It’s do-or-die time for one of my projects that I’ve been working on for a couple of months. How do I decide if a product is ready for launch?
If you’ve developed your own product or service, you’ll realize that the development process can go on forever, as you’re adding enhancements, updates, tweaks to it.
But if you take a page out of the Microsoft book, you should launch a product when you feel it’s ready and launch the service packs later.
Listening to the audio version of Donald Trump’s “How To Get Rich” helped echoed the lessons I’ve learned over the years, you can’t expect to please all your critics, not everyone is going to become a rabid fan. Just go for the ones that matter.
There’re a number of factors why budding marketers don’t see success from their projects, and in extreme cases never get round to launching their products or services.
Here’re a couple of principles to get things done:
Have a goal
You may not know what exactly you want when you start out, but you need a general direction. As you continue in your efforts, you (more…)
When I first started reading Haiko De Poel’s ABestWeb affiliate marketing forum, one of the things that mystified me was this lady who said she was going around giving people Loxly hugs at Affiliate Summit.
It’s no surprise that Deborah Carney AKA Loxly has built up significant goodwill through her journey as an affiliate, affiliate manager and currently, affiliate outsourced program manager (OPM).
Loxly is one of my secret resources and I find myself consulting her on business building and marketing strategies. The fact that she posts prodigiously on ABW and is available nearly 24-7 on Skype says a lot about her commitment and work ethic to the affiliate industry.
Besides catching her session at the recent Affiliate Summit West 08 in Vegas at the ABW panel discussion, you can also tune into the latest edition of the Friday Podcast where we discussed:
Affiliate strategies for new affiliates
How and when merchants should evaluate and engage outsourced (affiliate) program managers
The content management system of choice for affiliates
I had a twitter conversation with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews’ new Twitter directory/indexing service Twellow.com.
Great things about Twellow:
Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
Groups related twitterers together
It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.
The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.
The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.
But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.
Unless you’ve got a desire to be a loner hanging out on the internet, most bloggers, marketers and casual users want to build some sort of following.
A large part of your success will lie in building a loyal and large readership. And it’s not as hard as it might seem if you follow a couple of principles.
Principle 1: Pay It Forward
At the risk of sounding like a new age “Law of Attraction”/destiny manifestation proponent, I’m going to say that Law of Reciprocity determines the success of your written content.
If your content sites or affiliates sites are going beyond merely the hot/long-tail keywords, and strive to help people solve a burning issue or problem, you’re starting on the right track.
You’ve probably heard my constant refrain on the Friday Podcast about surfing for information before making a buying decision and landing on page after page of scraped manufacturer specs. If you can build the expert authority of a Tom’s Hardware or a Cnet, you’re moving in the right direction.
Principle 2: Positioning And Incremental Marketing
Here is the part that kills me…Why would you spend time writing great content and then fire an update on twitter or facebook or one of the other social networks and publish an update “New Blog Post: <URL>”
It’s like buying a set of new clothes and then have spinach sticking between your teeth – completely blows everything else.
I was hanging out at an internet chatroom listening to the latest buzz on the internet and the name “Magibon” came up.
Like iJustine (aka Justine Ezarik), Magibon is a young American woman whose videos on YouTube have generated quite a bit of interest, especially in Japan.
With 3.3 million views, it’s a little difficult to fathom the appeal where a young girl looks back at you for all of 30 seconds to about 4 minutes.
BUT the fact is that some of her videos have garnered between 1 million to 3 million views, she’s also appeared in a recent issue of Japan’s Playboy magazine (a non-nude pictorial) and been featured on a Japanese internet TV station GYAO.
I think her appeal has to do with the fact that she looks like a Japanese schoolgirl or anime character (maybe both), and appeals to the techie/net-savvy/Japanese manga-anime reading/watching audience.
And she’s a partner of the YouTube partner program too.
What do we learn from this?
The fact that she’s being discussed in internet chatrooms suggests that rich media beyond text is being actively discussed in chatrooms. Subtle content is hammering its way onto YouTube viewers (especially in the tween/teen demographic), more so than overt content-based ads.
Is Magibon being sponsored by a skin whitening or skincare company? If not, it’ll just be a matter of time.
Video literally gives “face time” to everyday spokespersons (think of the Benetton or Dove print ads given the video treatment).
One way innovative marketers have bounced off the successful platform of video broadcasters like Magibon has been to (more…)
When I first started reading Haiko De Poel’s ABestWeb affiliate marketing forum, one of the things that mystified me was this lady who said she was going around giving people Loxly hugs at Affiliate Summit.
I invited affiliate network ShareASale Director of Client Services, Carolyn Tang, on the Friday Podcast this week to get her thoughts on: