I try to log in, and am entering the correct password and when I hit submit I just get sent back to the same login form. It doesn't say "wrong password" or anything like that, it just sends me right back to the form. I know I'm using the right password because it works in other browsers. I think its related to my addons, but even when I disable ublock origin and ghostery and clear the cookies for those sites, it still does the same thing.

This is some stuff I’ve learned using Roll20 (my best practices) plus a little free GM advice. Basically my gaming group had to transition to this quickly when Covid struck, but this has really allowed me to get my weekly game in and I’ve learned a few things that might help you do the same.
My tech setup: Laptop, $20 Craigslist 2nd monitor, ancient Bamboo Graphics Tablet/ Mouse, Roll20 free account, Discord for Voice, Pinterest for monster tokens/maps
Discord Setup I create 2 channels in Discord: general and an information one with links to cheat sheets, any google drive content etc.
If you plan a long running information heavy campaign with lots of places, characters, plots, items etc setting up a Wiki on something like DokuWiki can be very helpful. This DOES mean you and players need to maintain it, however. (Also, don’t be grandiose if you are a first time DM, run a single session with the option to renew LATER, go ahead and be coy about it - this will save you the headache of committing to do 52 weeks of unpaid labor you come to resent AND kick people out of your game who are lousy players or you just don’t like - I cannot stress this enough - manage expectations up front, it prevents a lot of hurt feelings and awkward or confrontational conversations later)
I have Roll20 open on the 2nd monitor in chrome as well as Pinterest, A google doc with names for NPCs, Interesting sounding places, items etc - this is my Improv tool for DungeonWorld, but I use it for all games because no one I ever met can make up names on the fly.
If you have people who like to eat chips into the mic or have a lot of background noise tell them to enable “Push to Talk” in settings or tell all players to enable this BY DEFAULT.
Roll20 There are a ton of videos on getting to know roll20 on youtube.
Manage your game settings - these are presets before you even create a map, etc. I use a default page size of 40 wide x 25 tall to mirror screen aspect ratio. I also like a 30% grey as default map color - easier on the eyes than bright white. Fog of war is enabled - more on this later. With DnD the default character sheet is nice, you might want to know the “always roll with advantage” check box is in there - it confuses a lot of people that it is on by default.
Once you have a game set up, go into it and go to settings on the right (gear) I recommend: • Set voice + Audio options to NONE • Set your display name (save) • Check Enable 3d dice • Dropdown “Scroll to Zoom” (you can pan with a right mouse click) • Player Video/Avatar set to “Name Only”
Give out your link to Roll20 for players at 1-7 days in advance. Getting a character sheet with a functioning token set up can take a little bit - you do NOT want to be stressing over this wasting 4 other people’s time on game day, though it is inevitable to a point in your first game. They will need to set up the same settings or you will suffer terrible audio feedback. To help this, the first board they enter on login is a blank map with these instructions pasted as a graphic in the middle of the screen (hard to miss). If players have DnD Beyond there is a Chrome Extension called Beyond 20 to import characters a lot of people like, though I personally have not used it.
I tell players to also put there name as follows in settings:
“Drizzt (Bob) AC 15”
This saves me having to ask their AC over and over in game. If you want you can also have them put “Elf Ranger” at the end or anything else you find helpful.
Getting Players I tried Roll20 boards and other websites to find gamers. Facebook groups were most effective by a long shot. A lot of RPG gaming systems have Discord groups as well, which is nice because those people are already fans of the game system. It’s a good idea to build in expectations as much as possible if you are doing this (6-9pm CST weekly for 3 weeks, grimdark game tone...etc). I like to identify who my solid players are too - a mix of some people I know and like and maybe a few newbs. That way you are always meeting new people, and if you have a few new ones that you can’t count on you don’t need to call off the game because you have 3 solid players.
Minimum Viable Setup Some people think you need 15 full color maps, spell effects, etc. This is not true - while those can be impressive and evocative, this is a game of IMAGINATION, and sometimes having those beautiful graphics in my opinion detracts from the active use of imagining the action. The key point of maps is so everyone knows who they are standing next to, threatened by, where they can move, etc.
The smallest, fastest set up is a SINGLE page with hastily drawn maps pointing out key items - most rooms will be squares. I have the advantage of having a very old Bamboo graphics tablet, and can quickly draw on the fly (it helps to go into settings and have it map to a single monitor - the one I am using for Roll20).
I think the roll20 initiative tracker takes forever for the GM to manage, so instead I use a graphic strip for 5e - at the top is 25 (then 20, 15, 10, 5, 0) at the bottom -5. Once you have player tokens set up, you can duplicate them and have the PLAYERS manage their own initiative by placing their 2nd token on the strip in order of initiative (you can copy a monster to track yours on there too). This is MUCH faster in my experience and maintains more excitement when you say “Roll for initiative!”
I use Pinterest to get all my token pics, there are a fair amount of great map boards on there as well, though in my experience you are better off being inspired by a map and building your encounter around it than conceptualizing the perfect encounter and then trying to find a perfect map for it. I have a degree in design and am quite skilled in photoshop and could modify found maps, and I have yet to find a situation where it is worth my time - it most likely is not worth yours either. I have drawn things on graph paper in the past scanned but it is a pain to scan and align. Lately for basic custom maps I’ve been using https://dungeonscrawl.com/, which is amazing.
As a side note, sometimes when I’m stuck on ideas, just flipping through monsters or fantasy art on Pinterest inspires a fun encounter.
If you are ever uninspired, remember 3 dollars gets you a helluva lot on DMs Guild - pick a 5 star adventure and go. I think a lot of new DMs want to be writers and world builders and view writing a custom adventure as part of the fun, which is fine. But if you’ve never read a good adventure in your life, how do you expect to do this? Watch a few movies before you decide to become a director. Run a few great adventures before you decide to become an adventure designer.
For token creation, I try to do a closeup on faces - I do NOT try to get the whole body, though might for something like a horse and carriage which is more important as a map item in a fight. It helps to know how to screengrab Windows+Shift+S on a PC, keep your selection as SQUARE as possible. You can then paste into Photoshop, Paint etc and save a token. Irfanview is a free program for viewing graphics that I use for this. If you are using a map, it’s better to just right click the image and “save as…” to your desktop. Sometimes they list dimensions on maps (23 x 22) I try to save this in the file name as it is VERY useful to set up in Roll20 later. You only get so much space on Roll20 for graphics, so don’t save 20 MB image tokens, no one will see them anyway. My goal for a 1 square token is a few hundred KB tops. If you want to have all the players see the gruesome closeup of the zombie when it appears in game, click it and hit Shift+Z to pop it up on their screen (they can click it off to continue to play). I have never exceeded my image space on Roll20
What is an Adventure? To me 5e is a high prep game. That means the players OWE the DM to either go along with his plot or tell him their plans a week in advance. This is not railroading, it is courtesy to the person doing more work than anyone else in the game. If people don’t like it, they should play something that is lower prep, like DungeonWorld or Fate.
We typically play for 3 hours (6:30 to 9:30, people log on Discord and chat a bit starting at 6). My goal is to have 2-3 combat encounters centered around a plot. With low levels and few players things go fast so I might plan 4-5, at high levels with lots of players I would plan 2 fights and a role play scene or skill challenge. This means my prep is:
Roll plot around in my head for 6 days - What do they expect? What is fun? What would be surprising or shocking? What would happen in a movie or TV show? What character moments would be fun? What would be most dramatic? Can I actually do this idea in a 5e game? Examples of things that do NOT work well: Hostage situations, chase scenes, players deciding to kill goblin babies, torture…
The night before I round up maps and tokens. I paste monster stats and spells into a google doc (once again, google and screen grabs are great for this, you can also create 2 columns in a google doc by inserting a 2 cell table). I also write up short lead in descriptions for encounters. In my experience a lot of GMs try to do this on the fly, but often forget an important feature important to the encounter. 3 sentences summing up the scene, what they see and setting the tone usually works better. I also write up any important bullet points of fun things villains or NPCs might say, or important things they know and tell the PCs after the encounter that will lead to the next encounter or advance the story. If this is the end of an important arc, I write up a dramatic “cut scene”. The key is to have 30% more content than I need in case they tear through prepped material but to NOT overprep. The game the next week will almost always be better if I react to events this week, what players seemed interested in, what they seemed bored with, etc.
Page/ Map Setup As mentioned previously, I usually have a 40x25 page with fog of war enabled. The page should already have an initiative strip and player tokens on it. If it is a dungeon that I will reveal as they go, the monsters should be placed, and I use the 3 circles to enter the AC/ HP in advance. If it is more of an “ambushed by enemies” situation I have the entire map visible (or just draw a few trees and road) and have a fog of war strip on the right hand of the map 3-4 squares wide where I hide my monsters. It is very easy to copy and paste monsters so I usually have 2x what i need JUST in case. I also don’t want to have to construct a goblin army from a single goblin while the players sit bored. A nice thing is you can copy/ paste all the player tokens and initiative strip BETWEEN pages, so those are pretty fast to set up on all your pages.
Table Rules I think it’s a pain in the ass to punch in monster stats into Roll20 for 5e (it was easy though for Shadow of the Demon Lord, hats off to Schwalb) so I roll actual dice for most of the game on my desk. I will roll on Roll20 for something very dramatic (a villain saving throw or something) but usually I keep it fast with real dice. Players on the other hand will ALWAYS be expected to roll using Roll20 as a default and that expectation is built in. You can loosen this up if it’s your trusted group for 10 years, but it’s worth addressing up front especially with a new group you don’t know well. Why even give someone the temptation to fudge a roll? Save yourself a difficult conversation later...
Game Day Schedule
6pm (players log in to discord, BS, chat, catch up)
6:30 I read a short recap, summing up what happened last week, reminding them the context of the plot, what quest they were on etc. I have seen people post these, but 90% of the time players don’t read it, and reading this helps focus people and stops me from wanting to murder players an hour in when they can’t remember why the hell they broke into the Thieves’ Guild last week.
6:40-8:30 play
8:30 this is about where I should start the last encounter. If there are a lot of moving pieces (fighting a goblin army of 30) I might drop half the monsters just so they can chew through it faster.
9:30 end of game.
Thanks for Reading
I hope this is valuable to some and would love any feedback or to hear your experiences. RPGs have become my best social outlet during the last many months. I already loved them as a lifelong GM, but they have really kept me from cracking up in my apartment as well as my players I suspect. Having watched the tools to do online gaming I will say we are blessed to live in a time where this is viable, I feel the technology just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It can take some fiddling but once you have a few games under your belt it’s almost as good as meeting the old group down at the game store every Wednesday, and you don’t even need to drive home after!

Hi Ladies - !
We're making a monthly sticky to address any issues people are having with the website sign up.
If you filled out a membership application on the website in the last 30 days, you should have received an email from us:

• Rejecting your application and suggesting alternative forms of verification
• Reminding you to sign up with your 8 or 9 digit code
• Informing you we were unable to direct message you your code on your platform of choice

If you applied prior to 8/1 and did not receive an email from us - we have purged your data for security purposes and you will need to sign up using our new membership form here: Sign Up Form
Thank you for bearing with us through all the changes we’ve been making on the site!
If you have any questions for us - please post them in the comments below!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As of September 1st, 2020 The sign up - process is:

1. Enter your desired login username, password, and email address in the Sign Up Form
2. Choose one platform from the drop down menu to verify your account (Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter) and enter your social media user details
3. Click ‘Sign Up’
4. You will receive an automated email after signing up verifying we received your application
5. Send FDS a direct message from your social media account on your platform of choice (Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter)
6. FDS will reply to your message with a 9 DIGIT CODE
7. Reply to your automated verification email with the 9 digit code sent to your social media account
8. FDS moderators will review and activate!

A FEW NOTES:

1. We are only accepting 9 digit code requests through the website. If you PM me or any of the mods on Reddit, Instagram or Twitter we will be redirecting you to the website. This helps us keep track of all the requests in one place. Click here to request an 9 digit code.
2. Use Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter for an expedited approval process. Our reddit requests are backlogged and many of you are far too new for us to verify your account on the website. For expedited sign up, please apply with your instagram or twitter accounts.
3. Please make sure you can receive DMs on your platform of choice. There were some people we tried to send codes to who had their Direct Messages disabled, so we had to pass. If you are unsure, please DM the official FDS twitter or instagram accounts so we can respond.
4. Please be patient! Due to demand, We are on about a 5 day lag on sending out 9 digit codes. If you are not an existing sub member or someone we can easily identify as female from your social media, OR we can't reach you, you will likely be passed over for someone else in the queue and not revisited until the end of the month.
5. If you do not sign up within 60 days of receiving your code, you will be bumped from the approval queue completely and will have to start over. We have some members who we've sent codes to who as of yet have yet to create an account. Please do so ASAP!
6. Our website is now available via the Wix app! It can be dowloaded for iPhone and Android! Use the code "WZBOVG" to join the app page AFTER you have requested and received your 9 digit code. If you join through the app without the 9 digit code, it will be rejected.

FORUM:

1. Once you are approved, please log in and say hello in the Forum! We just want to make sure it is working for everyone. All new members are restricted to one post per day for their first week of membership to make moderation easier for us while we get the website off the ground.
2. Please change your default username! Your username will default to your email address. To change it,follow the instructions here.
3. The Strategy subforums and Sex subforum on the website are for members only - this is to protect the privacy of our members who want to ask sensitive questions.
4. If you are not logged in as a member, you can read the posts in most of the subforums, but you cannot comment. You will not be able to read posts in the Strategy or Sex Forum at all.

SOCIAL MEDIA:
We've archived our Facebook page due to security concerns (facebook LEACHES data), but we have just launched a new Pinterest and Tumblr!
Here are links to all our social media accounts if you wish to follow us!
Website - https://www.therealfemaledatingstrategy.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/FemDatStrat
Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/TheRealFemaleDatingStrategy/boards/
Tumblr - https://female-dating-strategy.tumblr.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/therealfemaledatingstrategy/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/The-Real-Female-Dating-Strategy-109118567480771/
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEtlkgMHsPhGLqmffpaFCA/playlists
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2tQGzxeUeuVVFYgiExaaoo
​Wix App - iPhone and Android!
Thanks again!!

Hi Ladies - !
We're making a monthly sticky to address any issues people are having with the website sign up.
If you filled out a membership application on the website in the last 30 days, you should have received an email from us:

• Rejecting your application and suggesting alternative forms of verification
• Reminding you to sign up with your 8 or 9 digit code
• Informing you we were unable to direct message you your code on your platform of choice

If you applied prior to 8/1 and did not receive an email from us - we have purged your data for security purposes and you will need to sign up using our new membership form here: Sign Up Form
Thank you for bearing with us through all the changes we’ve been making on the site!
If you have any questions for us - please post them in the comments below!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As of September 1st, 2020 The sign up - process is:

1. Enter your desired login username, password, and email address in the Sign Up Form
2. Choose one platform from the drop down menu to verify your account (Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter) and enter your social media user details
3. Click ‘Sign Up’
4. You will receive an automated email after signing up verifying we received your application
5. Send FDS a direct message from your social media account on your platform of choice (Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter)
6. FDS will reply to your message with a 9 DIGIT CODE
7. Reply to your automated verification email with the 9 digit code sent to your social media account
8. FDS moderators will review and approve!

A FEW NOTES:

1. We are only accepting 9 digit code requests through the website. If you PM me or any of the mods on Reddit, Instagram or Twitter we will be redirecting you to the website. This helps us keep track of all the requests in one place. Click here to request an 9 digit code.
2. Use Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter for an expedited approval process. Our reddit requests are backlogged and many of you are far too new for us to verify your account on the website. For expedited sign up, please apply with your instagram or twitter accounts.
3. Please make sure you can receive DMs on your platform of choice. There were some people we tried to send codes to who had their Direct Messages disabled, so we had to pass. If you are unsure, please DM the official FDS twitter or instagram accounts so we can respond.
4. Please be patient! Due to demand, We are on about a 5 day lag on sending out 9 digit codes. If you are not an existing sub member or someone we can easily identify as female from your social media, OR we can't reach you, you will likely be passed over for someone else in the queue and not revisited until the end of the month.
5. If you do not sign up within 60 days of receiving your code, you will be bumped from the approval queue completely and will have to start over. We have some members who we've sent codes to who as of yet have yet to create an account. Please do so ASAP!
6. Our website is now available via the Wix app! It can be dowloaded for iPhone and Android! Use the code "WZBOVG" to join the app page AFTER you have requested and received your 9 digit code. If you join through the app without the 9 digit code, it will be rejected.

