Forge Web

One of the web celebs that I follow online is Neil Patel. He’s the co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, both are tools used to help optimize your websites for conversions. By the age of 21, Neil was named a top 100 blogger by Technorati and was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.

His clients include but are not limited to AOL, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, Viacom, you get the idea. Whether you personally need those tools is a question for another time, but real quickly, I’ll say that if you’re not generating at least a couple hundred in traffic daily, you’re not there yet; your data sample is too small to act upon.

With introductions out of the way, Neil wrote an article in his blog Quick Sprout, about “How Not to Market Your Startup.” Essentially Neil made a top 7 hit list on what you shouldn’t do to market your new startup business and while I agree with the majority of what he’s said, there are a few things I do disagree with:

• I’ll believe it when I see it.

  While I can see the obvious benefit of having a splash page collecting emails, promising answers to problems yet to be solved and building hype with screenshots, I personally wouldn’t be all that interested until there was something tangible there. Even a demo video would be a step up from just a screenshot, just to let people know this thing is actually coming.

• Links at the bottom of each page are not just for Google.

  I agree that saturating your footers with a cloud of links to internal pages isn’t going to get you any rank with Google, but having a structured navigation in the footer with links to internal pages is good usability, especially when your website has a lot of long content pages. I always try to focus on the user experience first, search engines second, maybe even third.

• Bribing customers can work for some businesses.

  Having a great product or service with a serious competitive advantage is ideal, but unfortunately most small to medium businesses aren’t in that boat. They’ll often be competing with other players who’re doing the same thing for the same price, and they’ll be hard pressed to get a leg up on the field. That’s where contests, prizes, and gifts can help to win over customers, help to build a community, and take that lead in the game. Sure, customers might expect a regular giveaway, but if it’s working, how is it any different from spending dollars on pay per click every month? Free stuff and a better service is two times the smash.

That being said, when you’re in doubt, the best thing to do is try it out. Yes, mistakes are going to be made, but the worst one you could make is not finding out the answers for yourself. Take all advice with a grain of salt and be open minded, test it before you move on.