Social media start-ups suffer from a special problem: scalability. It’s hard to know whether the features will scale unless you get a lot of beta testers. You don’t want to throw your service wide open to the public until you’re certain it won’t melt down – but how do you get people to sign up while you’re still in stealth mode? Keep reading for some tips.

Let me give credit where it’s due: Shane Snow first wrote about this for Mashable. He pointed to the example of social media startup Kohort, which managed to get thousands of users to sign up for it while it was still in stealth mode, and no one outside the company knew what it would be. In fact, Kohort is still in stealth mode. So how did they do it – and how can you duplicate their success?

It all starts with a shareable “Launching Soon” page. This page needs to be more than a placeholder, though; it needs to be interactive. Kohort’s page asks users to enter their email address. You can also add a button that lets users easily share the page with their friends. Kohort raises the bar on this by encouraging visitors to “stake a claim” to their username, inspiring a sense of limited time and resources (“Get here before everyone else does”). I’ll be talking more about that in a bit.

To lure users to your yet-to-launch website, you need to create viral content. In one sense, that may sound a little counter intuitive; if you don’t have content on a public website yet, how do get viral content out there? Fortunately, sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook come to the rescue here.

Snow describes one example, infographics startup Visual.ly: “They attracted curiosity and in-bound user potential with an infographic-type video describing the site. It wasn’t just a plain (read: boring) video about some company launching. It was a spin on its own market: data visualization. People shared and watched the video more than 50,000 times in a couple of weeks.” Find a creative way to express what your startup does in a video – not something boring, but something that’s an actual reflection of the market you’re getting into – and you could strike gold.

Use Facebook and Twitter to help get the word out about your viral video content, and your landing page. You could try to get major blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch to write about your company. Or if you  have your own blog, talk about the kinds of problems that your startup is going to solve. Other people who have the same problems will definitely get curious, and that’s the first step to signing up.

The third thing you can do is make a game out of it. But not a stupid game; make it fun. Give people something for playing. Snow cited the example of game developer Chris Carella, who gave users the chance to get early access to the site if they talked their friends into joining the waiting list. For every friend that joined, they got bumped up in the queue.

A spokesperson from Sumazi commented on Snow’s article to say that they’d gone a step or two further. They integrated Facebook and Twitter into it, and reward their users for sharing “by showing them what # they are in line to get access to beta, moving them in our beta list, and even serenading them. We have also been tracking who is inviting who (and from what platforms) and thanking them in the process.” Reward interaction with more interaction.

If you’re still wondering how you can get users to sign up for something when they don’t even know what it is, believe it or not, that can actually be a strength – at least initially. Snow notes that “anything that sparks curiosity – in the right way – gets under our skin.” Hence Kohort’s landing page urging users to “stake your claim,” even though they don’t know what they’re staking a claim to, exactly. So play on the sense of exclusivity and/or mystery surrounding your startup. No early adopter wants to miss getting in on something that turns out to be cool.

Which brings us to the final point: make sure your product or service really IS cool. As Snow notes, “if a startup’s product sucks, it doesn’t matter if it has four users or 4 million when it launches. But if a company has something cool or useful to show the world, an extra thousand users or so to share your message can be pretty nice to have around on launch day.” Good luck!

For more on this, visit: http://mashable.com/2011/05/04/startup-launch-buzz/.

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If you use the AdWords interface to set up your pay-per-click marketing campaigns, you know that it accomplishes certain tasks quite well, but is somewhat less than helpful with others. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel lets you use certain tricks to get your PPC campaigns on track and properly optimized.

Let me give credit where it’s due: John Lynch, writing for Search Engine Watch described these and other Excel-based techniques for streamlining an AdWords campaign. You may want to read his article as well, especially if you run a lot of PPC campaigns to promote your website. I admit that I don’t exactly have a great deal of experience in this area, but even I can see how much time a marketer can save using these methods.

