The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path. It helps to literally draw this path out, enumerating the intermediate steps (milestones) to get to your traction goal. These milestones need not be traction related, but should be absolutely necessary to reach your goal.

Getting Started To get started in display advertising, first understand the types of ads that work in your industry. Tools like MixRank and Adbeat show you the ads your competitors are running and where they place them.

A popular approach is to create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new users to the key features in your product. Instead of throwing everything at them right away, you can email them five days after they’ve signed up and say, “Hey, did you know we have this feature?”

You can use tools like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Using Bullseye to find your channel is a five-step process: brainstorm, rank, prioritize, test, and focus on what works.

“Marketing’s job in working with salespeople is twofold:

They have a lot of landing pages. You can see what types of pages they are producing by searching site:domain.com in a search engine. For example, if I wanted to see how many landing pages Moz has created targeting long-tail keywords, I could search site:moz.com and get a sense of how many landing pages they have.

Everything you do should be assessed against your Critical Path. Every activity is either on path or not. If it is not on the path, don’t do it!

However, to get to the next traction goal they had to get more mainstream adoption and this next set of users is much less forgiving.