Most of the businesses that I’ve pursued are web-based, so I’ve had my fair share of computer time through the years. Through this experience (sometimes I feel like I type and send emails for a living lol…), I’ve learned some tips and tricks to be more efficient with email management that I could not live without now.

In short, many of things you do on your computer could be done in half the time or less if you identify more efficient ways of doing them- using keyboard shortcuts instead of the computer mouse is one of the best ways to do this, and email is the best place to start. I compiled this blog post after showing a few clients tricks they weren’t previously aware of- hope these can help you too!

Keyboard Shortcuts to Race Through 150+ Emails Per Day

Email takes up a pretty big chunk of my work time, as I’m constantly interacting with team members, vendors, and clients. Using keyboard shortcuts instead of my computer mouse might only save me about 5 seconds per email, but this adds up to over an hour each week. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an hour I wouldn’t have otherwise…

Side note- If you’re using hotmail, yahoo, outlook, or another email provider, you should move to gmail if at all possible. It’s built insanely efficiently and is just a better product than any other email service available.

Below are gmail’s keyboard shortcuts to use (be sure to enable keyboard shortcuts in gmail first). I’ve written these out in the order that you would probably use them so that it’s easier to understand.

• Move cursor to the search box so that you can type and find an email you’re looking for- /
• Move up / down to messages that show up in your inbox after searching (or without searching)- j / n
• Open a message in inbox after using move up / down to get to it- enter
• Reply to an email you have opened- r
• Send an email after you’re done typing it- tab  then enter
• Go back to the inbox after sending or reading an email- g then i
• Start a new email- c
• Move from typing the address, the the subject line, to the email body- tab

In an effort to provide a solid answer when someone asks me “what are some good web and mobile apps I should consider?” in business or personal life, I’m going to constantly add the below list over time.

Feel free to comment on this post with additional ideas too!

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Productivity

• Toggl.com – Simple, effective, and free time tracker web (and mobile) app. Basic start / stop functionality along with categorizing and jotting down notes, which is extremely helpful for looking back at where all the time in the day goes. I use this to track (literally) all of my workday activity so that I can identify inefficiencies that can be automated, outsourced, or eliminated. Without Toggl, I’d be crazy to attempt this…
• Gmail – Email, by Google. Enough said…if you’re still using msn or hotmail, you shouldn’t be. Gmail’s capabilities, mobility, and additional features / integration make it a must have in my opinion.
• iPad – I won mine in a business competition, but if it got stolen right now I’d go straight to the Apple store and buy another one. If you take the time to work it into your business lifestyle, it becomes a game changer. It sounds nerdy, but I really believe that.

Everyone has a little bit of entrepreneurship in them- not everyone has experience building a successful company, but everyone has a little bit of “wouldn’t it be great if XYZ?” in them.

This post is not meant to show you how to build a successful business- you’ll find a lot of that online, some of which works and some of which does not. Instead, this post will walk you through a number of specific steps that you can use to go from “wouldn’t it be great if XYZ?” to actually pursuing the business idea, if you choose to do so. In addition, I’ve also listed some great tools that may help you along the way.

Step 1- Define the Problem Your Solving, and For Who

Take a step back from your idea and ask yourself what problem you’re solving for your customers.

For example, my best friend is looking to start a group home for seniors (basically an independent assisted living center, run out of a large residential property rather than a giant complex). This is a great idea (gigantic market and growing, economics of it look good, and there are some pretty good real estate aspects to the business model that you can leverage), but what is the problem he’s solving?

In short, there are a large number of seniors in many areas (and growing day by day).

• His home is going to provide a comfortable place to live that’s not institutionalized and “big” like many assisted living centers.
• In addition, he will have expert staff such as nurses and doctors as needed for various medical care, although his particular home isn’t for serious medical treatment.
• Finally, residents will have the general comforts of home while their loved ones will have peace of mind knowing they’re safe.

When diving deeper into your idea, ask yourself:

1. What pain, problem, or inconvenience am I solving?
2. Who experiences this pain?

Step 2- How Will You Solve the Problem?

Now that you’ve defined what the problem is, it’s time to think through how you’re actually going to solve the problem. Don’t worry about the financial side of things yet- just think through how you’re going to solve the problem you defined above.

