It’s quite simple.  Basically you can hold a “photo contest” and see which photo your friends like best.

Here are a few examples…

1. Choose a photo of yourself.

2. Choose artwork or travel photos.

3. For downright silliness.

I’ll do a follow up post in a week or so with more details on the idea and results of the site.  But for now…

Try it out and let me know what you think!

1. Ricky Gervais

He caused an uproar lately by insulting lots of famous people while hosting the Golden Globes.  Backstory here.

There is no doubt he angered a bunch of people.  But did this hurt or help his career?

On the one hand he may not be invited back to host the Golden Globes again next year.  On the other hand, most Americans probably didn’t know who he was before this week.  They do now, and his appeal as a comedian just went way up.

Apparently, there are lots of people out there who also think Hollywood is ridiculous and full of itself.  These people rushed to his defense and became loyal fans overnight.

Being polarizing means for every enemy you make you gain a devoted fan.  When you remain neutral and try to appeal to both sides, you offend no one but also aren’t remembered by anyone.

He might not have had a fun week, but I bet his career just had a net win.

2. OkCupid.com

Their blog seems almost entirely centered on the idea of controversy as a marketing tool.  Here are a few of their headlines lately:

• The Real Stuff White People Like
• Rape Fantasies and Hygiene By State
• How Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back
• Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating (where they argue quite convincingly why most online dating sites are a scam)

Their posts average probably 500 comments and are massively reposted all over the internet.

However, there is one key difference between their posts and most controversial discussions on the net: their posts are based on hard data, not opinion.

The guys behind the blog are huge math nerds, and have a wealth of data at their disposal from the dating site (people fill out profiles etc).  So most of their posts take the tone of “we’re not saying this is right or wrong, but here is the truth about what the world is like”.

This is a powerful position to come from because if someone wants to disagree they have to argue with your math, and can’t appeal to emotion.  So I think there is a good lesson here: if you’re going to be controversial, back it up with hard data.

3. Apple

Steve jobs puts it a different way in this classic video where he lays out Apple’s marketing strategy.

He says every great brand isn’t afraid to stand for something.

“Stand for something” is less pejorative than being controversial, but it’s really the same thing.  If you stand for something, then you aren’t afraid to disagree and you think the other way of doing it is wrong.

And they live it by building opinionated software and hardware.  Want more than one USB drive on your MacBook air?  Sorry can’t have it.  Want a discount Apple computer under $500?  They don’t want your business.

I think the lesson here is clear.  In business, trying to be all things to all people just makes you unremarkable to everyone. People become loyal fans of companies that stand for something.  By polarizing people you’ll wins fans (along with the enemies) and stick in people’s minds.

I think a healthy dose of speaking your mind can be a great tool to jumpstart any brand.  What do you think?

Yet Dropbox has over 4 million users.  So how did they do it?

Apparently it was almost entirely word of mouth – but they did it in a smart way.

You can click above to see the full set of slides (they are worth reading).  But one important point that stood out to me was the 2-sided incentive for referrals that he mentioned above.

I logged in to Dropbox to see what it looked like and here it is:

The key here is that he is giving them more storage as the reward and not money.  I like this for a few reasons:

1. It’s closer to what Dropbox users actually want.
2. It’s cheaper for Dropbox to give this away because they are dealing in trade.

It’s sort of like if you ask your friend to give you a ride to the airport, and when you get there you pull out your wallet and give him $10.  He’d probably feel insulted – it cheapens the act of kindness.  But if you give him a ride the next time he needs one, or return the favor in some other way that isn’t money, then it’s all good.

Sometimes money isn’t the best gift.

So with this in mind I started thinking about how I could improve my own site, UniversityTutor.  My current referral program pays tutors $3/month to refer other tutors.  But those other tutors not only have to signup, they also have to upgrade – which only 1-2% of them do.  So it’s tough for tutors to make much doing this, and $3 isn’t very motivating.

This weekend I took a few hours to change UniversityTutor’s referral program to more of a Dropbox model.  The free account on UniversityTutor is based on the number of job requests you get (first 3 are free, after that you can upgrade) instead of storage like Dropbox.  So now when a tutor refers a friend they both get another free job request up to a maximum of 20.

It will be interesting to see if this is more effective than money.  My hunch is that it will be – when tutors reach the end of their free account, the conversation in their head is much more around how to get more tutoring jobs, not how to get $3.  What do you think?