Okay, let’s look at building those PPC ads first. Excel works well for that, except for one issue. Search ads must meet character limits for headlines, descriptions, and display URLs. You can’t tell just by looking at an Excel cell whether you’re under or over the character limit. Fortunately, you can make Excel tell you how many characters you’re dealing with before you try to load your ads.

When you build your Excel spreadsheet for ads, you’ll include a column for the various different headlines you hope to utilize. Insert a column directly adjacent to your headline column (in Lynch’s image, this column is right next to the one that contains the headlines). Now take advantage of the length function in Excel to give you a count of the number of characters in each headline. As Lynch explains, “If your headline is in cell c2, simply enter the function =len(C2) in the adjacent row.”

That give you your character count, but you still need to make it eye-catching. Looking at numbers helps, but it’s too easy to miss a number that’s too big or too small. Wouldn’t it be great to get some bright color in there to tell you when you’re on target or over the limit?

Fortunately, that trick isn’t difficult either. To accomplish it, you’ll need to use Excel’s conditional formatting. For the first condition, tell Excel to highlight the cell in red if the character count is greater than 25. Use a second condition to highlight the cell in green if it’s less than or equal to 25. What you’ll see are red and green cells next to each headline, and each one will contain a white number. This way, you’ll not only know that you’re over or under 25 characters in each headline you’re thinking of using, but you’ll know by exactly how much. And you’ll be able to take it in with a single glance.

Ads aren’t made up of just headlines, of course; typically, you get two lines of description. That’s okay. Build columns for description lines one and two, and add that extra column for counting next to each one. This time, of course, the search engines generously give you more characters to play with, so increase your count to 35. Like magic, you’ll never have to worry about problems submitting and loading your ads into the AdWords or adCenter platforms because you’ve exceeded character limits.

Are you having a problem coming up with headlines? Excel functions come to the rescue once again. This time, we’re going to use concatenate. As Lynch explains, the function simply lets you combine two or more cells of data. So start with the column for your ad group label. Create a new column and fill its cells with positive adjectives: time-saving, powerful, versatile, best, etc. Now, in a headline cell, use the concatenate formula to combine an ad group field with an adjective field to create your headline. You can even use this technique with the character limit field.

The concatenate function itself is actually not difficult to form: =CONCATENATE(first cell,” “,second cell). So if you wanted to join the name of an ad group in cell C5 with the name of an adjective in cell E5, the function you’d put into the headline cell is =CONCATENATE(C5,” “,E5) and then await the result. If you just wanted to put the cells together as if they were one word, you could simply type =CONCATENATE(C5, E5) but you want them to be separate words and phrases. That’s why this form of the function includes the quotation marks and a space.

There are more tricks you can employ with Excel to speed up ad creation, but these should get you off to a good start marketing your website. Good luck!

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Have you been reluctant to learn how to market your business on Facebook? Whether you’re an SEO who thinks search engine optimization and AdWords will carry the day, or a website owner who figures social media is not for professional matters, you’re missing out on the way of the future.

Let me start by addressing the SEOs in this group, as Brian Carter did recently for Search Engine Journal. It is true that search can capture customers as they’re getting ready to buy. But if you really want to capture them at the right moment, according to Carter, your keyword choices for AdWords can be pretty limited. There may be 45 million searches for “shoes” every month on Google, but only 450,000 searches for “buy shoes.” Your safest bet to capture customers, “buy shoes online,” sees only about 90,000 searches every month.

That still looks pretty good…until you consider how many competitors are bidding to show their ads in Google for precisely that phrase. And don’t think your customers won’t comparison shop with your rivals online! As Carter notes, “we’re also competing on price with all the other businesses who are only advertising at the bottom of the funnel. We lower our profits and our conversion rate with all that competitive shopping.”

