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Customers should be rewarded earlier and more often in the relationship they establish with vendors.

This is true of any type of customer and any type of business. Keurig does a nice job of providing members with 10% off purchases. That’s not a ton of money when you’re buying coffee, but it’s something. More importantly, it’s an instantaneous and ongoing reward for being a member. On the flip side, Aeroplan is such a ridiculous program that you never feel like you’ll get anything (on top of which the experience with most airlines is painful.)

Discounts are an obvious way of rewarding customers, but there are other creative ways too. Everyone likes receiving presents. Hand-written thank you notes work too. Surprise ‘em and they’ll pay you.

If you build a reward program into your strategy, make the early rewards achievable and addictive. This is where a bit of smart gamification comes in handy. Some companies reward loyalty (or try to), but very few reward customers earlier on, after one or two purchases, before loyalty is proven. And I think that’s a mistake.

The reward sign picture is courtesy of Shutterstock.

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You want someone to use your product, then get in their face and force them to. I’ve made this argument before. One of the biggest challenges for any startup is engagement – acquiring users is hard, keeping them is usually much harder. And even when users say they love your product or think it adds value, it doesn’t always translate into significant usage and engagement. Why is that?

Generally people are enthusiastic and interested in trying new things, but they’re also lazy, comfortable, scared of change, and unmotivated. You can increase motivation by charging people – generally people will stay more engaged (at least for a bit longer) when they’ve increased their level of commitment. But for a lot of web startups charging out of the gate is unlikely.

Try interrupting users.

It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot at Year One Labs with our startups. How do you interrupt the daily activities of users in such a way that you become useful (and grow into a necessity) right at the very moment when the users actually need you?

Put another way: Your web application is going to require either a change of behavior or the creation of an entirely new behavior. Both are hard to do, and it’s foolhardy to assume people will change their behaviors easily. That kills a lot of startups. So how can you interrupt a user during a chain of behaviors they’re comfortable executing to slot yourself into that chain at the right place and right time?

There are some feedback loops that are effective. Social pressure is one. The more I see people using a certain product and/or talking about a certain product (this includes media, close friends, acquaintances, and others) the more likely I’ll try something a few more times at least. Email is another potential way of trying to increase engagement. But if you go deeper than that and inject yourself right into what people are already doing and interrupt them … it won’t really feel like an interruption, and it won’t feel like a bother … it will feel like you’re creating value at the exact moment when they need it, and you’re embedding yourself into users’ existing behaviors. Suddenly the change required, the leap of faith a person has to make in order to get value and stay engaged is greatly reduced.

Drill down into the use cases you think are right for your application. Write those down. Understand (or at least hypothesize) who is the right user who fits the use cases you’ve defined. Think: personas. Then figure out what those people are doing right now in and around the use cases you’ve defined. How are they solving or semi-solving the problems you’ve identified? What are they doing immediately before and after your relevant use cases? As you explore these ideas you may find opportunities to integrate with other applications and piggyback on their traction. You may find “sneaky” tactics for injecting yourself into people’s routines, which can greatly clarify your value proposition and minimize the demands you’re making on users.

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When it comes to marketing, you need to understand the difference between tools, tactics and strategies. A blog is a tool. Writing blog posts is a tactic. Google AdWords is a tool. Publishing ads across multiple keywords is a tactic. Combine a number of tools and tactics together and you’ve got the makings of a strategy.

A strategy is driven by the goals you’re trying to accomplish. You need to identify your goals and understand them clearly. Quantify them. “We want to increase revenue” is clearly a goal. “We want to increase revenue by 25% in 6 months through increased sales of products A and B” is much better. Attach specific, measurable targets to your goals as often as you can so you’re more equipped to make rational, fact-driven decisions.

