A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Anyone can sign up and unleash an AdWords campaign. You can’t sell anything without significant traffic, especially since 80% of it is crap even with a good campaign, and it is preferable that some of that traffic is not costing you dollars per click. I killed the campaign and decided to try something new. Phone, Robert.

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Conversely, time-pressure means the more time you spend deciding, the less time you have for implementation and unanticipated problems, so you’re adding risk by dragging out the decision. If the status quo isn’t that bad, there might not be a reason why a decision should be made quickly.

Engineer 264
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If you build it, they won't come, unless.

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Except the "strategy" is a tirade of drivel I've heard so many times I can lip-sync as the words spew out the founder's mouth: "We're going to A/B-test AdWords campaigns until we discover our hook.". In a world where everyone and their brother is "joining the conversation" (oops, I use that phrase constantly!),

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Smart Bear Live 4: Nick from PinfoB.com at AZ Disruptors

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

And then on the client side, we can super, super target e-mail campaigns and whatever other things. Jason: And so, you have the time and desire and so do they, hopefully, to have these deep conversations. If you have 2,000 of them, maybe you can’t have this kind of conversation, but you still can and so you should.

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Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

One of the root questions you have at the start, which is supposed to be data-driven (but you don’t have data) is: What’s the maximum I should bid for CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords? Conversion Rate = 1% Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who convert to a paying customer.

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Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Because you get organized around marketing metrics, because your campaigns get optimized, because your landing pages and drip campaigns become stronger, because word of mouth produces sales “for free,” and so forth. Of course if there is a conversion rate, you can start applying the above logic again.

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Accounting for Startups: Cash-basis or Accrual-basis?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It's perfect when you're wondering if you can afford $5000 in graphic design work, a new $6500 marketing campaign, or whether you can hire someone and have 3 months of runway to discover that was a massive mistake. Leave a comment and join the conversation. But this method is perfect when pondering an experiment.

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