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MenuHow can I go from 0 to 20,000 users in one month?
A web based service offering bookings of [x] at a slightly cheaper price. Marketing budget is low, very low, but ambition is high. How to get the word out globally?
Answers
There are many free or low costs things you can do:
Marketing on Facebook or Linkedin (depends on what you offer)
Contests
Influencers
Killing testimonials
Pick up the freaking and make phone calls (you have to learn sales. Any business is 90% sales).
Sales is scary but there are lots of easy ways to do it, that gives you confidence.
Give me a buzz to set up a killing strategy that pays.
It's been my experience that the only way to build a huge, engaged, and paying audience is by building your email list.
If you're starting from zero I recommend you allow for your social network (friends, colleagues, etc) to help you tighten your web based services first. What I mean is to sell, and generate buzz by not selling at all. I'm in the midst of doing it right now. I'm productizing my book. Creating a Fedora based 7 week course with video tutorials. I'll seed my list first with an inquiry. So perhaps 200 people on my Facebook page see the announcement. I will ask them for feedback. I'm launching this product, and I'm very excited about it. What 2 or three things would you like to see in my course that perhaps I've overlooked? Now your community is engaged, and helping you. You should institute some manner to aggregate more emails to your email list when people land on your site. I recommend SUMOME. Simple, and easy to integrate to nearly any email service. So as they register with you, the email automatically passes to your provider.
Dr. Robert Cialdini speaks in great detail how this whole sales process unfolds. Law of reciprocity, authority etc. Now they've helped you tighten your web based service. Now you should thank them. When you thank them, you can give them a coupon to gain access to your web based service at a lower rate. Now comes the fun part. List this MVP version of your services available for a short time (24 hours). Once that's up the sale will close. End. Forever.
1. You engage your audience.
2. You aggregate emails.
3. You generate buzz.
4. You take constructive feedback and improve your product (remove the guess work).
5. You launch your MVP.
6. You offer something that nobody else gets (rewarding your insider friends and family).
7. You close a date around purchase.
While this may not get you 20,000 customers, you will certainly be on your way.
Most important take aways:
1. BUILD AN EMAIL LIST.
2. ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE IN YOUR PRODUCT.
3. GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT.
4. LIMIT THE ON SALE TIME.
Happy building.
Learn everything you can about what's now being called "growth hacking."
1. First, its all about the product. Create a minimum viable product (MVP) -- like a prototype -- and then present it to potential customers. Ask what they like, what they don't like, what they'd like to see, whether they'd pay for it, and how much they'd pay. You want to establish a perfect product-market fit so that it sells itself.
2. Integrate marketing into the product. Hotmail added a signup link into the footer of everyone's e-mail. Dropbox and other SaaS products offer referral bonuses to users.
3. Experiment with different marketing strategies to see what brings the most users at the lowest cost. Spend a little money on online ads, PR, and every other tactic to see what works the best. Once you see what delivers the best ROI, then pour all your money into that tactic.
Good luck! Let me know if you'd like to talk further.
PS -- I'm doing exactly this in my role as Director of Marcom at a high-tech startup.
Webinars! Check out a company called LeadPages.net. They have been killing it in this arena by using weekly webinars to engage, educate, introduce and offer their software to attendees.
In fact, they recently taught a strategy on how you can do webinars for free (without paying the costs of using, say, a GoToWebinar software):
1 - The formula involves setting up a Google Hangout (google.com/hangout). Set the webinar for "later."
2 - Get a chat feature embedded (i.e., http://chatango.com)
3 - Create a page to host your hangout (I suggest using one of the LeadPages pre-made templates)
I've seen webinar marketing work in almost any industry. It's nice because people feel like they've spent time with you but it's scaleable for you, the business owner/marketing director, because you can have many people there at once.
Also, the idea of appointment marketing works well. And it's not surprise that Fortune 500 companies use this as the #1 sales mechanism to drive more sales.