Don’t get hung up on the tools. Should you use Twitter, Quora, Facebook or blogging? Use the tools that are right for the goals you’re trying to accomplish. Chasing the newest shiny tool and scrambling to use it as quickly as you can is a fool’s errand if you don’t understand the benefits upfront. Experimentation is one thing; there are lots of advantages to experimenting, but rushing to implement a “shiny tool strategy” is silly. Worse, ignoring “older” tools because they’re no longer as shiny is shortsighted and tells me very clearly that you don’t understand marketing.

Take a look at this Twitterverse diagram produced by Brian Solis and JESS3. If you ever needed a clear indication of the glut of tools available and just how confusing they can be, this is it. How can you just pick a tool and think, “We need a strategy for that tool!” Wrong. Match goals to tools and tactics to design a proper strategy. Don’t assume you need a strategy for a specific tool because it’s shiny.

Using a tool well means understanding the tactics by which to maximize the use of said tool. Without an understanding of tactics, for all you know you could be using the wrong end of the hammer. Might still work, at least part of the time, or partially, but once you really know how to use a tool properly, with the right tactics, you can make real progress (or discover more quickly that the tool is the wrong one, not achieving your specific goals, and move on.)

When exploring how to improve marketing in your company, start at the very top with your goals. Define them. Write them down. Then investigate your marketing strategy, the tactics, and tools being used, and identify the problems. If you can’t figure this out, you’re in trouble. You won’t know what to change! Start by talking to customers, prospects and employees. Dig into how your company is perceived online. Take a look at the competition. A bit of analysis is a good thing. Get some analytics in place and start measuring what’s happening.

Jump down at this point and get right into the tools. List them all, with pros and cons, and do some research into what people are doing with them. So you’ve gone from the top (your goals and a 20,000 foot view of your current situation) to the tools of the trade. Pick the ones that you think are the best, and then get into the tactics you’ll use to maximize their value.

1. Define Goals
2. Identify Problems
3. Pick Tools
4. Implement Tactics
5. Measure & Analyze
6. Achieve Goals (or not)

Think of it more like a circle. Doing things in order doesn’t guarantee success but it significantly increases your odds. It gives you the opportunity to learn more quickly about what’s working and what’s not working, and adjust accordingly. Doing things out of order is absolutely like gambling; you may win occasionally, but your odds suck, and unless you’re one of the very few super-lucky ones, you’ll lose. And try not to mindlessly and rabidly chase the “shiny” tools for the sake of it. Tools are just tools. You need tactics and strategies for tools to be of any use.

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Video is a powerful storytelling medium. Just ask Thomas Clifford, who has been using video for many years to tell some great stories. Many of them might have seemed dull or unclear at the outset, but video and smart storytelling can work real magic.

We’re seeing quite a few startups use video prominently on their website as a quick and very helpful way to show off their products. This makes a lot of sense; not because what they’ve built is necessarily complicated or difficult to understand, but because visuals are almost always more compelling and interesting than text. I can read five bullet points that speak to your value proposition, or you can just show me.

Short videos also force you to think creatively and distill your value proposition down to its very essence. You don’t want to ramble in a video; it looks a lot worse than rambling in text. So you have to put considerable effort and thought into what story you want to tell and how. And why you’re telling it.

Video = good. There, simple.

Now for a more personal connection to the power of video and storytelling. Stresslimitdesign was engaged by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to produce a short video about greening corporate fleets. Pardon? Greening corporate what exactly? You want to paint my feet green? Not feet – fleet. Cars. Lots and lots and lots of cards. Corporate fleets are big in the US. There are millions of corporate fleet cars. And they create a lot of pollution. EDF wanted to promote the importance of making corporate fleets a bit more environmentally friendly. This isn’t about a couple kids with Methos and bottle of soda. This isn’t some chubby Star Wars fanatic swinging around a light saber. It’s a serious topic, difficult to promote and get people excited about.

Stresslimitdesign took on the challenge and put an immense amount of work into creating the video you see embedded below. Soon we’ll be releasing a “How To” micro-site that walks through how the video was created. But what makes this video particularly cool (at least for me) is that I did the voice over! That’s right … click the play button on the video and you’ll get a chance to hear yours truly. I used the best “announcer voice” I could muster. It took about 2 hours to get right. I hope you enjoy it!

