The Startup Pre-launch Strategy

We’re building something awesome for marketers and when we launch we want to make sure people know. This is our startup pre-launch strategy for Makers Tool.

First Goal: 1000 Subscribers

Strategy:

• Develop a plan to keep our audience engaged with really great content
• Build up industry connections to network with
• Spend twice as much or more time distributing the content than we did create it
• Create a one awesome piece of ‘opt-in’ content per post
• Contact everyone mentioned in the post

We’re focused on growing our blog first and then building our brand through content before launching our product.

The Blog Strategy

We want to create a blog about our journey because there are already a lot of great blogs that cover marketing/growth tactics.

Every post our audience gets from us is going to be an update with where we are and how we’re moving forward.

We hope this strategy creates a more engaged audience as we will be telling a story that you can learn from, not hit or miss tactics.

How we plan on getting our first 500 subscribers.

Great content of course.

We did some easy math to help figure out how much content we need to create to get those 500 subscribers:

If we have a 5% overall conversion rate on our blog

We need 10,000 targeted visitors at least. Which leads us to the next question:

Where can we find 10,000 awesome marketers who value good content?

Content Distribution

(without great content we won’t be able to achieve this)

We won’t be distributing the content to each site at the same time/day. We want to make sure every time we submit an article the right people see it give it the best chance of success.

GrowthHackers.com – Estimating 300 hits per top article

Social Media Today – Republishing this content – Estimating 10 hits + Backlink 🙂

Hacker News – Estimating a lot of traffic for the top article but it’s hard.

Reddit – Multiple relevant subreddits. I’ve barely used Reddit, so going to have to earn some Karma beforehand. – 20 hits Est.

Facebook Groups – Not very effective for traffic but when starting, every bit helps. Estimating 10/Hits from all groups combined.

LinkedIn Groups -Same as FB 10 hits est.

Tribber – Unsure of the traffic from here. Been wanting to experiment with this.

Twitter – We’re going to be tweetin up a storm. Follow us: @TheMakersCrew

Slideshare – Adds to the content, increases the distribution and really doesn’t take that long to create. I personally hate the giant slideshares with over 80 pages, so we’re going to focus on short impactful slideshares.

Tumblr – Going to be mainly using this to share content with relevant hashtags. May drop this from the distribution strategy later on.

Total Estimated Hits: 630 per post

Joining Communities

Communities we can actually contribute to, not just spam our content. This also limits the amount we can join and actively participate in. So we are targeting 3 high traffic, relevant communities.

Quora – If you legitimately help people on Quora, they will want to see who you are and what you’re about. We plan on helping people and gaining visitors with this.

Warrior Forums – Why? This is a high traffic place with a lot of marketers. Yes, there is a lot of ‘spammy’ stuff going on but we’ll be looking for the good marketers.

The third community/forum was a tossup between Marketing Profs & Digital Point.

We decided on the Digital Point forum because it has much higher traffic.

Estimated: 20 hits/day

Newsletters

We have to be careful here because we want the newsletters to cover us when relevant and don’t want to burn any potential relationships by sending them every piece of content we create.

Strategy – Only send our content to the ones it’s most relevant to. You only get one chance with this and it needs to be taken very seriously.

SaaS Club – One of our personal favorites. Always great content in this newsletter. 100% open rate over here. Curated by @saasclubio

Startup Digest – An awesome weekly newsletter I’ve been subscribed to for a while.

Founder Weekly – Another really awesome newsletter lead by very intelligent @Rahul Chaudhary

Morning Reader 3 – Has some really big names, not sure if we can get on here but we’re sure as hell gonna try!

Techo.co – They have a weekly curated list. Generally, it’s only their content, i’m hoping if we can deliver enough value they’ll consider us.

Product Habits by Hiten Shah – A newsletter by just a brilliant guy. Who doesn’t know Hiten?

Hacker Newsletter – Check out the website. They have some awesome testimonials backing up their newsletter.

Convince & Convert – One thing newsletter. These guys know marketing, the content we submit has to be amazing to even be remotely considered.

Estimated: 500 hits/mention

RoundUp Posts

We’re also going to be actively searching for great roundups that we can be a part of.

See these awesome posts to learn how to search for round ups:

Quick Sprout – How to build links and traffic from round ups

And also Blogger Jet has a really good round up list here

Outreach – Relevant content

We’re going to be researching every post and finding people who have created similar posts.

Depending on what type of content they created, we’re either going to ask for a share or a mention via social.

Worth reading:

Putting outreach theories to the test – Amazing case studies

Another outreach case study post – awesome stuff here again from the Moz blog.

Some really good examples of outreach emails that work by the awesome Gregory Ciotti.

Estimated: 5 hits /per share + 5 hits per link

Outreach – People we just want to connect with because they’re awesome.

We’re also going to be doing some outreach to influencers who we think can help us grow this blog.

We’re not going to be listing exactly who but we will share our strategy in an upcoming post. Make sure you subscribe.

Estimated: 5 hits /per share + the start of a relationship <3

We’re not guest posting, yet

Guest posting is great. To get the type of traffic to make it worthwhile though you need to get some highly respected blogs to let you contribute.

To do this, you need to come to the table with something. That’s why we’re going to wait until this blog has a good amount of subscribers before we start guest posting and then leverage our community.

Tools Used:

Buzzsumo – Using this to find relevant content and bloggers.

BuzzStream – Helps us manage our contacts/influencer outreach.

Buffer – Is there even another choice? 🙂

Pin Groupie – Helps us find relevant groups to post our pins in and jump our Pinterest profile.

Articles we reviewed in the making of this post:

15 Pre-launch growth hacks by Gleam.io – Takeaway – Drive signups from your email signature. I am now using Wisestamp.

Distribution Checklist – Takeaway – Find roundups

25 Creative content promotion strategies – Venchito is one of the best marketers out of the Philippines and I love his content. We took the interview idea out of this post.

17 Advanced content promotion strategies – Takeaway – Slideshare + Tribber – From @IAmAaronAgius