Cameron Olthuis

Update: Last.fm’s chart looks good…

Last year I wrote a couple of posts on how getting on TechCrunch isn’t a viable marketing plan. While a TechCrunch write up can certainly be a great kick-start to your marketing campaign, by no means is that traffic spike alone going to make your company a success.

A good comparison would be getting on the homepage of Digg. They will both result in a huge spike in traffic, attention from key people, a few sign ups, and a bunch of links from other bloggers but the problem is that after a few days you’re back where you started. Ok, so maybe you have a little more traction but it won’t be enough so you need to keep moving forward. Unless you have a solid PR strategy and this will be an ongoing campaign you need to have a more well rounded marketing strategy, one that results in a graph that is up and to the right, not spikes.

I just finished reading a post on Read/WriteWeb that talks about the same thing. Author Emre Sokullu brings attention to the traffic spike caused by TechCrunch and then goes on to talk about the optimal timing for getting that coveted write up.

1. The wait list – wait until you have a large user base so when you get that spike there is already activity on the site and it doesn’t look like a ghost town.
2. The walk list – the sites on the list depend on the quality of the service and not the popularity, therefore you can shoot for that write up now.
3. The run list – these sites are dependent on the buzz from web 2.0 media because they appeal only to the tech savvy audience.

So what are some ways that you can market your web app?

1. SEO – Like it or not, the fact is that the majority of people use Google to navigate the web. This means that it’s critical to your company’s success that you are easily found in the search engines when someone searches for keywords that are relevant to your website. I’m not suggesting that you use black magic or unethical techniques to improve your search engine visibility, that’s not what real SEO is about. But you do need to make sure that your site is properly optimized so that people looking for what you do easily find you.

2. PPC – Again, going back to the fact that so many people use search engines to navigate the web it’s critical that they can find you through this medium. PPC is a great addition to SEO for a number of reasons. First, SEO can take time whereas PPC is instant, you can literally be up and running in minutes. Second, depending on your site it’s probably not reasonable that you can organically rank for all relevant keywords, variations, and misspellings, but you can bid on all those with PPC. The third reason is branding; it doesn’t hurt for paid listings to show up along side your organic listings and it just helps create mindshare.

One of the things I like best about PPC is that it scales very easily. If your campaign is properly managed it should have a positive ROI. When your company raises capital it’s very easy to scale that with the additional money.

3. Social media marketing – Social media marketing is leveraging social media sites like Digg, Delicious, YouTube, MySpace, and bloggers to spread messages virally and connect with the community. It’s a great way to increase visibility and mindshare, educate and connect with consumers, sell products and services, and generate new signups. Social media marketing shouldn’t be a one-time campaign, especially for new companies. It is something that should be ongoing and part of your overall marketing strategy.

4. Social media optimization – Social media optimization (SMO) is the process of optimizing a website so that it can easily spread through social media sites. This can be anything from improving the usability to adding RSS feeds to building widgets. The main thing is that you need to make it easy for users to share your content with their peers and help them spread the site virally.

5. Other – There are a number of other online marketing tactics that can work very well including affiliate programs, media buys, sponsorships, and more. I’m not an expert in those areas so I’ll refrain from breaking them down.