Please do me a huge favor and help spread this video around. It’s important to get the message out there, and everyone deserves to hear me, right? *smile*

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I’m a big believer in content marketing. I’ve produced content to help market and promote my own business, and I’ve seen it used successfully by others as well. One of the biggest challenges with content marketing is that the barrier to produce content online is so low, everyone can do it. As a result, the quality of content online has dropped significantly. Noise goes up, signal goes down. Such is life. As a result, the bar is continuously being raised on the expectations that your audience has in terms of content quality and delivery.

Here’s a free e-book that can help — ClickPredictions: Key Content Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2010 (PDF download)

The e-book was produced by ClickDocuments. It’s a good refresher on the key content and social media marketing trends for the coming year. ClickDocuments and Ambal Balakrishnan collected predictions and thoughts from 39 top B2B content marketers. Folks like Gordon Graham, Rick Liebling, Michael Stelzner, Doug Kessler, Dave Fleet, Sunil Malhotra and many more. The e-book was also sponsored by Marketo. So there’s a great collection of people who participated, and a lot of actionable content to share.

Full disclosure: I’m not published in the e-book but I did help with its production. I work from time to time with a great digital design and development agency, Stresslimitdesign. They recently did a kick ass redesign of Julien Smith’s blog. Stresslimitdesign did the e-book design (which I think is beautiful) and then I helped them out with a couple of cool (hopefully!) marketing ideas:

1. Customized toolbar. We created a custom browser toolbar for the e-book that kicks in whenever you click a link from within the e-book itself. The toolbar will show up at the top of your browser window. I’ve included a screenshot below. The purpose of the toolbar is to introduce you to other valuable B2B content (from Marketo) covering email marketing, demand generation and lead management. You can minimize the toolbar if you like, but when you click on the buttons, you’re taken to a landing page for more content. We’re using the ClickPredictions e-book as a content marketing test itself by implementing the toolbar. My hypothesis is that it will be better appreciated than the popups that we often see on sites asking you to join a newsletter (although I know they’re very effective), and a great way to stay connected with people who download the free e-book. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

   

2. ReTweet This to Slideshare. Of course, we want people to share the e-book as much as possible. And there’s a very nice page halfway through that provides readers with some options on how to share the content. But we also wanted to give as much credit as possible to each individual contributor and give readers as much flexibility as possible in terms of what content they wanted to share. So we implemented “ReTweet This” buttons for each prediction in the e-book. What’s cool is that each one of these will retweet a link to the actual page of content in question on Slideshare. The entire e-book is available on Slideshare. But you can also just retweet a specific prediction and it will link to the specific page inside the e-book on Slideshare. I’ve never seen that done before, but I think it’s a very smart way to let readers retweet pieces of content they particularly enjoy and highlight each contributor just a little bit more.

It was a fun project to work on, and I hope you enjoy it.

Click here to download ClickPredictions

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I’m a big believer in inbound marketing. I’ve seen it work, and I’ve leveraged many of its tactics for myself, my business, and for others. I believe it will (and has already started to) fundamentally change how companies market to consumers.

Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan are smart guys. They’re the founders of Hubspot, and masters of inbound marketing. And they’re the authors of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media). I read the book in an afternoon (it’s an easy read with great cartoons) and wanted to share 10 key insights gained from it.

