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how are you doing?

This is my first thread here, hoping to get some nice input from the experts on this site.

Let me tell you a bit about our startup: We began developing our web-app about 12 months ago, this year around march we had our first semi-public release. It's been running in a limited public beta since then.

In the next two weeks we will be implementing our definitive version. We've been hearing our current paying users (around 350 atm) for the past months and we're giving them a completely revamped version of our website that we feel is going to hit hard.

Now, this has been privately funded and we've been running at loss for the past year, we believe it's time to hit a level where we at least break even so we can continue operation without so much overhead.

Our service is related to the filesharing business and helps users protect their privacy, won't mention much more details as i want the site to remain strictly anonymous, sorry.

I have a plan which i feel if conducted well, could make us hit our first milestone of 1000 recurring members, our ultimate goal is hitting 10,000 members. I'd like to hear some thoughts about it:

1) We have a mailing list of roughly 40k members, this includes: actively paying members, cancelled members and members that never paid. We're going to segment this list and make custom promotions for each segment.

2) We are going to release our affiliate program to the public, so far it's been running with less than 10 active affiliates sending traffic, think this could be a good move?

3) We are contacting most of the biggest blogs / publications / etc in our area and giving them free premium (yet limited) accounts for their users.

4) We'll be possibly purchasing announcements on related sites as well.

5) We want to get the word out in as many ways as possible, do you believe that services like PRWeb and similar could be helpful?

6) Do you think that having a corporate blog could help us engage potential future customers? Think it's worth the hassle?

7) We have a small presence in social media sites like Facebook And Twitter, but so far it hasn't been of much help. Is there any good way to engage our current members and use them to help us viralize our product? We were thinking of giving prizes for following us on twitter, sharing our site on facebook, etc. Is this really worthy while having such a low number of users?

Please excuse my english, I'm not a native :)

Thank you very much for your time, guys! Hoping to hear some input from you!

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Btw, i read a lot about having sites published on magazines? How do we go by that? Is there any good service that will help us pull that? Thanks! – S. Aug 1 '10 at 20:11
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Welcome. Please enter questions individually. It helps with getting answers. – JeffO Aug 2 '10 at 0:03
Thanks, Jeff. Will do :) – S. Aug 3 '10 at 5:32

2 Answers

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I would focus on person-to-person promotion. The rule is that if each user gets more than one user to join (1.01 is enough), you will get an accelerating effect and you do not need to put any effort into marketing. Hotmail did this as well as Skype, Facebook and so on. Focus on this. Once you have concluded that you can only get it up to i.e. 0.8, then try to get it over 1 by utilizing your marketing ideas. It is easier for friends to recommend a service to a friend if that friend has already heard about your service through marketing.

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1) Sounds like you have a good mailing list to start with. Don't forget to tap this list in multiple ways. Yes, segment and market to the list. But perhaps try and offer one segment of the list a special discount. Offer another segment of the list free subscription of they give you the contact info for 5 other people that might be interested. Give them a free subscription if they become an affiliate by getting 3 people to sign up. Whatever. You choose. But those 40,000 people know a lot of other people. Don't forget that.

2) Definitely release the affiliate program to the public. Find top affiliates and directly contact them about your offer and get them to sign up!

3) Good idea! Also ask them to mention your service/site or even do a little review. They need something to write about. Ask them to do so.

4) Depends on the sites. Instead of purchasing, depending on the site, contact them and tell them about your affiliate program. Heck, even give them the choice of you paying for an ad or them doing the affiliate program.

5) PRweb is useful. It may help news of your launch get picked up in some mainstream offline capacity. It's hard to know but it's just one more thing to try and test. Test, test, test. You don't know until you try. Don't give up if it doesn't work once either. It could mean you just need to make the headline more interesting or the whole press release a bit more interesting.

6) Absolutely have a corporate blog. But only if you will spend some time on it. It's free (pretty much) and it gives you SEO content so you appear in the mighty google index for free. You may not see any direct positive results right away, but the content you make is there and may bring in customers slowly at first. If you keep at it and build the site up, you will learn from your customers and you will get so many new ideas for add-on products/services and changes you need to make that you will reap what you sow. It's just slow to see any results.

7) Yes, give prizes. Get people involved. If they tweet to more than 500 people, they get a free subscription. Get everyone to follow you and of all those that follow you one person will get an iPad. Who knows. I'm just throwing ideas out there. Use the power of social media. People are connected. Get them to connect you.

Remember, you're helping them with your product. So ask them to help their friends by promoting it to people the think could use your product.

I don't know if this helps at all. Hope it does. :)

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