Sticking with the small group home for seniors idea mentioned above:

• He’ll need to have the property where residents can live. The property will probably need to be able to fit 4-6 residents comfortably, so we’re probably looking at a 4-5 bedroom place. In addition, it needs to be in a nice neighborhood that feels comfortable to the residents.
• He’ll most likely need some sort of certification or license to operate the business. Since he’s not providing extensive medical care, he may not need in-depth certifications. But odds are, there is some sort of certification process involved. This can be researched via a few quick Google searches, although I usually just jot dot everything related to the business and then start researching each one at a later time.
• He’ll need to have staff available to provide the care and operate the business. This is a common step that many people forget to think through at the start of researching a business. While you may run the business solely on your own at the start (or even forever), it should be structured in a way to allow others to run it at some point if you want…otherwise, you’ve just got a “job”, with a lot more liability. In our example, he may need a registered nurse on staff or some other level of medically experienced staff that’s not a doctor. In addition, he may need to contract with various service providers that can come to the property periodically to add to the great experience of living at the home. For example, specialized group personal trainers for the elderly, musicians, etc.

Step 3- Basic Economics of the Business

At this stage, it’s time to start thinking through the financial side of the business. By no means am I saying that you should build out a detailed cash flow forecast, a 5 year revenue and profitability forecast, or anything along those lines.

Instead, you should jot down answers to the basic questions below:

• How much will someone pay to have their problem solved, as you’re proposing? In the senior group home example, this would be the monthly fee that residents would pay. In other examples, it could be an hourly rate for a service, a price for a product, etc.
• How much will it cost you to solve these problems on an ongoing basis- by “ongoing basis”, I mean what are your typical expenses directly related to serving customers over time and not the upfront expenses or overhead expenses. In the senior group home example, this would be the mortgage / lease on the property and other property-related expenses (utilities, electricity, etc.), cost of staff, food, insurance / licenses if ongoing fees are involved, etc. Note that I put the property expenses in for this particular example since it’s an ongoing predictable expense and a pretty big part of the businesses’ service offering (i.e. residents are paying for a place to live). I realize in other businesses these might be considered up-front expenses or overhead.
• How much will it cost you to acquire customers? Note that this doesn’t mean, “how much will my website, brochures, business cards, etc.’ cost?”. Instead, you should get as close as possible to “each paying customer we receive will cost us X dollars”. This is easier in some businesses than others, but you can usually run some sort of calculation to get to this number. In the senior group home example, it’s very common to pay for “move ins”, which is essentially a fee you pay to an outside sales organization if they refer someone to your home that actually moves in (i.e. becomes a paying customer). That makes the calculation pretty easy…
• Taking into account the above numbers, what is the potential big picture profit per customer or per time period (monthly, etc.). Again, this is not meant to be used to develop your financial projections…it’s just to understand how you will profit from the business. While building a business your passionate about is important, you need to be able to profit in order to sustain and grow the business.

Tools That Will Help You

Although every business idea is unique, all business ideas are similar in that they require a lot of research to think through and move forward with. It’s important that you take action rather than research the years away on your great idea, but below are a few tools that may help you uncover some powerful information that you can leverage when starting the business.

• Quora.com – Quora is an amazing resource for finding answers to questions related to business, marketing, and quite a few other things. For example, you can find specific metrics related to various industries (i.e. typical conversion rates for online retailers), the technology used by various companies (i.e. how was the Groupon.com website developed), etc. In short, it’s a solid resource to find answers to questions that come up (and dive down the occasional rabbit hole) as you’re researching your business.
• AngelList –  AngelList is basically LinkedIn for independent investors that are actively seeking startup companies to invest in. While you may not be ready for investment yet, it can’t hurt to identify specific investors that are active in your industry (i.e. if they’ve invested in other companies in your industry) and reach out to them to discuss your idea. If you have specific questions to ask and don’t come across as someone that is going to waste their time, then it’s fairly simple to form some pretty powerful relationships through AngelList. In short, be honest, be clear, and be compelling…that will go a long way. Remember, these investors are actively putting themselves out there to be contacted by startups…you shouldn’t be scared to contact them ; )
• Google Search Operators – You’re going to spend a ton of time on Google researching your business. You may not already know that you can use specific search codes on Google to find very specific information. For example, this search shows you anything on ImJonTucker.com that mentions “Google search operators”. Become familiar with how these work and get comfortable using them. It will take a bit of time of forcing yourself to use them, but once they’re part of your standard Google search behavior, you’ll realize that you are finding much more relevant content very quickly.