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

This is an exciting announcement.  For the last few months I’ve been working on a new web app (was contracted to build it actually) and today is the beta launch!

The site is Seoaholic.com.  The name is a made up word which combines SEO (search engine optimization) and “work-a-holic”.

This is a beta launch so the tool is still a work in progress, but feel free to try it out and send me any feedback on what you like and don’t like.

The main benefit of this tool is to bring more traffic to your website by:

• Building more incoming links to your site
• Improving your search engine rankings
• Tracking your keyword rankings over time to see big picture SEO changes to your site

As you may know, building incoming links to your website is one of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings.  Seoaholic goes out to find “link opportunities” for you and ranks them by (1) how valuable the link would be if you got it (2) how likely you are to actually get a link from that site.  Seoaholic helps you (and your team) track the process of getting incoming links from those website owners.

A link opportunity is typically a page on a website that is already linking to your competitors or related websites, but they aren’t linking to you yet.  It might be a blog post, a list of resources, job posting board, etc.  You have a good chance of getting a link from these pages because they are already linking to sites like yours (by good I mean maybe 25% chance of success instead of 1% like most link building campaigns).  The last step is still up to you: contact the website owner to ask for a link, submit your site (if their site allows it), or write an interesting piece of content they would be likely to link to.  This last step is standard linking building stuff, and remains a manual process (we don’t want this to turn into a spamming tool).

The tool manages the rest for you (finding the high value opportunities, checking if they actually linked, managing your team’s progress, and seeing how it ultimately affects your rankings).  We imagine it being used by anyone from small time bloggers (who want to improve and track their search engine rankings over time) to hardcore SEO consultants who do this for a living.

Here Is A 90 Second Demo Video

If you don’t see the video embedded below (i.e. you’re reading this in email) you can click here to watch it on YouTube.  Click the “full screen” button below to get a better view or try it in HD.

And Here Are A Few Screen Shots (Click The Screenshot To See A Larger Version)

1. Discover new link opportunities and manage the link building process from one screen.

2. Track your website’s average search engine position over time plus total incoming links

3. Watch your individual keyword rankings vary and spot big picture SEO changes to your site

Try It Now For Free…

The first 5 keywords you want to track and build links for are absolutely free!  To try it out with your website just click here to sign up in 30 seconds.

Feel free to leave me any comments or feedback in the comments below!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

This is one of the toughest moments for entrepreneurs (especially engineering types) when you realize that building the whole thing was the easy part.  Now it’s actually marketing the damn thing that is going to take a while.

Here are 5 ways I’ve used to launch a website and get the first users to my site.

1. Target Your Niche On StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon has a tech savvy base of people who are looking for cool websites just like yours.  When they are bored, they check Stumbleupon to see what cool new stuff has just been launched.

What’s great is that you can target the exact group who might be interested in your site.  For example, with BuyersVote.com I knew people into consumer info and possibly bargains would like the site, and I was able to target those groups.

Pros: Only $0.05 per visitor (way less than Adwords).  Can target people with relevant interests.  Can see a feedback report afterwards with what percent of people liked/disliked it.

Cons: Stumbleupon users are pretty click happy and are just trying to prevent boredom, so they tend to have a high bounce rate.  But then again, aren’t most web users?  This is a good test to see if your homepage is grabbing people’s attention.

2. Tell people your competition sucks

If you’re making a cheaper/better/faster alternative to an existing product, why not tell people that your competitor sucks?  Use their name right in the headline.  These ads tend to have a high click through rate, and your ideal early adopter is someone who is currently using the competition and is fed up.

Facebook ads work well for this, and their ad targeting is outstanding, but it can work elsewhere also like in Adwords or blog posts.  You may recall I launched FeedmailPro.com because I was fed up with Aweber and thought they sucked.

Pros: Works best when going against an established competitor.  Usually gets a high click through rate.

Cons: Sometimes you’ll run into problems using a trademark in your ad headline and Facebook or whoever will take it down.  But if it happens no biggie, you just take it down or reword it.  Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

3. Try to rank for long tail keywords

Traffic from organic search results is free, and 98% of people don’t click the ads when doing a Google search – they use the organic search results.  So obviously, ranking in search engines is great.  The problem is it’s very difficult for a brand new website.

The solution?  Target long tail keywords first – keywords which are more specific, have more words, are more obscure, etc.  One good way to make a long tail keyword is to add a city name or regional keyword on the end.

