Traction

Shortening your viral cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral, and is one of the first things you should focus on improving if using this channel. To shorten it, create urgency or incentivize customers to move through your viral loops. Additionally, make every step in your funnel as simple as possible to increase the number

Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.

Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product and your broader mission, or has some other purpose than immediately completing a sale.

the company that leverages a newer platform that’s growing quickly will have a significant advantage over companies chasing the same old methods.

The second key benefit to parallel product and traction development is that you get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly.

DEFINING YOUR TRACTION GOAL You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working toward. This could be one thousand paying customers, one hundred new daily customers, or 10 percent of your market.

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.

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?

Last, an effective email sequence will be meaningless if you don’t have great email copy. Copywriting is an art on its own, but we suggest checking out some of the resources and information that Copy Hackers provides. An email campaign can easily go from a waste of time to wildly profitable just by tweaking a few words and headlines.

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.