Having been in web marketing for most of my adult life, friends and family often ask for marketing advice that they can apply to their own business or career. In many of these cases, they’re striking out on a more independent career path such as business consulting or independent sales where they will be responsible for generating sales for a firm.

While there are obviously numerous ways to market a business, my own experience has shown me that striving for expertise in a market and sharing that expertise in a constructive way is crucial- and it’s often enough to build a steady stream of referrals. After all, the “product” of a business consultant is really their expertise in the area they’re consulting in- clients are paying for their expertise for the betterment of their own firm. The same goes for someone in sales- prospects need to be confident in your expertise in order to trust the product(s) that you’re selling.

In order to build that expertise, you really only need (1) expertise in your industry- duh (2) a few free web tools that we’re going to cover below. While you’ll probably use additional marketing tactics in the future, the below will give you a solid foundation to start from and help you build a strong referral pipeline in your market.

Step 1- Have a Professional Website With a Blog

If you’re working for a bigger company, they probably already have a website. That’s fine- but you should still have your own blog where you share your thoughts related to the industry with prospects and current customers. Think of the blog as your communication touch point with the marketplace. This is your “conversation”, so it’s important that it look professional and have a steady flow of good content- similar to how you would be sure to dress professional for an offline event and contribute to the conversation of attendees.

Weebly.com is a great resource to put together you own website with a blog, or even just a blog. The basic version, which is enough for what you need, is free while the premium version is only about $6/month. Plus, it’s one of the simplest website tools out there for putting together a professional looking site in a short time.

WordPress.com is another resource to consider for launching a blog (versus a website with a blog), but it’s going to be a bit more technical.

For the person that wants to whip together their website in a weekend, Weebly is the way to go.

Step 2- Create Interesting Content

Once you have your website and blog completed, it’s time to start creating content. By “content”, I’m simply referring to blog posts like the one you’re ready here. By creating content about topics that are of interest to your prospects and customers, you will gradually build expertise in your market and become known as the go-to-guy (or gal of course) in your local industry.

Here’s a few tips to make content creation easier:

• Organize your ideas for content in a Google Spreadsheet (or anywhere) so that you have a list of topics readily available. That way, you don’t have to write the post right when you think of the idea- just add it to your list.
• Look at other companies and bloggers in your niche for ideas on content- here’s a quick search on Google in the “CRM Software” niche that you can modify for your industry. While this might sound a bit odd, most of the ideas for content that you have exist somewhere else- why not leverage other people’s content in your brainstorming work.
• Publish at least once blog post per week. That may sound like a lot, but if you work it into your weekly schedule you’ll find that it becomes easier over time.
• In order to bulk up the amount of content you have on your blog without having to write “full posts” too frequently, consider summarizing other people’s blog posts. Check out the post here for more info on that tactic.

Step 3- Distribute and Share Your Content

Now that you’re creating all this content, it’s time to share it with people…after all, your work is in vain if no one is reading your content, right?

There are a range of ways to share your content, but below are the basic foundational ways that you can use to easily share your content with your customers and prospects from day 1.

• Reference new blog posts in your email signature. I’ve found that quite a bit of traffic comes from my email signature. Make sure you leverage all those emails that you’re already sending out each day.
  
• Create an email newsletter at Mailchimp.com- it’s free for an account that doesn’t do huge volume (i.e. 1,000′s of emails per month) and pretty simple to setup using one of their templates. Sending out a monthly email newsletter, which is basically a quick summary of your favorite blog post for the month and a link to the post on your blog, will help you keep in touch with people that you may not otherwise contact throughout the month in your normal emails. You can even import existing contacts that you have, which is why Mailchimp can get you off to a great start- but be careful with who you consider “interested” in your newsletter as you are technically not allowed to import people who haven’t actually given you permission to be added to your newsletter list according to MailChimp’s terms of service. See the Can Spam Act for more info on email marketing. Shameless plug- You can signup for my agency’s newsletter here to use as an example if you’d like.
• Refer people to the blog when relevant, such as if you have a conversation with them about a topic you’ve already written about. Hint- take a mental note of the questions people ask you throughout the month and consider writing blog posts about the questions that many people seem to be interested in.

