in the other 9 spots to purchase a mailing rundown.

There are two sorts of post office based mail records, controlled by their cause: accumulated standard mail records and reaction mailing records. Arranged Direct Mail Lists