But not the sort of PR that most people THINK is PR - putting out a media release to any and all comers.
Well targeted PR is what's key. Being in/on the right medium for your product or service. This means that with your limited time you can focus on researching the right medium and ensuring the pitch is interesting to someone else (there's a whole other blog post on what NEWS actually is!).
I just saw a great example of selecting the right medium - and thanks to The Start Up Daily for sharing the details of their success with Springwise.I love Springwise; a fantastic site & newsletter that shares news of very creative, entrepreneurial startups. I always finish reading it and feel inspired...and with a few ideas in my back pocket. Yesterday they featured a business idea that I thought was very clever - a daily blog featuring a vignette of wisdom from a business book each day. The revenue model will be kick backs on book sales. Obviously a volume game, but I think it has potential.
So I signed up. Here's the kicker. Apparently, so did 41% of the visitors from Springwise! 41% is a DREAM conversion rate. It's MASSIVE.
The Start Up Daily had obviously found the RIGHT place to attempt to get coverage. The author, Karl's, post said he was shooting for 1000 subscribers by 1 Feb. When I visited yesterday he was at 2,500. And today he's at 3,300!
What a success. Now, as long as Karl keeps on putting out great updates, and he keeps reminding people to do so, they'll share. And he'll keep growing.
So the zero budget marketing tip today is that PR is your best friend if you (a) have a great story to tell and (b) find the right place to target the story. And the right place isn't necessarily a daily newspaper...in fact, in today's online world, the right blog post can apparently blow your aspirations out of the water.
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2 comments:
Hi, It's Karl from the Startup Daily. I found your site by watching my backlinks.
I'm glad you found the info on the conversion rate useful. I am still blown away by the conversion rate too. I'll also note that I'm using double opt-in for sign-ups, which from my research typically loses a 1/4 to 1/3 of the people that start the signup process (due to people getting distracted and forgetting to confirm, spam filters, etc). So the number of people that attempted to signup may have been even higher.
The funny thing is that I thought Hacker News would be the holy grail of press coverage for my site. As I mentioned in that post I was on Hacker news at the same time and it was a drop in the bucket compared to Springwise, even though the traffic was close to even.
I've certainly learned to be more open minded about sites I have never heard of before. Now I just need to find more sites like springwise :)
I'm poking around and I love your site you have here, really useful information. I'm going to lose myself here looking for ideas.
Thanks!
Hi Karl-
Springwise is a gem, thanks for adding to the story.
I look forward to lots of great inspiration from your blog! :)
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