Step X- Measure All of It

While this isn’t crucial at the early stages, it may service to motivate you to continue to write content if you see people are interacting with it (i.e. “it’s working!”).

• You can measure the number of visitors to your website or blog by using Google Analytics- here’s a pretty simple setup guide for Analytics in Weebly websites
• MailChimp has metrics built in so that you can see how many people are on your email list, how many new subsribers you’ve received, the number of people who open and read your emails, and much more.
• This is a bit more advanced, but you can “tag” the links to your blog (i.e. a link in your email signature) so that you’ll know which website visitors came from your website through the link. For example, you may see that 100 visitors came this month from your email signature links while only 77 came from your newsletter.

Get Started- Let Me Know If You Have Questions

In short, marketing for consultants or sales reps basically comes down to fostering your expertise in the marketplace. The above tactics will help you build a good initial foundation for marketing yourself or your products, and all of them are free- it just takes a bit of your time.

Looking forward to discussing your questions in the comments below

I have to say, even I was amazed when I read about this tactic (over at Wealthy Affiliate). It’s a tactic that involves promoting someone’s ebook at a tradeshow and getting a commission for it.

While getting a commission for selling someone elses ebook is common, I hadn’t looked into promoting ebooks at offline tradeshows yet…

Here’s How It Works- A Simple Weekend Venture

1. Find an upcoming tradeshow- like a Home and Garden Show
2. Find an ebook related to the tradeshow’s target market- like a wood working plans ebook for the home and garden show (i.e. people trying to make home improvements including “do it yourselfers”)
3. Create fliers promoting the ebook through your own website address, such as WordWorkingHQ.info. When someone visits this website, they’re taken directly to the ebook’s site but it’s through your affiliate link which means you get a commission if someone buys the ebook (described below).
4. Go to the tradeshow and (1) convince a few vendors to put the fliers in their booth (2) hand out fliers yourself if possible- though that’s not too scalable (3) flier the parking lot- probably not ok with event security though (*) or figure out some other way to get your flier into the hands of the audience
5. If people visit the link on your flier and actually buy the ebook, you get a percentage.

To put this in context, the woodworking ebook mentioned above sells very well online at $67 and pays out 50% commission I believe ($33.50 per sale)- that’s not a bad commission if you can sell 25-50+ at a single event.

Past Experience With This Tactic

While I haven’t personally tried this tactic (yet), a member of the discussion forum that I read about this on had a pretty regular system going where he does this at multiple conferences per quarter and makes $1,000′s per month doing it. He’s tweaked it quite a bit since starting up earlier in the year, but the core concept is the same- he’s promoting an online ebook at offline events via fliers and commissions on each sale.

Do you have any experience with tradeshow events? I’m thinking of doing a pilot test of this at a few local tradeshows here in San Diego and possibly scaling it up around the country (more on that later).

Looking forward to some discussion in the comments below…

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image credit: Flickr user tresbienshop

Being a web-based entrepreneur (i.e most of the projects I work on are usually websites, involve heavy amounts of SEO and web marketing, etc.), I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out faster / better ways of doing repetitive tasks online.

Google Docs- It’s More Than Docs and Spreadsheets

Google Docs, a seemingly simple free tool Google provides to create online word documents and excel spreadsheets, can be used in quite a a few different ways to rapidly complete tasks that may otherwise have taken you hours.

Below is a Google Docs hack that saves me countless hours each week.

Create a List of Specific Websites in 60 Seconds

If you need to create a list of websites about a given topic, such as any bloggers that have written posts about “iPad 2 Products”, here’s a quick way to get the initial list of 100+ blog posts into a Google Docs spreadsheet in a matter of seconds.

