Creately Blog

Growing Traffic for your Web Startup

So you’ve built a killer web application (lets call it “Killer App A”) and you’re ready to take over the world with it. Now what?

How exactly do you get the rest of this planet excited or even aware of your new whizz-bang Killer App A? How do you get it out there and build an audience for your product with a bootstrapped startup’s budget?

Just like conventional offline marketing, every startup marketer needs to understand the basic marketing tenets of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning if you’re to succeed. Once you’ve identified your target segment and customer - you’ll need to find the best way to reach these target customers.

Unfortunately, simply knowing who your target customer is - isn’t going to be good enough because you don’t have the budget to hire marketing suits to help you reach these customers. Fortunately for all of us, the Internet today offers a host of options to get Killer App A out to the people who matter - it just takes a little work and a healthy dose of creativity to succeed.

3 Questions to ask about your target Customers?

Once you’ve identified your target customer - you’ll need to know where to find your target customer, or more specifically, where on the Internet your potential customers are spending their time and attention - so you can get “Killer App A” in front of them.

Typically you need to be able to answer the following questions about your target customers:
1) Which websites or blogs does a typical customer visit?
2) Who are the influencers or mover and shakers that your target customers are paying attention to?
3) Are there online Communities, Forums or Social Networks that your customers congregate at?

Answering these basic questions will help you formulate the most cost effective strategy for customer acquisition - allowing you to channel your limited resources towards the most relevant customer sources.

Start Here… Google Alerts

The first thing I’d recommend for anyone trying to reach their customers is to create a set of Google Alerts. Google Alerts are a great way to keep up to date with the latest on any topic on the Internet, and thats exactly what you want to do for the keywords (topics) that matter to you and your customers. You can set it up to receive daily alerts and once you’ve found a site thats relevant - you’ll want to Engage, Engage, Engage.

Here at Creately.com - we’re interested in customers who draw technical and business diagrams - so we’ve set up Google Alerts which point us to sites, blogs and online conversations where these are being discussed.
Then we engage in the blogs and forums that discuss these topics - initially by offering to help and providing useful information and resources to gain credibility in the community. And finally introducing your product/service where appropriate (Note: Posting about your product without engagement can be counter-productive). This is a great way to reach out! Once you’re known within the community, you can also send out direct emails to bloggers requesting them to review your startup - this sure beats a standardized email from an unknown startup.

Where are your competitors reaching customers?
Another nifty trick is to set up Google Alerts for you competitor’s product or brand. If someone’s talking about your competitor on a website or blog - that probably means there’s a keen interest from the Blog’s author and readers in your particular space or product. As long as your product can add value to the discussion, there is no reason why you shouldn’t engage with this blog/site to put forward Killer App A.

Start-up Blogs

Another great source for potential customers is getting featured on one of the leading Technology blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or Mashable. These sites can drive a lot of traffic to your website but simply relying on these tech blogs is not good enough to grow your startup’s web-presence (Read more about the Techcrunch bump here).

Here are some good tips to help you get featured.

• Pitching to ReadWriteWeb
• How not to Pitch a Blogger
• How to get your Startup mentioned on TechCrunch
• TechCrunch vs Mashable - Which works best?

Besides these high traffic blogs there are a host of very useful niche blogs that may be relevant to your target customer base. But, how will you find these niche blogs? Marshall Kirkpatrick (from RWW fame) has a good post on finding the right sites on his blog.

Directories (Google Loves them)

Now, just as how review sites are paramount to any startup it is equally important to get listed in Directories. DMOZ is one such prestigious directory, and so is MakeUseOf.com, and KillerStartups.com. Bookmark these URLs and read these posts for useful tips for getting Killer App A listed on them:

• How to get listed in DMOZ
• Listed on KillerStartups for Free

Good backlinks from these reputable Tech Blogs and Directories help build your business’s reach and gain credibility in a very competitive startup environment. Besides being a great way of acquiring initial traffic, these listings improve your site’s Google Page Rank by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages.

Content is King

Reviews and listings will drive good traffic, but to convert the traffic into customers there’s a lot more work to be done - we’ll discuss some strategies for conversion in another post. In the meantime, you need to be constantly engaging with the communities that will drive customers your way. Write blog posts that appeal to your target customer, always using appropriate titles to capture the attention of readers. The goals of your blog posts should be to educate, inform and to generate comments.

Social Media is your Friend

You’ve written your posts and published them - now its time to make sure you get the maximum leverage from your effort. Social media plays a key role here, so make sure you have profiles on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and loads more. Submit your blog posts with a back link to your blog or site. Remember to make your interactions with members on social networks a 2-way dialogue by answering their questions and helping the community where possible.

And Yes, at Cinergix we do a lot of hardwork to create a buzz about Creately! We aim at having as many reviews, listings and social media presence as possible. These tips may not work all the time, but keep at it and I assure you it will pay off.

Here’s a simple diagram featuring Creately’s Reviews from 10 review sites.

We hope you’ve found this post useful for your own Killer App - we’d love to hear of other innovative things you do to get your product out to the world.

