Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

using tactics that don’t scale is one of the best ways to get your first customers.

Here are several tools you can use to find all the influential bloggers in your space:

Run tests on a variety of smaller blogs.

Sponsor small blogs, especially personal blogs.

Offer something unique to your best targets.

Focus on the right smaller sites. Press stories often “filter up,” meaning major news outlets are often looking to major blogs for story ideas, which in turn are looking at smaller blogs and forums.

Build real relationships with the specific reporters covering your startup’s market.

Have newsworthy milestones to share. Contact reporters only when you can package your milestones into a compelling emotional story.

Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.

Do something big, cheap, fun, and original. A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to generate a large amount of media coverage.

Publicity stunts need to be creative and extraordinary to succeed.

Be awesome to your customers and good things follow. Common ways to do customer appreciation well are through gifts, contests, and amazing customer support.

Prepare for failure. Success in this channel is unpredictable.

The basic SEM process is to find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and then test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, you remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to better-performing ads and landing pages to keep improving results.

Keyword research is the first core component of a strong SEM strategy.

Long-tail keywords are less competitive and have lower search volumes, which make them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.

Keep in mind that SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords. As such, you will want to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.

When you write an ad, the title should be catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. You will also want to include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad. Finally, you will want to conclude with a prominent call to action (CTA)

If a test is promising, you will keep trying to optimize your campaign to make it become profitable.

Building a scalable SEM campaign can take a long time because there are so many variables to test—keywords, ad copy, demographic targeting, landing pages, CPC, and more.

Once you have a search engine marketing campaign up and running successfully, you may want to start exploring some more advanced tools and features.

Use search engine ads to test product positioning and messaging

Measure conversions so you can test SEM variables against profitability.

Use longer keywords.

Pay close attention to your ad quality scores.

Display ads are the banner ads that you see on Web sites all over the Internet. Social ads are the ads on social sites, like those in or near your Facebook and Twitter timelines.

Most display advertising is run by ad networks that aggregate advertising inventory across thousands of sites (blogs, communities, media outlets, etc.) and sell that space to advertisers.

The largest display ad networks are Google’s Display Network (also known as the Google content network), Advertising.com (owned by AOL), Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade.

Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics,

To get started in display advertising, first understand the types of ads that work in your industry. Tools like MixRank and Adbeat show you the ads your competitors are running and where they place them.

Building an audience through social ads is more valuable than you might suspect.

Contact small sites directly for display ads.

Use social ads to build awareness of products and create demand. The goal with social ads should be to build an audience, engage with that audience over time, and eventually move them to convert to customers.

Create compelling social content.

The demographics of each advertising medium are the most important factor to consider when making an offline ads purchase.

Thanks to the wide variety of offline media available, you can scale your ad buys according to your budget and product phase.

Offline ads are much harder to track as compared with online ads that have tracking built in. Successful offline tracking involves the use of unique Web addresses and promotional codes to measure effectiveness.

there are lots of ways to take advantage of offline advertising. The branding potential, cost, impact, and flexibility of this channel make it a really strong one to consider when looking at how to get traction in later phases.

Run cheap tests by first targeting local markets.

Seek out remnant ad inventory for the highest discounts.

Use unique codes or Web addresses to track the effectiveness of different offline ad campaigns.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.

Though competitive, SEO can scale well at any phase, often at low cost.

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.

Whether you pursue a fat-head or long-tail strategy, SEO comes down to two things: content and links. The more aligned your content is with the keywords it’s targeting, the better it will rank.

In SEO, there are a few big don’ts. The biggest: don’t buy links.

SEO is one of the cornerstones of what is commonly referred to as “inbound marketing.”

Find search terms that have enough search volume to move the needle for your company.

Generate long-tail landing pages by using cheap freelancers.

Focus on how you will build links.