• Go to Google Blogs and search intitle:”ipad 2 products” (here’s the search to use)
• Use your Google search settings on Google to see 100 search results at a time instead of just 10 per search result page.
• Open a Google Docs spreadsheet
• Enter the following formula into cell A1 of your spreadsheet.
• =ImportXML(“URL”, ”//h3[@class='r']/a/@href”)
• *Replace URL in the above formula with the URL of the Google search results page for your search (i.e. this URL in the example described above)
• Your Google Spreadsheet should now automagically fill in the 100 webpage addresses that you’re seeing in the Google search results as shown below.
  *if the spreadsheet doesn’t include 100 results, add “&num=100″ (without quotes) to the very end of the URL that you inputted into formula =ImportXML(“URL”, ”//h3[@class='r']/a/@href”) as noted above.
• These results are saved in a formula format, so they can’t be modified yet. In order to turn them into a “normal” list of websites that you can edit (i.e. as if you manually typed each one into the spreadsheet), just copy the entire column and right click on another column to “Paste Values”- this will paste just the values of the list instead of the actual formulas.
  

Other Google Docs Tricks Coming Soon

The above is one of the main Google Docs hacks that I use frequently (sometimes daily), but below are a few others that I’ll write about soon.

• Getting the follower / following count for multiple Twitter users at once
• Downloading all the URLs for a specific website
• Counting the number of website links a page has

Helpful Resources for Google Docs Hacks

Below are sources I recommend reviewing if you’re interested in leveraging Google Docs to speed up work that you’re doing online.

• “ImportXML CookBook” from Seer- Great post summarizing almost anything you’d want Google Docs to do
• Pre-Made Google Spreadsheet- This spreadsheet has a ton of the formulas already built in. By using File > Make a Copy, you’ll be able to save a copy to your own Google Docs account and start using it.

Getting the feedback of other people as you develop your idea can be incredibly powerful. Not only will you start to see if people “get it”, but you may begin to expand or refine your idea based on common responses that multiple people give to you.

Don’t Just Start Building Your App

As an entrepreneur myself, I understand that you may feel the need to start building right away…there is no time to test the concept with your customers or peers, right?. However, with so many easy to use tools out there to demonstrate your concept quickly, you’d be crazy not to gather feedback before coding.

One tool that’s extremely helpful is Balsamiq Mockups (not an affiliate link). I’ve used it numerous times and it’s one of the first stops I make when I think of a new idea.

Balsamiq enables you to quickly, easily, and at no-cost create a sketch of your website or mobile app that you can use to demonstrate to customers.

Examples of Fast Sketches

iTunes

YouTube

Demonstration Video of Balsamiq in Action

Balsamiq’s interface is extremely easy to use. Here’s a 2 minute video of how to create the main iTunes interface, demonstrated directly by the company founder.

Other Uses for Balsamiq

In addition to sketching your idea for a new website or mobile app, you can use Balsamiq to work with your creative or development team in building a product  to your specifications, wireframing website designs for clients prior to starting a project (if you design websites for people), and much more.

Try Balsamiq for Free

While there are quite a few awesome features within the paid version (not an affiliate link), there is plenty that you can do with the web-based demo linked from the homepage. You can sketch your entire app, download it as a jpg/PDF, and even save the sketch and open it at a later time.

Give Balsamiq a try and pick up the paid version if you find it useful. This team is absolutely killing it, on both their product as well as the great service they offer.

Do you have any other tools that you use regularly to concept your idea for people? List them in the comments.

You had a great idea for a web-based startup, have hacked together a prototype to test the concept, built a great team, and have ultimately produced a market-ready product (wow- that makes it sound a bit too easy).

But now you need users…

Bloggers Can Help You Launch Your Product

If you’ve created a rockstar product (note: there are no silver bullet marketing tactics for a mediocre product), chances are that you’re going to get some great blog coverage once you’ve launched. But part of your product launch strategy should be strategic blogger outreach to expedite and expand the coverage you get.

Here are a few ways a blogger that believes in your rockstar product can help make your launch a success:

• Write a post or review of your product (duh)
• Email their list re: your product (or re: their blog post reviewing your product)
• Post a widget related to your product on their blog for their users to interact with. For example, Yelp has a widget for showcasing reviews, GrooveShark has a pretty cool “make your own playlist” widget, etc.
• Introduce you to other bloggers who might help as noted above
• and more (full post re: launch strategies coming soon)

But How Do You Find Bloggers to Contact?