For UniversityTutor.com this is exactly what I did.  I had a couple dozen subjects (algebra, chemistry, Spanish, etc) and a bunch of cities (Austin, Boston, San Jose, etc) with tutors signed up.  So I combined the subject and the city name (and added ‘tutor’ in the middle) to auto-generate a bunch of long tail keywords, such as “calculus tutor Austin, TX”.  Then I auto-generated pages on the site that targeted those.  Within a few weeks I was getting 500 visitors per day (for free) from organic search results.

Even a brand new site can rank for long tail keywords with just on-page SEO.  If you can start getting traffic for long tail results, then you have early adopters who will eventually give you links, and you’ll eventually rank for more competitive keywords too (although this takes a while).  Oh yeah, and don’t forget to create a sitemap after you do this so Google actually finds the new pages.

Pros: Free!  Brings lots of traffic.

Cons: You need at least SOME good content on the pages for this to work.  It can be user-generated if your users are submitting content (this is best), otherwise you’ll have to generate it yourself.

4. Seed your site using Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is awesome, and some entrepreneurs are using this to seed content on their sites.  Basically you create a simple task that can be completed by a human being (write a review, tag this image, vote this up or down, etc) and assign a very low dollar amount to it (say $0.05 or $0.10).  Then you can publish these to Mechanical Turk and thousands of stay at home moms, bored librarians, and people all over the world will complete your task for a few cents and become early users of your website.

Sure, they are getting paid.  But it can help to generate the initial content on a site, even for the SEO trick mentioned in #3 above.  The task is completely open ended so some people also use it to get people’s feedback.  You can make the task something like “try this out and tell me what you like about it and what was confusing about it” if you just want to do user testing.

I tried this on BuyersVote.com and the results were pretty good.  The main thing you have to worry about is quality.  You can approve or reject each result that someone completes, and Mechanical Turk lets you adjust some quality controls like their approval rate from past requests and what country they are in, English speaking etc.  I’d say overall about 95% of the work completed was worth keeping, and about 5% needed cleaning up or deleting, which is decent.

Pros: It’s guarantees the person will actually participate in your site instead of just viewing it, unlike the other methods.

Cons: Keep an eye on quality and clean up any junk that gets posted.  Start small (maybe 10 tasks) and see results before going to 100, 1000, etc.  There is an art to making your task instructions clear for 100% of people.

5. Have a blog

I saved the best for last.  Having a blog is both the most powerful and the most long term approach.  It takes years of dedicated work to build up a good permission asset, but once you do it is worth it’s weight in gold.

37Signals launched Haystack.com in the blog post pictured above.  Just three days later Haystack.com had thousands of registered users and was generating revenue in excess of $7,000 per month.  Their marketing cost for this was zero. This was all possible because 37Signals has about 100,000 dedicated readers of their blog.

Joel Spolsky did the same thing when he launched StackOverflow.com with a blog post.  In the last 6 months it has become the #1 programming website in the world because of the critical mass it achieved from his (and his co-founder’s) blog posts.

Bottom line: if you don’t have a blog, you should start today because it will almost certainly pay off down the road.

Pros: It’s free.  These early adopters know you and actually care about the site (they aren’t being paid) which means they’ll probably tell their friends.  This is the most powerful form of marketing you can do.

Cons: Takes a long time to build a following on a blog.  You can’t start a blog just to promote stuff. It has to be a topic you actually care about and would write about even if nobody was reading it (because that’s exactly how it will feel for the first year or so).

Conclusion

There are a few other methods people use, like scraping competitors data off their site (not recommended from an ethical point of view although it can be effective in some cases) and of course you should definitely email it to your friends, your family, post it on your Facebook profile, etc (it’s surprising how many people don’t do this first and most obvious step – HotOrNot.com launched just by emailing a few friends and was receiving 2 million page page views per day just a few weeks later).

You might get lucky and have your site blow up without any serious marketing effort on your part, but in my experience (and from talking with other entrepreneurs) this is very very rare.  It’s far more likely that, even if you have the coolest product in the world, you’ll have to spend just as much time marketing it as you did building it, if not more.  Hopefully these tips help you out!

What techniques did I miss?  Which have worked best for you?  Please post your thoughts in the comments below.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

1. Doing something different
2. Having fun
3. Not being afraid to be a little weird

It reminded me of Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button or Facebook’s Pirate language setting.

It also reminded me of some of the ideas I wrote about in word of mouth marketing.

Then I started looking at the BuyersVote.com homepage and I got sort of sad.  It looked really boring.