LeadPages has a whole free course on webinar marketing. If anything I've written above interests you, then I'd definitely recommend you check it out: http://www.leadpages.net/webinarfunnel
To get 20k users to your booking site follow the following rules:
1. Contribute to other sites: Bloggers consistently use guest posting as a method of obtaining valuable back links to their blogs. This method is so useful that it evolved into content marketing, a popular method of digital marketing. By contributing to other sites, whether as a guest poster or simply a source for an article, you will raise exposure for both you and your brand. Referral traffic is raised, and search engines give better rankings for sites with backlinks from reputable sites. This makes contributing to other sites one of the best, across-the-board digital marketing techniques to raise traffic to any website.
2. Rank for long-tail keywords: While some keywords gain a lot of traffic, the large majority (70 percent, to be exact) of online searches are long-tail keyword searches. For example, instead of searching for “bicycle,” I’d likely search for “mountain bikes under $500.” Organic search traffic is the holy grail of Internet traffic, as it is automatic and sustainable. Optimize your website for broad keywords, but also include as much niche detail as possible. Blogs help create landing pages to answer specific questions and provide specific information for as many long-tail keywords as possible. By starting a blog, you exponentially increase your odds of being found by qualified leads for your business.
3. Drive referral traffic: Organic search is important, but so is referral traffic. Guest posting isn’t the only way to generate referral traffic either. Social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat, and StumbleUpon can help drive referral traffic to your website quickly. Social signals can also help raise search engine traffic.
4. Consistently create content: It takes consistent content to drive traffic. While you may eventually accumulate 100,000 views on a single post, you will need tons of posts for the daily volume to make a difference. Research from HubSpot shows companies that publish at least 16 posts per month on a consistent basis gain more traffic than those who do not blog or rarely add new content. Even blogging every day, it can take months to finally craft a post that hits and drives massive amounts of traffic. These tent poles support your efforts on smaller projects. You will need 400 or more blogs to generate sustainable traffic, which will take over a year of blogging every day.
5. Sustaining your following: Even when you gain 20,000 followers, they will not last unless you keep hustling. You will still need to take steps to keep the content fresh. Adding images and videos, updating content with newly discovered information, optimizing your site for speed, and continuing to promote your brand on social media channels all contribute to keeping your site at the top of the search results. If your site has valuable information, it is likely to be cited by other sources. People will tell their friends about you, and your brand awareness grows. All of this helps sustain your site’s traffic. Anyone can draw eyes but keeping people happy takes attention to detail and a focus on delivering consistent quality.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
Related Questions
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What are the best ways to generate traffic or ways to reach to the customers you are looking for as a startup?
It really comes down to 2 major buckets. 1) CONTENT / INBOUND MARKETING Some people consider this option free, but it's not. Time is money, and it requires an major investment to do it right. The options are: - Company blog - Guest post on other blogs - Engage on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) - Press - Videos on YouTube - Create a free App (web or mobile) etc ... This strategy is all about create amazing content/information/tools for your customers. Think about their major questions they have for your industry, and answer them. Even consider teaching them everything you know about your industry. Doing so will attract them, and make you look like an authority. I've done this with my past 2 companies Flowtown (300K U/V), and Clarity (40K U/V) blogs. Each of the items mentioned above have a unique strategy and tactic .. so best to pic the one you'd be most excited about creating, and do just that one with all your resources. 2) PAID MARKETING Paid means using advertising to introduce your company to potential customers. Some options you have: - Google Adwords - Facebook Ads - Twitter Ads - Bing Ads - Banner Ads etc ... The only way I would suggest paid marketing is if you truly understand your customer LTV (Lifetime Value). If you don't know that, then you could be wasting money attracting views to your startup that aren't profitable. So be sure to have a product / service that makes profit, then you can test different paid marketing channels. My rule of thumb, is it'll cost your $200 to get 1 new paying customer (on avg.), so unless you're making $600 profit from a new customer, don't both for now. If you need to discuss further, you know how to find me.DM
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What is the best way to capture and track referrals directed from a landing page?
There are a few ways to track things automatically, but they get complicated: - referral program software - Give your referrers special URL's with parameters that identify them as the referrer (like http://url.com/?referrer=JohnDoe), then push that value into a hidden form field - Create a separate landing page for each referrer I'd keep things much simpler to start. Just tell your social club that there's a referral program in place, then add a form field on your signup process asking who referred the new customer. If John Doe knows that there's a program in place, when he refers someone, he's likely to tell them "make sure you say I referred you". When the new customer joins, they'll likely remember to enter "John Doe" as the referrer. It's not bullet proof, but it's an easy way to start.CD
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How can i embed my Clarity link into my website?