1. The book is a worthwhile read for anyone in marketing and social media. Even if you consider yourself experienced with social media, you’ll get something from the book. The first section is largely about how to use inbound marketing tactics to generate traffic and leads (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, SEO, etc.) For many of you this won’t be new, but there are nuggets in there just the same. The second half of the book is largely about how to measure your success, build a marketing funnel and drive your organization to shifting its mentality. This is where the book stands out against other “how to generate traffic” books, e-books and blogs.
2. Search engines are important because of the people who use them, not the algorithms behind them. One of the quotes I saved from the book is this, “Other than the sheer volume of potential visitors you can draw through Google, there’s another important consideration for ensuring your site ranks well: People searching on Google are actually looking for something.” Just remember that, ok?
3. A blog is a long-term asset. And even more importantly it can appreciate in value over time. You’d think most marketers would get this by now, but if they honestly did, a lot more companies would be blogging (and blogging well!) A blog (along with other social media / inbound marketing strategies) is designed to return value over a long period of time, unlike an advertising spot that is unlikely to give you any long-term value whatsoever. And to all the lawyers, administrators, managers and others that want to bury corporate blogging and social networking in a pile of guidelines, policies and other nonsense, I say “Nay!” I love what Mike McDerment from FreshBooks says about his corporate Twitter policy, “We have some style guidelines like each post must be fun, playful, professional, and should not include swearing.” Truth is, if you have a meaningful corporate brand that people are committed to, you shouldn’t need overwhelming policy; the brand already defines what and how things should be said.
4. Use PPC (Google AdWords), Facebook Ads and StumbleUpon advertising as test cases for determining the efficacy of each channel. Most companies get the idea of having as many marketing channels as possible, but this is a smart, simple and relatively inexpensive tactic – leverage paid advertising for quick tests – and then work to maximize the non-paid advertising (Google organic search for example) with the knowledge gained.
5. Landing pages should have a 15%+ conversion rate.
6. Everyone in your organization has the potential to be a marketer.
7. Being remarkable matters, now more than ever. You won’t be able to hide crappy products and crappy companies behind huge marketing budgets.
8. Companies need to change how they hire marketers. This stood out as one of the best (if not the best) parts of the book. I can’t quote the whole section, but suffice it to say you better start thinking about what types of people you hire in your marketing department. And it’s going to be changing faster than ever over the next few years. And the companies that get it right are going to win big time.
9. If everyone in your company can be a marketer, now is the perfect time to expose that within the organization. This is another section I really liked in the book. Dharmesh and Brian talk about exposing people’s inbound marketing efforts publicly within the organization (I believe it was called a “Reach Grader”). Make it something that everyone can see and understand. This is going to create competition internally, and also enhance the company’s culture and brand around inbound marketing (which I think is going to be increasingly more important in the years to come.)
10. You can measure the ROI of inbound marketing. A lot of people struggle with the concept of ROI and social media (and inbound marketing). But there are clearly ways that you can measure ROI, and the book helps a great deal with walking through some of those basics. One of the simple tactics they suggest is to rank all of your marketing (both inbound and outbound) tactics and simply remove the bottom two worst performers and add two new ones to the top of the list. Simple in mechanical terms, but maybe not simple in cultural terms; your marketers have to buy in!

The book has plenty more than what I’ve described above. For example, there are some good primers on search engine optimization, landing pages and hiring help (such as PR agencies).

The only section that I didn’t like was the one about Digg. A few years ago Digg was a great source of huge traffic spikes, but that’s really not the case anymore (at least not for 99.9% of blogs out there.) Given that the primary target for this book is more on the newbie-side, I think the section on Digg creates a bit of false hope. They do say (a few times) that it’s very hard to hit the front page of Digg and get tons of traffic, but I wouldn’t even bother thinking about it. I would much rather see Dharmesh and Brian give people more help on how to write a great blog and find traffic from other niche sources.

Plus, I would have loved more examples.

I’m certain there’s a second book in the making after this one. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) is a great introduction to inbound marketing, but so much more needs to be beaten into the heads of old school marketers. For starters, a lot of companies need more guidance on how to shift their marketing departments and their entire organizations to a new way of thinking. More needs to be explained about landing page optimization and A/B testing (although there are other resources for that.) Companies need to use this book for inspiration, and then get into the trenches, get their hands dirty and make things happen.

Thank you Dharmesh and Brian for an enjoyable read. Thank you for reminding me of things I hadn’t paid enough attention to recently. And thank you for teaching me new stuff as well.

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Say that 5 times fast, will ya?