The bulk of this blog post is meant to help you actually build a list of potential bloggers to get in touch with.

Apart from simply knowing who a few of the leading blogs that you personally follow are, I wanted to share a strategy that I use to find bloggers within a given niche during a blogger outreach campaign.

Let’s assume you’ve created a product specifically for traveling backpackers.

Step 0- Organize Your Info

A simple Google doc or excel spreadsheet is good enough to gather the info below, but make sure that you start off organized because you’re going to be compiling a ton of information (and working with other people at some point if you are doing a large launch).

Step 1- Find an Existing List to Start With

A great starting point for building your list is to find a list that already exists.

Quora.com is a popular Q & A site that has some great content. The odds are in your favor that someone has already at least asked Quora users for a list of popular blogs in your particular niche. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few gems that will help in your research.

• Here’s a discussion thread I found on a quick search for backpacking blogs.
• In fact, here’s a massive gem I found through this Quora post: A weekly list of the Top 100 Indy Travel Blogs

Step 2- Use Blog-Specific Search Engines / Directories

Another step to take at the start of your research is to use blog-specific search engines / directories to search for blogs by industry / topic, mentions of your company / competitors, mentions of popular news stories in your industry, etc.

Here’s a few you can use:

• www.blogcatalog.com- Great for finding all types of blogs, and I personally like their interface better than Technorati. For example, here’s a list of travel blogs that are specifically about backpacking.
• www.technorati.com- Great for finding larger blogs
• Google Blog Search- Uses Google to search specifically through blogs, but it’s a bit harder to filter down by readership, etc. You can use specific Google search operators to find relatively specific blog posts, such as blogs with “my backpacking trip” in the title.
• AllTop.com- Another great place for finding larger blogs, but it’s more difficult to find obscure smaller blogs that may still have a large readership.

Step 3- Find Blog Posts Being Shared on Twitter

Apart from existing lists and directory sites, you can use search.Twitter.com to find blogs that are being shared on Twitter. For example, you could find Twitter users that specifically shared a website link and said “backpacking guide” or “backpacking” in their tweet.

• I use Twitter’s advanced search with the “any of these words” field (i.e. any posts that say “backpacking”) and “only show tweets that contain links” so you actually find blogs / websites instead of just tweets.
• If you hack around, you can write this yourself rather than using Twitter’s advanced search page to speed things up.

Step 4- Find Lesser Known Blogs Mentioned by Twitter Users

Another way to use Twitter is to find Twitter users that mentioned a particular blog you found above or something related to your topic. Then look through their Twitter stream to find other related blogs they’ve mentioned. This is a bit tedious, but you may be able to find some gems.

• For example, find any Twitter users that retweeted lonely planet (lonely planet is a large travel site), then search through the user’s other tweets to find other related travel blogs.

Step 5- Prioritize Your List

Once you’ve compiled a large list of potential blogs (I usually end up with 100-200 minimum), you want to prioritize the list so that you can focus your efforts on a decent number of bloggers that (1) would definitely be interested in your product and (2) have enough of a readership or following to make an impact.

Here’s a few metrics I gather to prioritize my spreadsheet:

• how popular is the blog online, (roughly) gauged by:
  • number of indexed posts on Google via a site search on Google
  • number of websites linking to the blog via Open Site Explorer (the free version of the tool is good enough for this)
  • number of mentions on Twitter of the blogger’s Twitter account (note that I wouldn’t use number of Twitter followers as a main metric because it’s so easily inflated and gamed).
  • number of comments on their blog posts via randomly clicking through their posts and seeing if there are a lot or just a few comments (or none)…that’s accurate enough for now.
  • *You can make this process much faster if you know XPATH coding via Google docs, have used or created web scrapers in the past, or work with an overseas data entry team but that’s a post for another day ; )
• How established the blog is via the age of the website on GoDaddy’s “whois” info
• Number of subscribed readers, either through the blogger openly posting this on their blog or by hacking it if the blog uses feedburner.

Your goal should be to end up with 25-50 bloggers that you now want to form an initial relationship with. I usually shoot for a smaller focused approach rather than expecting to become best friends with 100+ bloggers in a short time frame.