@Charan & @Indu

Image by: Intherough/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Why Sitemaps and Website Navigation Plans Matter

Working with designers, developers, clients and other stakeholders in designing a website can be a challenge, especially when working with external vendors. Its challenging enough to grok your client’s exact requirements and you want to make sure these requirements are clearly understood by the entire project team. As part of a web design project, its essential to develop a sitemap or website navigation plan in order to clearly communicate the intent and scope of your website to stakeholders and the project team.

Web site navigation plans should include all the web pages within your site and preferably be easy to navigate, update and share. But an ideal navigation plan, should allow you to easily link your sitemap to your webpage mockups - so clients can visualize and explore the entire website design even before a single line of HTML code is written.

Interactive Sitemaps with Creately

This 2-min video demonstrates how to create interactive Sitemaps and Website Navigation Plans with Creately that user’s can click-thru to review the underlying webpage mockups. With ready made easy-start templates and a fully interactive interface, Creately makes it easy to create and collaborate on sitemaps, mockups and wireframes for all your design projects.

Like what you see? Sign up for Creately - and start creating website plans and online mockups for free.

@charanjit

Creately through to Finals of Best RIA of 2009

Thank you to everyone who voted. We have made it through to the top 10 applications in the of  Best RIA of 2009 competition. It is a great feeling. You can see the full results on the Insideria website.

The voting for the top 3 starts now til 6th September and we need your help again to get us to the top.

Here’s the link - Just click to vote - http://oreillynet.com/insideria/polls/237.csp

@nick_foster

Creately for best RIA of 2009

We’re really happy and honoured to be nominated for the best Rich Internet Applications of 2009 over at O’Reilly media’s InsideRIA.com site. It’s come as a real surprise and we’re definitely very excited to be honoured amongst some of our favourite RIAs on the web.

There will be 2 rounds of Voting - the first round of online polling is going on now and we’d love for you to click here to vote for Creately. There’s no registration or signup required. Just click and Vote. We hope to be able to make it through to the final round with your support.

The Finals will be held Live at Adobe’s Max 2009 event in LA in October 2009. We’d love to be there - so vote for us and we’ll see you at Max.

@charanjit

Creately’s New Clothes

New Skins for a New Creately

Of all the updates, features and fixes we’ve put out this month, my favourite has been the new skins we’ve put on for Creately. The previous skins were fine and we felt they did a decent job, but as we prepare to get out of our beta phase we wanted to give Creately a truly professional finish. We hope you like our new togs.

Cleaner, Smarter and Faster
We’re added a whole bunch of nice little UI tweaks as part of the new clothes we’re put on Creately. Simple little bubbles come up to help you work better with Creately. Along with these new tool tips, we’ve improved mouse interactions so there’s no more mouse flicker and far greater responsiveness from Creately. We’ve also fixed some niggling bugs around resizing of shapes, multi-select and copy’n'paste. Timing out of Creately will also no longer be a problem now that we’ve got a quick login window - so all you serious diagram-philes can keep Creately running all day.

Visual Feedback for Containers
Many of you may not have realised this, but most of our Shapes are also containers. What does that mean? Certain shapes (for example the Browser Shape in the UI library) behave as containers giving them context specific properties. When you drop another Shape into a Container Shape, the 2 shapes can interact smartly to give you special behaviour that makes working in Creately a breeze. Going back to the Browser Shape example, next time you drop a TextBox into it, you will notice a green border around the container. In this case, the TextBox shape will stick itself to the Browser without requiring you to lock or group the objects. That’s what we mean by intuitive!

Connectors
Those little lines that run all over your diagrams have had a major face-lift too. Now when you group and select, your connectors are included, and these connectors are now smarter than ever. With our new Magic Gluepoints, you can stick a connector to any part of your object and it stays there. To use this, simply mouse-over the connector endpoint on any part of a Shape, until a large dot is revealed. When you see the dot, release your mouse and the connector will now be fixed to that point. That’s ultimate flexibility built right into Creately. Expect even more innovation with our connectors in the next release.

Help Window and Shortcuts
We know you love your shortcut keys, so we’re added a whole lot of them to Creately. And its easy to find them as well. We’ve added a new Help panel next to the Share and Comments window on the right of the drawing canvas. We’re working on adding more Help tips as we go along, so keep checking back.

And here’s one that should make using Creately easier right away - Next time you’re entering text in Creately you can use the TAB key to save the Text and exit the edit mode. If you don’t want to commit the text, just press the ESC key and we’ll drop all your changes. When not editing text you can also use the TAB key to move between fields and components in Creately.

Diagrams getting Bigger

As you’ve started to use and like Creately, we’ve noticed your diagrams are getting bigger and bigger by the day - we understand, so we’re introduced a new Page Size feature, that will let you define the size of you drawing canvas when creating a new diagram. Now you can work on those large scale design projects without worrying about running out of space in your diagram.

Did I mention Clearer too?
In the last release we introduced a whole bunch of new Fonts, but our users told us the fonts needed to be sharper and clearer. So our Dev team put on their thinking hats and we’re reworked our fonts to make them a whole lot more crisp and print ready. Check it out- they’re beautiful.

@creately

PS… Keep those ideas coming.