FORUM:

1. Once you are approved, please log in and say hello in the Forum! We just want to make sure it is working for everyone. All new members are restricted to one post per day for their first week of membership to make moderation easier for us while we get the website off the ground.
2. Please change your default username! Your username will default to your email address. To change it,follow the instructions here.
3. The Strategy subforums and Sex subforum on the website are for members only - this is to protect the privacy of our members who want to ask sensitive questions.
4. If you are not logged in as a member, you can read the posts in most of the subforums, but you cannot comment. You will not be able to read posts in the Strategy or Sex Forum at all.

​
SOCIAL MEDIA:
We've archived our Facebook page due to security concerns (facebook LEACHES data), but we have just launched a new Pinterest and Tumblr!
Here are links to all our social media accounts if you wish to follow us!
Website - https://www.therealfemaledatingstrategy.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/FemDatStrat
Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/TheRealFemaleDatingStrategy/boards/
Tumblr - https://female-dating-strategy.tumblr.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/therealfemaledatingstrategy/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/The-Real-Female-Dating-Strategy-109118567480771/
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEtlkgMHsPhGLqmffpaFCA/playlists
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2tQGzxeUeuVVFYgiExaaoo
​Wix App - iPhone and Android!
Thanks again!!

Updates on The Real Female Dating Strategy's Official Website!
Hi Ladies - !
We are still getting requests to sign up for, TheRealFemaleDatingStrategy.com, and we are overwhelmed by the response - thank you!!
Thank you for bearing with us through all the changes we’ve been making on the site!
To make the sign up process smoother - we have consolidated the 8 digit code request form and the sign up form into one single form!
As of August 1st, 2020 The new sign up - process is:

1. Enter your desired login username, password, and email address in the Sign Up Form
2. Choose one platform from the drop down menu to verify your account (Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter) and enter your social media user details
3. Click ‘Sign Up’
4. You will receive an automated email after signing up verifying we received your application
5. Send FDS a direct message from your social media account on your platform of choice (Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter)
6. FDS will reply to your message with a 9 DIGIT CODE
7. Reply to your automated verification email with the 9 digit code sent to your social media account
8. FDS moderators will review and approve!

If you were given one of our old 8 digit codes and have not yet signed up, then please follow the instructions above and reply back to your automated email with the 8 digit code you were given
A FEW NOTES:

1. We are only accepting 9 digit code requests through the website. If you PM me or any of the mods on Reddit, Instagram or Twitter we will be redirecting you to the website. This helps us keep track of all the requests in one place. Click here to request an 9 digit code.
2. Use Instagram or Twitter for an expedited approval process. Our reddit requests are backlogged and many of you are far too new for us to verify your account on the website. For expedited sign up, please apply with your instagram or twitter accounts.
3. Please make sure you can receive DMs on your platform of choice. There were some people we tried to send codes to who had their Direct Messages disabled, so we had to pass. If you are unsure, please DM the official FDS twitter or instagram accounts so we can respond.
4. Please be patient! Due to demand, We are on about a 5 day lag on sending out 9 digit codes. If you are not an existing sub member or someone we can easily identify as female from your social media, OR we can't reach you, you will likely be passed over for someone else in the queue.
5. If you do not sign up within 60 days of receiving your code, you will be bumped from the approval queue completely and will have to start over. We have some members who we've sent codes to who as of yet have yet to create an account. Please do so ASAP!
6. Our website is now available via the Wix app! It can be dowloaded for iPhone and Android! Use the code "WZBOVG" to join the app page AFTER you have requested and received your 8 digit code. If you join through the app without the 8 digit code, it will be rejected.