Now You’re Ready to Start Outreach

I’ll be posting another post on product launch strategies that will provide some guidance re: how to actually form a relationship with a blogger (i.e. don’t just start pitching), but here’s a few tips:

• Keep it personalized- don’t use a massive email template, don’t be pitchy, etc.
• Research the blogger first- read their blog posts, gauge their views in your industry, etc. Integrate this into your personalized email. You could even create a Google Custom Search Engine (like this one) to find blog posts written by your target blogger list that are about a topic related to your project (instant connection with the blogger).
• Make it easy for them to do what you’re asking- give them all the info they need in a short and succinct way, provide any images / video links that they can use, etc.

I hope this post has been helpful and that you’ve learned a trick or two that you may not have known before. Share your thoughts or questions in the comments about blogger outreach and how you use it (or could use it) for your product launch or existing business.

This is a tool I use for various tasks, but I thought that I’d post it to the blog for anyone that finds it useful. It essentially enables you to search through specific startup related blogs that I follow. It’s like Google.com, but it’s limited to the specific websites I’ve targeted with this list.

For example, search “viral marketing tactics” to find blog posts about viral marketing from these startup blogs.

*note: excuse the Google ads. It’s a free and powered by Google, but they gotta make that money ; )

Let’s face it, a startup isn’t blessed with an endless marketing budget to be spent on every web marketing tactic in the book. To be effective in your web marketing, you need to ensure that your marketing budget is being spent in the most effective way possible.

Here’s a stealth tactic your team should use that you may have been on the receiving end of yourself…

Do See You Certain Ads Everywhere Online?

Think of the last time you visited a website and then left, without giving them your contact information, making a purchase, or leaving any other way for them to contact you after you’ve left.

Chances are, you may have started to see their advertisements on many other websites in subsequent days.

For example:

• You visit LiquidWeb.com
• You leave LiquidWeb.com without signing up
• You see their ads on multiple other websites related to LiquidWeb.com
• You click on one of the ads, end up back at LiquidWeb.com, and maybe even signup

Because you see their ads everywhere, you may start to think: “wow, this website seems pretty popular since I’m seeing them everywhere. I think I’ll go check them out again…”. Sure, this might be a idealized explanation, but you get the main idea.

Ads Can Be Targeted To People That Visited Your Website in the Past

One of the powerful features of Google’s advertising network is that you can specifically show ads to people that have visited your website in the past but left without making a purchase. For example, you can tell Google “once someone visits my website, I want you to show them my ads when they’re visiting related websites out on the web”.

Depending on your ad settings, you can actually only target people that have visited your website in the past instead of showing your ads to people that are just browsing related websites. This enables you to catch the eye of website visitors since they’ve visited your website in the past and will recognize your company upon seeing the ad.

The video below provides a brief explanation of remarketing and how it’s actually accomplished in your Google account and website code:

Applying Remarketing to Your Startup

Although the possibilities are endless, below are a few ways that you can apply remarketing to the launch or ongoing marketing of your startup.

• Remarket to people that signed up on your website pre-launch. You could specifically show them ads encouraging them to invite their friends to the pre-launch in order to get some sort of benefit (early access, premium account for free, etc.)
• Remarket to people that have read your blog in the past. You could either market to them to visit your website and sign up for your product, or simply showcase additional blog content that you want them to come back to read.
• Remarket to people that have actually purchased a product on your website, either up-selling or cross-selling them on related products. It should be noted that you can target people based on the specific product they purchase, product categories, or just the fact that they purchased anything from your website.
• A ninja tactic you could use, if you get lucky, is to remarket to people that have visited one of your partners websites in the past. For example, let’s say that you’re lucky enough to be friends with someone that has a complimentary website (i.e. their customers are your target customers) and they happen to get 10X the website traffic that you get. You could technically remarket to people that have visited this website in the past if you were able to convince your friend (the other website owner) to input your remarketing code on their website.

Today’s To Do’s:

• Watch the remarketing video embedded above (or see it here)
• Brainstorm 1-3 “audiences” you would want to advertise to for your business (i.e. people that visited your blog, people that downloaded free content from you, people that made a purchase, etc.)
• Make remarketing part of your web marketing startegy in the next 30 days

Are you currently using remarketing? What other stealth marketing tactics are you using to drive traffic to your website?