A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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How do I know where to advertise?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Adventurous Advertiser writes: I’m ready to spend my first $1000 on something other than AdWords. “Besides that, you’ll lose credibility if you stop advertising. Fast learning means you get to a working advertising model faster. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com.

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Who’s lying?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

There are analytics that tell you where traffic originates (imperfectly, especially with the latest in browsers and services intentionally obscuring or blocking data), data about your advertising click-throughs, your own raw web server logs, and broad industry data around traffic trends (e.g. They all tell a different story.

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If you build it, they won't come, unless.

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Advertising ?? Advertising isn't dead; you can still buy eyeballs. It sounds simple: The average cost of acquiring a customer is $C (advertising, sales, support, doing demos) and the lifetime revenue you get from that customer is $R, so if C < R you have a business. But one story beats a pile of AdWords A/B tests.

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Why your company should have a single email address

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Yet, when it comes to email management, most companies seems to adopt a somewhat broken posture: either they don’t advertise any public email or they advertise too many of them. Despite experts routinely claiming Email 1.0 will soon be replaced by their own Email 2.0 ; Email 1.0 is here to stay.

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Enough with the "expert" guilt

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sergey and Larry weren't advertising experts before they started Google. Because Google reinvented advertising, there were no "blogs" when Joel started posting essays, and there was no tool for code review until I invented one. Joel Spolsky wasn't a blogging expert before starting FogCreek.

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“Fantastic” beats “efficient”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Since I defined the Something Awesome as being holy-crap-you-have-to-be-kidding-me good, word-of-mouth “advertising&# is automatic. If word-of-mouth can replace 90% of your advertising/marketing budget, maybe you can use that money to address the challenges of extra expenses.

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What’s The Important Thing, that is powerful enough to override all your deficiencies?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no efficient advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy. Do you feel the crushing weight of the disadvantages facing every new company? How do the successful startups rise above all that?