The truth is, I don’t have 650 reasons to do anything, but having spent the last few days doing some research into digital agencies, social media agencies, web companies, PR firms, etc. (all service companies) it’s somewhat shocking and hugely disappointing to see the amount of wasted bits and bytes used on superfluous nonsense.

I’m not going to name companies here, that’s not the point. It’s a general frustration with copywriting on the Web. Most of the companies I took a look at had very nice sites (some were very sparse/simple, some more complex), and most of them had very rich portfolios of fancy design, development and marketing work (although they were almost universally lacking any real case studies with metrics and ROI). But it’s as if they forgot about copywriting. And frankly, copy sells. After looking at 50 or so competitive sites, designs start to fade away and all you really see is the copy.

Something I like to do when looking at text is to take it out of context. Copy and paste a bunch of text into a file and read it there; not alongside other copy on the website, and not combined with the site design. That really helps focus on the copy and make it stand out (for better or worse). You also start to see interesting patterns and similarities in the copy.

What’s really surprising about the copywriting that I found is that it’s written by companies that are supposed to be experts in digital marketing. And the last time I checked that means they’re in the business of effective communication — selling their ability to effectively communicate to their clients’ target markets. But if these companies can’t put out a decent effort for themselves, what does that say about their ability to give customers what they need?

Here are some examples:

At Acme Corp, we are passionate about exceptional website design and application development. We research it and practice it. We live and breathe it. Let us run with your project and see just how great web development is done these days.

We’re a full-service, interactive marketing agency focused on measurable, results-driven engagement.

The Acme Group is a digital services and creation company that delivers the best possible experience for the consumer through the integrated and disciplined use of the best possible practices, good ideas, people and technology.

We offer unparalleled design and creative direction, along with a rock-solid group of technologically innovative minds.

The 3 Most Common Copywriting Problems

1. We, We, We Syndrome: I realize that at some point a company needs to explain to prospects and customers what it does. But too often this focuses on the service provider and not on customers. There’s not enough writing in the second person. When I read the first quote above my first reaction was, “Let YOU run with MY project? It’s MY project, not YOURS, I’m not letting you run anywhere with it.” That’s an adverse reaction to the “We, We, We Syndrome”.
2. Punch Drunk Word Addiction: It’s easy to throw in extra words that you feel are powerful – words that punch the reader right in the face and say, “POW! Check this out!” But the truth is these words very quickly become meaningless. In the 3rd quote above, they’ve used “best possible” twice. In the last quote, the latter part of the sentence doesn’t inspire anything in me except for a yawn, “…ROCK-SOLID group of TECHNOLOGICALLY INNOVATIVE minds.” Say what?
3. And You Are Who Exactly? Affliction: After looking at 50+ websites (all in the same general area) you quickly realize how few of them are presenting a strong brand and genuine personality. Everything starts to blend together, and the only ones that truly do stand out are those that used text effectively.

Writing great copy is very hard. Especially when you realize that it also involves deeper internal and brand analysis – What is your company’s personality? What is your company’s brand? What do you stand for?” And then you have to really hone in on your value proposition to customers – What value do you bring? How? What results have you generated?

These are the types of questions you need to answer before you can write really effective copy. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, how can you write copy that explains this stuff to prospects and customers on your site? You can’t.

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Turns out, people like surprises. Who’d a thunk it?

Actually, some surprises may anger, disgust, scare or shock people — but that’s a good thing!

And most important for businesses out there: People will pay for surprise.

Andy Nulman is Mr. Surprise. Go read his blog on surprise. But come back, ok? Better yet, stick around here for awhile, but bookmark his blog link in a separate browser window or tab for later enjoyment.

Beyond being a flamboyant, extravagant genius, Mr. Nulman is also an author. His book is Pow! Right Between the Eyes: Profiting from the Power of Surprise. Go buy it. You won’t regret it. In fact, John Cleese (who wrote one of the book’s forewords) spells it out for you, “But this book. Or you will die.”