If you go to to https://clarity.fm/yourusername/widget and replace 'yourusername' with your actual user name, you should see an Embed code link to add a widget that includes your profile/per minute rate/Request a call Button. Feel free to give me a call if you'd like help implementing this into your site.JN
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What's the average CAC value or range for a Marketplace client?
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Your customer acquisition cost is not something you should benchmark against other businesses. Without knowing more, like your short and long-term goals, it's impossible to answer. Two companies with similar business models may have different answers to this question. A venture-backed startup trying to keep up with aggressive revenue goals may be able to stomach an astronomical CAC. A bootstrapped startup that is not seeking venture money may aim for slower growth and much lower CAC. I suggest setting up a call with a marketing or finance expert to determine what CAC is appropriate for your company and how to get there.TL
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Need a good lead generation strategy for chiropractors for getting new patients. Ideas?
I think Facebook is great for really targeting your audience and you’re on the right track. But I think you can have a better funnel than that. I find, for getting better conversion today, it is better to get your Facebook traffic off of Facebook as fast as you can to your offer and into your funnel. It is more effective for driving actual sales. If you’re just looking for social branding etc. then your funnel might be ok. A very effect strategy is to create either a video or report that you give away to your audience in exchange for an email. It should be something that helps solve or bring to light the problems patients are suffering from and how to go about solving them. Then mention how having a great Chiropractor can solve all of that and can be the most effective way to get ride of the pain. I would also have some things in there that would help them in other ways. Then I would send them to an event or webinar with your top Chiropractor and you in an interview / reveal-all type webinar to educate your lead and manage their fears of going to a Chiropractor. You could tell them that the first step is making an appointment for an assessment. You should make it easy for them to find the best and most effective Chiropractor in their area. You might have a discount on the assessment only available to them for being on the webinar to get them to sign up at the end of the webinar. By the way, once this is recorded, you can make this evergreen so you don't have to do a webinar all the time. As long as you are reaching more and new people with your Facebook campaign you won’t have to change the video all the time. Once you have people signed up to make an appointment, make sure they are also putting a deposit of a 100 dollars or something down. This will increase your show rate for the Chiropractors. Then give them a voucher for that Chiropractor, for more than you’re asking for at the deposit for services, to use with that Chiropractor. Allowing you to prevent cancelations etc. so that their getting their money back in the form of a voucher for services which, by the way, is not a discount and shouldn’t diminishing your Chiropractors Rates. This strategy I have used in several markets that has produced more prequalified leads and patients / customers. Remember to test, track and know your metrics. You’re going to need to make some tweaks in the beginning, but this can be very effective for you. So to recap: 1. Setup a landing page with your offer in exchange for an offer. You can build this in software like Leadpages.net or Megaphoneapp.com 2. Make your offer downloadable if an ebook or white paper or present your video after. I recommend using Wistia instead of YouTube for playback as you will be able to have heat maps of your video to know where your fall off points are. You can also make this page with the software mentioned above. 3. Use an email autoresponder to engage your lead and email them about the event you’re doing after they had time to read or download your materials. Or, if a video, I would just pitch them at the end with a link below the video to automatically register. 4. Put on a webinar with your guest using either GoToWebinar or Google hangouts if you know how to set that up. 5. Make sure you have your appointment getting page with your the down payment created. You can use several different type of scheduling services so you can automatically deliver the lead/ appointment to the chiropractor. To Note: The reason I don’t send the visitor to the webinar first is because it is better to get the visitor predisposed to your information before asking them to commit to a webinar and when you do it the way I played out, you will have a much better show rate. This is it in a nutshell. Obviously there is more to it. If you need another funnel idea I am hear to help. I have used other effective strategies in the past to also make money on the front end to make your advertising free. It just depends on what you want to do and how advanced you want to get. Hope this helps give you some ideas. :) If you need help implementing something like this just let me know.MH
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