It looked like every other review site out there.  If I saw it for the first time, I’d probably be sort of confused, do a few clicks, and then leave.

So I started wondering, what is this website actually ABOUT damnit.  It’s got to convey it instantly.  And I blurted out “it just so you can find out if something sucks or not before you buy it!”

So I decided to change the tag-line of the site from “Online product reviews made easy” to “Find out if it sucks, before you buy!”

Irreverent?  Yes.  Junevile?  Probably.  Fun and engaging?  I think so.  At least it would cause me to give it a second look, and maybe even participate in this community – it’s sounds fun.

What do you think?  Worst idea ever or good marketing?  I think I’ll test it out for a bit.

P.S. Because it worked out so well last time, I’ve started a new category on BuyersVote for “Best Christmas Gift Ideas 2009“.  Hopefully you’ll find it useful as you do your last minute Christmas shopping.  Please take a moment to go check it out now – and don’t forget to vote or add your own idea if you have a good one.  Thanks!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

For those who didn’t read it I setup a category on BuyersVote.com for the best halloween costume ideas of 2009. I did this because I knew it would be a popular keyword in October, especially toward the end of the month. And if I could make a good page targeted specifically for that niche keyword, it might get some traffic.

Well, it worked. I just BARELY got on the first page of Google in time for Halloween and managed to get the 9th or 10th place listing (which is still on the first page) for some costume related keywords. It was enough to triple the traffic to BuyersVote.com for a month (which isn’t saying much given how little it was before, but still, you have to start somewhere ;).

Here is the graph from Google Analytics.

Check out the keywords which drove all the traffic.

It’s also interesting to note that I think my page actually had the best content of any of the top 10 listings. Most of the other pages were made-for-adsense sites or crappy articles without many good costume ideas. It shows you that crowd-sourced content works, even on a small scale.

So what did I learn from this experiment? Primarily it shows this could be a good growth strategy for BuyersVote. With just a few good niche review topics like Ski Resort Reviews, Blogs for Entrepreneurs, or Mac Web Browser Reviews it could start to get some good organic search results. If I get just a few, that will be enough to start getting new contributors to the site who will generate new topics, and new search results, and it will be come a positive feedback loop to growth.

This is the hardest part about starting a site like this: critical mass. Nobody wants to be the first reviewer on an empty site.

Feel free to steal this SEO idea too (I didn’t come up with it) and apply it to your own site. Basically just pick a highly specialized keyword (so it’s not too competitive) that will have a lot of traffic coming up. Seasonal or holiday related keywords work well for this. Then if you generate a page targeted to just that keyword, it’s possible to get on the first page of Google, even if you have a relatively new or unknown site.

What do you think? What might be some other good niche topics to add to BuyersVote.com?

By the way, the site now has 405 items and 113 contributors, so if you haven’t already, please take a moment to create an account and add some reviews.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

His biggest advice was to get more incoming links to the site.  This is probably the most important thing you can do to rank well in search engines, because Google (and others) place a high value on how many sites link to you.  It’s also a great barrier to entry against competitors because an established site will have lots of incoming links built up over time and it will be very difficult for a new startup to outrank them in search engines.

I’m already ranking well for some local searches (such as biology tutor austin)  but not so well in other (such as find a tutor).  This is largely due to how long those sites have been around and how many incoming links they have.

So obviously getting more links is good, but HOW was the big question.  Neil’s advice was to follow the same model Yelp.com used with their user badges.  This lets Yelp users display their reviews on their own blog or website.  They get to show off their work, and Yelp get’s an incoming link.  You just have to provide users with a little snippet of code and an incentive to paste it into their site.

So a day later I had launched tutor “bling” that my tutors can add to their own websites (blogs, school websites, facebook profiles, etc).  Since a lot of the tutors are university students, it would be particularly great if I got some incoming .edu links (these carry a particularly high value) but we’ll have to see on that.

As an added incentive I built in my UniversityTutor affiliate program so all the pre-generated links contain a tutor’s affiliate code (they can track it using the stats at the bottom).  Using this they can not only advertise their profile, but also get paid for any new tutors they refer.

One More Idea….

This wasn’t related to my conversation with Neil, but I thought about it after reading a story on Hotmail.com.  Hotmail got popular FAST (something like 2 million users in 18 months) almost entirely because they forced you to include a line in the bottom of every email that said “Get A Free Email Account At Hotmail.com”, or something to that effect.

