Free, Easy, and Quick Ways to Market your Startup

In my last blog post, I tentatively proclaimed that I would be taking over the marketing side of YakGroups. In true geek fashion, I took to the tubes and spent the last few days reading around trying to figure out what to do next.

I came across a great quote by Dharmesh Shah:

"Instead of spending money trying to seek out your best customers, startups should instead focus on helping their best customers find them."

I think that's a great idea. Unfortunately, he didn't really elaborate on how to achieve it. This post is my attempt to brainstorm some ideas on how to do so.

I've noticed that there are a lot of great articles out there that will show you how to maximize the effectiveness of your paid online advertising. They are chock full of great information, but for me (and maybe you as well) it's all next to useless.

Let me elaborate:

1. Ads are expensive. As college students bootstrapping YakGroups, Robert and I definitely can't afford to be playing around with ads and tweaking until we get the best ROI.
   
   
2. Many people, especially the savvy internet-users that your startup may be targeting, are inherently mistrustful of anything that looks like an advertisement. We are so overwhelmed with ads these days that many will have learned to ignore them and the truly savvy are likely to have something like Adblock installed.
   
   
3. It takes a lot of practice and iteration to create properly-targeted ads. We want to target potential customers who are looking for the solution our startup provides, not bombard those who do not need our service with ads because they probably won't be interested.

So, how can we market our startup for free, as efficiently as possible, without spending valuable hours of coding time writing ad copy and pitching to tech blogs that our customers don't read?

My idea is to effectively utilize the long tail of social media. We are going to look for the low-hanging fruit -- the places too small for bigger companies to engage.

1. Forums
A great way to do this is by joining the conversation in the places where your potential customers already meet online. Find out where they congregate. What are their favorite blogs, websites, and especially forums? Find out what questions they're asking, and answer them.

For example, for us, our customers are college students. So there are already tons of great places for us to join in the conversation. Try to find out where your customers hang out. By participating in the conversation, you'll build trust and they are more likely to use your service.

However, make sure you're not just participating only when it's beneficial to you. This can be hard; personally, I'm a classic lurker, and will usually read forums for a long, long time before I ever post (hello, HN!). But it's important -- you have to build trust and a connection before you start asking people to use your service, or you'll start to come off like a spammer.

But what if your customers are more disparate or don't participate in forums much? Or what if they don't have very many places online that they can congregate? (Actually, this may be a great problem for your startup to address, but I digress.) In that case, you can try...

2. Question/Answer websites
Some great places to use are websites like Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo. Every day, people post there looking for answers to their questions. Chances are, some of these questions are problems that your startup is perfectly designed to solve. So answer them!

For example, our startup, YakGroups, will be a website designed to help college students organize and complete group projects. Here's a Yahoo! Answers question that we will be perfectly poised to answer once we launch.

There will probably be similar questions related to your own business. They don't even have to be as straightforward as that. Any question whose asker would benefit from using your product is a perfect opportunity!

There are tons of benefits to this method:

• The people using these websites are great potential customers: they're desperate to find a solution to their problem, and they will probably read and consider every response to their post. If you link to your startup and it's a good fit, you have a high likelihood of gaining a customer.
  
  
• On top of that, other people with the same question or with the same interests will often read the thread and be pointed to your startup.
  
  
• Bonus: these places are huge websites and have great Google-Fu. I know that when I'm looking for an answer to something, Yahoo! Answers is usually one of the first links that pops up, and I almost always click on it. If other people are like me (and I suspect they are), this is a great resource to get the word out for your startup!

**However, please be careful. People tend to trust these websites since they are answered by real people. So don't be sleazy and don't spam; only answer questions that you genuinely feel would benefit from the service that you have to offer.

I love this method, because it fulfills my most important requirements:

1. It's free! You don't have to pay for any ads.
2. It doesn't require a huge time investment. Answering a question will take 3 minutes or so.

I know the programmers are going to start complaining here that this is tedious, but...

You can even batch this method to make it more efficient:

1. Set up a Google Alert for people asking similar questions on the relevant websites.
2. (optional) Create a general template for how you're going to answer those questions and a short blurb about your startup (you do have an elevator pitch, right?)
3. When you have 10-20 minutes free, go through your Google Alerts and answer some questions!

I find this to be a great form of productive procrastination. Often, I'll have a small chunk of time that's too short to really get into "programming mode" or do any large piece of work. Instead of wasting time clicking through email or checking Facebook, I can use this method to help potential customers find YakGroups.

Here are some other popular Q&A sites I've found:

• WikiAnswers
• HelpGlobe
• Amazon's AskVille
• AskPedia

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So what do you guys think? Has this method or something similar worked for you? Do you have any modifications or suggestions that might make it better? Thanks for reading and commenting, and good luck with your startup adventures!