But there’s even uglier news. Carter says that he’s managed a lot of AdWords accounts for advertisers over the last six years, and he’s noticed a painful pattern: only about five to ten percent of the keywords actually turn a profit. Once you’ve discovered what those profitable keywords are and gotten the most out of them, does it make sense to throw more money at AdWords? And if it doesn’t, what do you do when you’re ready to expand?

Here’s another situation: say you’ve created a new product. Its functionality combines that of two older products. Which keywords do you use? Your instinctive answer may be “keywords for both of the older products,” but it’s not that simple. Google dishes out quality scores on AdWords ads; these scores affect how much (or how little) you can bid to get your ad in certain positions. Ad position plays a major factor in its click-through rate.

Given all that, what kind of quality score do you think you would get if your ad is for a new device that both melts and blends widgets, when most people search for either a “widget melter” or a “widget blender”? You can bid for “widget blender” and “widget melter,” but your ad’s quality score in AdWords might not be very high – because your product and ad are not perfectly relevant to either of those phrases. If you need to bid more for your AdWords campaign, you’ll need to sell more of your product to turn a profit. You might find, as one of Carter’s students did, that you can’t launch an affordable AdWords campaign for your new product.

Next: How Facebook Changes the Game
 

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If you do your business online and make all of your sales through your website’s shopping cart, bravo. But not everyone’s website converts that smoothly. For the non-Amazons out there, the online business presence works in conjunction with the telephone to bring in sales.

But this isn’t an article about the way that a well-organized website combined with great customer service over the phone leads to conversions and loyal customers. This happens all the time, and deserves its own article. What I’m going to discuss happens before you even pick up the phone. Someone is calling you. Do you know where they got your phone number?

Let’s go beyond the obvious “from my website” answer. Depending on how you’ve set things up and what kind of advertising you do, they could have gotten your phone number from clicking through an organic search listing, a PPC, seeing it on a business card, reading an ad in a newspaper, hearing it over the radio…the list goes on. How do you know where they got your phone number?

You may be wondering why you need to know this. It’s not good enough that they got your number through one of your marketing efforts. If you can’t create some kind of list that shows how many callers came to you as a result of each of the different ways you market your website, you have no way of knowing which of those methods is most effective at attracting callers (read: conversions and potential conversions).

Here’s the big point: if you don’t know which method is most effective at attracting conversions, you don’t know where to invest your time and money in marketing your website.

Large companies like IBM have been doing this kind of tracking for a long time. Mike Moran mentioned Big Blue’s “Call Me” button, for instance. “Instead of waiting for customers to call the phone number on the site, they allowed Web visitors to press a button on the page that gets the right person at IBM to call them within a few minutes,” he noted. Visitors liked it because they didn’t need to wait on hold or explain where they were on the site, and IBM, of course, “could track that phone call from the Web visit that caused it and they could track it through to an eventual sale.”

We aren’t all IBM. We don’t have the kind of money that can pay for this kind of technology solution. That’s okay. There are other ways to accomplish this kind of tracking. Moran mentioned an online jewelry retailer that came up with another technology-related fix. It wasn’t a “Call me” button, though. This technique looked at where the traffic was coming from, and displayed a different phone number on the website to traffic coming in via different paths. In other words, “the site would display one phone number when PPC searchers came to the site and another one when they reached the site based on SEO, for example,” Moran explained. Doing this let the jeweler track sales by tactic. Thus, they could tell which marketing tactics brought in more sales, and deserved more resources.

If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, it’s called Dynamic Number Insertion. You can Google it; Search Engine Land also offers a cogent explanation. Fortunately, the market has advanced to the point that you can find companies with Dynamic Number Insertion packages. The work’s already done for you; you don’t need to do any coding yourself. I’ve seen prices as low as $50 a month for a basic package. Isn’t it worth it to know where you should be investing your website marketing dollars?

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What do you hope to accomplish with your website? Some of us dream of changing the world, but most of us cherish some relatively modest goals. What you’re trying to do with it determines the actions you’ll need to take – or, to be specific, your website marketing strategy.

