Traction

The Archives.com team used AdWords to drive traffic to landing pages before they made a big investment in building a product. Each landing page was written to test interest in a specific product approach. For example, one page tested “get access to census data” while another tested “get access to your family genealogy.” By measuring the CTR for eac

you should be running several cheap tests (perhaps two social ads with two landing pages) that give some indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be. In other words, you should not be getting too deep into tactics at this stage; stick to the strategy level.

In particular, your tests should be designed to answer these questions: How much does it cost to acquire each customer through this channel strategy? How many customers are available through this channel strategy? Are the customers you are getting through this channel the ones you want right now?

If your pitch doesn’t draw a line in the sand—with some people shaking their heads and some people nodding—it won’t get discussed as widely as you hope.

TARGETS Use search engine ads to test product positioning and messaging (even before you fully build it!). Do not expect your early SEM ad tests to be profitable. If you can run an ad campaign that gets close to breakeven after a few weeks, then SEM could be the traction channel for you to focus on. A test ad campaign can be as little as four ads t

Blogs have an enormous influence over other blogs, making it possible to turn a post on a site with only a little traffic into posts on much bigger sites, if the latter happens to read the former. Blogs compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to “confirm” it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it. The smaller sites legitimize

how compelling SEM is as a way to get early customer data in a fairly controlled, predictable manner. So even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend $5,000 (or $1,000, or $500) on an advertising campaign and get an early base of customers and users. It informs a whole bunch of things that are really important in terms of the

The goal of this focusing step is quite simple: to wring every bit of traction out of your core channel. To do so, you will be continually experimenting to find out exactly how to optimize growth in this traction channel. As you dive deeper into it, you will uncover effective tactics and do everything you can to scale them until they are no longer

someone just starting out in this channel should begin testing just four ads. Four ads will give you a good baseline for the performance of SEM as a whole, while still allowing you to test different messaging, demographics, and landing pages.

it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.