People buy a lot of stuff. But what’s really interesting is the motivation behind their purchases. Why are people willing to put out their hard-earned cash for something? There are a few reasons, but one of the most important and lesser-appreciated reasons is Surprise. It’s clear that surprise in business is misunderstood, misused and under-utilized.

People will give you their money if you surprise them. And I don’t think enough people realize the value, importance and power of surprise.

Andy Nulman easygoing writing style makes this a fast read. He has some great, hilarious and poignant examples of how companies have successfully used surprise to make money. And in some cases, lots and lots of money. In some cases, companies have built nearly their entire business existence on surprise. Implementing surprise strategies isn’t easy. It’s both a science and an art, and Andy gives you the guidebook on how to do it properly. Think of the book as one giant motivational kick in the pants.

I want to leave you with Andy’s four surprise theories. He writes, …”all you have to keep in mind are the four key theories that permeate just about every action that causes a delight-filled reaction:

1. Everyone’s a Kid in Disneyland: Andy reminds us that surprise brings out the inner-child in all of us. It doesn’t matter who you are, surprise levels the playing field, opens people up and makes everyone (and everything) more accessible.
2. Balls Beat Brains; Balls Beat Budgets: Big marketing dollars and huge budgets don’t guarantee success in the world of surprise. The truth is you need more guts than brains and more guts than money to pull off huge surprise wins. And action beats inaction any day. Action beats endless planning too; sometimes you have to just “go for it”.
3. Little Things Mean a Lot: And while you’re at it, remember that big wins come in small packages. Success surprise marketing campaigns don’t have to be massive projects. People will notice and hugely appreciate small surprises.
4. Sometimes, There is No Reason: It turns out not everyone does need a reason. In business that may be challenging to accept as we always look for practical step-by-step understanding of what we’re doing and why. But surprise doesn’t have to work that way. Sometimes you have to do something, “just because” and it works like a charm.

After reading Andy’s book I want to find ways to create surprise in everything I do. Not just because it’s fun, frivolous and more interesting to think about than most other business endeavors, but because people pay for surprise. And as a businessperson I like people paying me for stuff.

image courtesy of shuttershock.com

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Before you spend time & money increasing leads, you should look at improving and optimizing conversions.

In order to optimize conversion you do need some number of leads, but the number doesn’t have to be huge. As soon as you start to see consistent metrics on conversion (and you need to make sure you define conversion clearly too), you can look at optimization.

It’s a lot cheaper and less risky to work on improving conversions than it is to generate more leads.

Fairly simple A/B testing, landing pages and basic metrics analysis can give you the tools needed to optimize conversions. None of this has to be expensive or overly complicated, but it does require a lot of attention to detail, focus and commitment.

As soon as conversion increases – even a small amount – any investment made in generating leads is going to be much more valuable.

To learn more about A/B testing and conversion metrics, visit these sites:

• Which Test Won?
• ABTests.com
• KISSMetrics blog

And follow these people on Twitter:

• KISSMetrics
• Cindy Alvarez
• Hiten Shah
• Eric Ries

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Many people will tell you the best way to launch a product is to do so early and iterate constantly. I’ve said the same thing, and generally agree with that sentiment. You don’t want to spend a year building a product without any serious customer feedback, without putting your feet to the fire in the wilds of the marketplace.

But one of the downfalls of iterating and releasing constantly is that you lose the opportunity to package a launch into a more full-blown marketing and press campaign. Releasing new features every few weeks doesn’t necessarily allow for the time and energy to be put into marketing and selling those features effectively. That doesn’t mean you should abandon the iterative process and the “release often” mantra, but think about building towards more major releases while doing so:

1. Quick product launch to start
2. Iterate & release
3. Iterate & release
4. Iterate & release
5. Release Version 2

So while you’re iterating and releasing updates, patches, fixes and new features, think about how you can package all of that and additional things into a new version of your product. This gives you the chance to align marketing, PR and business development initiatives simultaneously.