There are over 100 contact messages going through UniversityTutor.com every day now, so I decided to add a line to the bottom of their contact emails reminding them of the opportunity to refer new tutors and get paid for it.  You can see the new line in the email below.  This is more for word of mouth than SEO because I don’t think Google will index links from someone’s Facebook profile.

So what do you think, will it work?  Here is a graph of search engine traffic to UniversityTutor.com over the last three months (traffic from search engines makes up about 50% of total traffic).

It will probably take a month or two to have any effect (if it works), but we’ll see!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

But I think it’d be interesting to get a collective approach from all the readers of this blog.  What books on business have had the greatest impact on you?  Which book do you find yourself recommending to other entrepreneurs the most?

A bunch of suggestions have already been added to BuyersVote.com.  What would you add or subtract?  You can check out the list here to add your two cents.

In case you’ve never used BuyersVote.com before, here is a quick review of how it works (it’s really simple):

• If you like an item, vote it up (+1)
• If you don’t like an item, vote it down (-1)
• If you have a better idea, add it at the bottom

You’ll have to login to vote (sorry, that is the only way I could find to keep voting fair), but you can use your Google account or one you already have so there is no registration process.

This isn’t really related, but another category that I put together recently on BuyersVote is for the best halloween costume ideas of 2009.

As you can see, some of them are good, some are bad (maybe even offensive).  But this is the beauty of crowd sourced data.  Good ideas get pushed to the top and bad ideas get pushed down (with enough participants).

I actually have an ulterior motive for this category: I’m hoping to get on the first page of Google for keywords related to Halloween costume ideas this season!  There will obviously be quite a bit of traffic over the next month for those keywords and, if it works, some new people will be introduced to BuyersVote that wouldn’t have otherwise seen it.  This is a nice little marketing technique that you might want to try: target a highly specific seasonal keyword.  If you can get on the first page of Google for it, you might be able to ride a nice wave of traffic that few other people are competing for.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Sometimes I find it easy to explain things clearly and succinctly.  But other times I really struggle to capture the main idea of a complex subject in just a few lines.

What’s so deceptive about good writing is that it looks simple when you read it.  It looks casual, like someone jotted it down in just a few seconds and it’s so easy to understand.  But if you’ve spent any time writing you know how wrong that assumption is: it actually takes much longer to write something in fewer words.

Case in point, here is a piece of copy I revised on UniversityTutor.com today.

Before:

After:

Aside from the blatant grammar mistake in the first one (“we’ll won’t”) which somehow went unnoticed, here are some other improvements I thought about:

• I gave up trying to combine both ideas (contacts are free AND we don’t take a percent) in one section.  The free contacts was an important point but it was already elsewhere on the page so I decided to just focus on one thing.
• Throwing out unnecessary parts can be just as valuable as adding the right parts.  Anything which isn’t relevant pulls attention away from what is.
• People in marketing talk a lot about features vs. benefits.  Getting free contacts is more of a feature.  People don’t lay awake at night worrying about how to get free contacts on my website.  They worry about saving money.  You have to get to the root of the benefit you are providing and not get caught up in listing features.
• Shorter is better.  Three lines of text is worth reading whereas four (spilling over to the fifth) is approaching a paragraph and people don’t read paragraphs (at least in marketing copy).
• It’s more dramatic and drives the point home to say “they take 50%” than it is to say “we don’t take a percentage”.  Subtle wording changes can make a big difference.

Anyway, I’m certainly no copywriting expert but I find it interesting to practice.  It’s an art form that all entrepreneurs should at least basically understand.

I’ve read a number of books over the years on it but the one that stands out is The Ultimate Sales Letter, by Dan Kennedy.  It was pretty good if you want to just get the basics down in one book.

However, I think like anything you can go too far down this road.  Most internet marketers take it too far where they create these ridiculous landing pages and testimonial things all over the internet that cause them to lose a lot of credibility.  If you focus too much on marketing you end up getting to a point where you are just trying to trick ignorant people, instead of doing the most important thing: building a product that is actually useful.

Having a useful product can make up for all the bad marketing in the world, or no marketing at all, because people will do it all for you by word of mouth and you’ll be richer in the long run.  But there’s no reason to make it harder on yourself and rely on that.  You’d do better to make a great product and also understand the basics of good marketing and copywriting.  After all, you’ve often only got a second or two (literally) before people click the back button on their browser.  You’ve got to make that first impression fast or you might not get another chance.