If you’re planning to monetize your website in one way or another, there’s four basic approaches. What you do to market your website will be very different depending on your approach. We’ll look at each of these in turn.

First, you might simply be using your website to convey a certain image to your clients. What you’re actually making money from, then, is the service you provide. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals may use this kind of site. You’ll want to include contact information, some professional history about yourself, some details concerning the services you provide, and so forth.

You could, possibly, build a website like this yourself – but you probably shouldn’t. Imagine this scenario: you’re going to a meeting with a high-powered client, hoping to convince her to use your services. You need to wear a suit to the meeting. Would you sew that suit yourself? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t – and I’ve made money (briefly) as a seamstress!

If you’re using your website to convey your professional image, you need to work with someone who is a website designer first and foremost, as opposed to a programmer. They also need to understand the kinds of marketing messages that particular design decisions may send to your site’s visitors. For example, you wouldn’t normally plan to use the same color scheme on a lawyer’s website as you would on a bakery’s website.

Taking site interactivity a step further, you might hope to use your website to generate new leads and customers for your business. Make that your goal, and your life instantly gets more complicated. It also may get more expensive.

If you only want to show a professional image to your clients with your website, you don’t need to concern yourself as much with how they find your site. Presumably you’ll give them a business card or other piece of literature, and they’ll use that to look you up online for more information. If you’re trying to attract leads with your site, on the other hand, your site needs to be able to do some of that work for you. It needs to rank in the search engines, and you need to get word of the site out to people who might become customers.

Next: Getting Leads to Your Site
 

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In my field, I’m a late adopter. I only joined Google+ on Wednesday, and I’m still getting my feet under me (please don’t ask me about Hangouts yet). In comparing this social site to Google’s other attempts at social networking, though, I think the search company got it right this time – not just in the way Google+ works, but in the way they’re marketing it.

To be fair, I can’t say that the company took a substantially different approach in marketing Google+ than it’s taken in marketing its other products. And some of the factors I’m thinking of as “marketing” actually pertain more to the nature of the product itself. Even so, I think I can distill some ideas that you might find worth using in your next website marketing campaign.

Let’s start with the product idea itself. From a user’s perspective, it looks as if Google examined what is actually working for people and thought about how to make it better. But they thought very hard about how to make it better. Thus, Google+ looks a lot like Facebook, but functions differently – and better – in some very important ways. It also combines features from other social networks, such as Twitter (you can follow people, for example).

That’s not marketing until you consider the next steps. Google tested the product in-house, and then reached out to early adopters for beta testing. They knew who the early adopters were, because they know who writes about them – and where they stand in Google’s own search results. High-ranking websites carry a certain amount of influence, after all. This is why Search Engine Land has been on Google+ for months.

When you reach out to the bloggers in your field, it’s potentially a double-edged sword. They’ll tell you what you got right, but they’ll also tell you what you got wrong. That’s actually a good thing, especially if they’re willing to get access to your product in exchange for a limited-time non-disclosure agreement. Let them participate in shaping your product, and you know you’ll be serving not just their needs, but the needs of their substantial audience.

Once you do let these early-adopting bloggers start writing about your product, they’re going to generate plenty of buzz within their own audience. This is where Google got something else right, which they’ve done before: rather than immediately opening Google+ to everyone, they gave their early adopters invitations to spread to their friends. Google did that with Gmail, and this immediately created a demand; the very fact that you couldn’t just join the service, but had to receive an invitation, made it special.

This tactic worked with Google Plus, but it wouldn’t have worked as well if there weren’t so many people blogging about it – and blogging positively, almost gushing about the new social site. Indeed, one somewhat meta post from Search Engine Land even talks about how excited everyone is about Google Plus. Who could pass up an invitation to an exclusive club that all of the active members you know about seems to love?

Next: On-site Marketing
 

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