Standout Jobs launched in late January. Since then we’ve released a bunch of new features, fixed a bunch of issues and overall improved the system. For awhile we were releasing every 2 days to fine tune a bunch of things, and once things “calmed down” we got into a weekly or bi-weekly release schedule. But at the same time, we’ve been working towards “version two” of the product. It’s taking the combined effort of what we’ve done to-date, adding significant new functionality into the mix (based a great deal on customer and marketplace feedback), and giving us the chance to reset the marker for moving forward. In some ways it will be the “going out of Beta” stage for us … which many software companies experience.

With that in mind, I wanted to share a few things we’re learning and preparing as we move towards a new version of our product (and here’s where the “Big Bang Theory” comes in, although it’s hardly a theory, more a string of ideas mashed together…)

1. Don’t Get Lost in Development: It’s not about disappearing for 6 months and suddenly releasing a completely new product. We’re doing more than adding a couple of enhancements, but the development cycle isn’t more than a few months. So keep the development cycle as short as possible, even when contemplating a “big new release.”
2. Align Your Brand: Now’s the time to get your brand message and corporate brand in order. Take a look at your website. Take a look at the messaging you use to sell / promote your product. Is it all aligned and making sense with what you’ll be releasing in the next version? If you are going to change those things – i.e. the design of your website, or the brand messaging – then it’s the perfect time to do it, because you can release all of that simultaneously with the new product version.
3. Fine Tune Your Business Model: Many companies release quickly (often with a free product) and look to implement a business model after the fact. Iterative releases aren’t ideal for launching business models, because the sum total of the changes made may not be enough to justify charging people. But when you release a “new version” and package it properly, you give yourself the chance to also introduce a good business model that layers on top of the previous success you’ve had with your free product.
4. Prep the Marketing and Public Relations Machines: If you’re launching a new version of your product, launch it big, and make as much noise as possible. That’s my take. When you’re iterating and releasing constantly, you’re building momentum, you’re maintaining touch points with customers, prospects, etc. But when you’re launching a new version, it’s time to bring out the trumpets and blast ‘em. So have a marketing plan and PR campaign ready to go. You want plenty of news going out about the release, you want lots of chatter and then you want to maintain that momentum going forward.
5. Build Momentum Before Launching: Ideally, you’re making a ton of noise and building up lots of momentum right before you launch the new version of your product. There’s no reason for the launch to come out of left field and surprise people. Get people talking about it. Let clients know what’s coming. Generate as much buzz as you can, to improve your chances of a successful launch.
6. Don’t Forget Your Customers: Your existing customers (whether using a free version of your product or not) are your best friends. Treat them well during the launch process. Get some of them up and running beforehand as beta testers. Leverage your happy customers for testimonials and case studies that you can use to promote the launch.
7. Try Something New: As crazy as things are in your preparation towards the big launch, now is the time to try things out in a different way. Or maybe you’ve had some things you wanted to do for awhile and never got around to in the process of constant iteration. I’ve had a few “backburner ideas” sitting around that I’ll try to implement in conjunction with our new release. It’s good timing to package those things up, and experiment a little.
8. Clear Your Schedule: Don’t overload yourself immediately after a big product launch. You’ll be in crazy-iterative-fix-it mode for awhile, so leave plenty of time for that. And make sure you have of development plan ready to go once you can see past the trees, so you’re not caught asleep at the wheel.
9. Timing is Everything: The biggest challenge with a “big launch” is timing. You’ve got developers coding like mad, business people implementing new plans, marketers and PR folks greasing the wheels and everything has to happen at the same time in perfect synchronicity. Guess what? It’s damn hard to do, and chances are some things will go wrong. As long as nothing catastrophic happens, any minor slip-ups will go unnoticed by most people. So don’t panic. Mitigate your risk as much as possible with great planning. Don’t overstep your abilities. It’s better to have a smaller, successful launch than having it all explode in your face.

I’m a big fan of iterative development and releasing often. But there’s also a place for the “big bang” release, which I feel is often overlooked by many startups. You should consider big product launches as a way of drawing a new line in the sand for business and moving forward.