FORUM:

1. Once you are approved, please log in and say hello in the Forum! We just want to make sure it is working for everyone. All new members are restricted to one post per day for their first week of membership to make moderation easier for us while we get the website off the ground.
2. Please change your default username! Your username will default to your email address. To change it,follow the instructions here.
3. The Strategy subforums and Sex subforum on the website are for members only - this is to protect the privacy of our members who want to ask sensitive questions.
4. If you are not logged in as a member, you can read the posts in most of the subforums, but you cannot comment. You will not be able to read posts in the Strategy or Sex Forum at all.

​
SOCIAL MEDIA:
We've archived our Facebook page due to security concerns (facebook LEACHES data), but we have just launched a new Pinterest and Tumblr!
Here are links to all our social media accounts if you wish to follow us!
Website - https://www.therealfemaledatingstrategy.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/FemDatStrat
Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/TheRealFemaleDatingStrategy/boards/
Tumblr - https://female-dating-strategy.tumblr.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/therealfemaledatingstrategy/
Facebook (archived) - https://www.facebook.com/groups/685539095599373/
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEtlkgMHsPhGLqmffpaFCA/playlists
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2tQGzxeUeuVVFYgiExaaoo
​Wix App - iPhone and Android!
Thanks again!!

(nope, it’s not a clickbait)
Hi.
Benefits/harms of ads can be discussed forever.
I don't encourage anyone to use this manual, or not to use it, just sharing my tools.
These couple of tips are equally relevant for Windows/MacOS/Linux users for Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.
And at the end of this post I will share with you something interesting for Android and iOS. Yeah, yeah, I don't see any ads on Android.

Firefox

Let's start with it (because it is my favorite browser).
Insert this in the address bar and press Enter: about:preferences#privacy and choose "Strict".
You will see: "Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break." - I don't know anyone I can apply it to, but I'm fine and nothing breaks.
Next, install these extensions:

• uBlock Origin
• Privacy Badger
• Privacy Possum

Well, uh... that' s it. I am not kidding.

Google Chrome

Install all the same extensions, but for Google Chrome:

• uBlock Origin
• Privacy Badger
• Privacy Possum

All these extensions are free (as freedom) and open source, so they do not track you and will not sell your information to advertisers.
Once installed, these extensions are ready to use and do not need to be configured. Although, if you are one of those who likes to customize, here you will find a lot of useful information on configuring uBlock Origin.

What kind of “trouble” may arise

For example, you have installed all three extensions and you are enjoying the Internet without advertising. And then you need to log in to your Pinterest account (using your Google account).
You select "Login with Google", enter your login and password for your Google account, the page reloads but you can't log in.
Solution - disable all three extensions, login to your account, and enable extensions. I think it's a miserable inconvenience to enjoy the Internet without ads.

What else would I advise you

Two more free (as freedom) and open source extensions:

• ClearURLs (Firefox | Google Chrome) - is an extension for Firefox and Chrome that deletes tracking information from URLs. See more info here.
• Cookie AutoDelete (Firefox | Google Chrome) - see more info here and here.

Android / iOS

Do you see ads on Android? I do not.

• Blokada

After installation, go to the settings and configure the application to suit your needs.
Blokada is also available for iOS, but I don't know how it works there, because I don't use Apple products because of principle.
Which one of you has iOS, try Blokada for iOS and write the comments to this post, I would like to know if it works for you or not.
Above I said that Firefox is my favorite browser on the desktop... on Android, too. Choose a more suitable for your needs:

• Firefox Focus
• Firefox Nightly (if you are wondering why Nightly and not the standard one, the answer is - because the uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger already works well in the Nightly version)

After installing Firefox Nightly, go to its settings and install the already familiar to you uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
Do you see ads in the YouTube app? I do not.
Install New Pipe app, it is a free (as freedom) alternative client for YouTube. I've been using it for a couple of years and I like it very much.
I also see that from time to time YouTube struggles with this app, changes its code on the backend so it does not work (because YouTube wants you to see more ads) then you have to wait a couple of days when developers update the app.
Or alternatively - you can login to your YouTube via Firefox Nightly (with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger installed) and you can watch YouTube without ads.
Enjoy.

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
​
Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:

• You get knowledge from traction efforts, so you’ll build the right product for your customers.
• You get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly.

Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
​

Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!

– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
2. How many customers are available?
3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?

You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:

1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.

There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:

1. How many people landed on the website?
2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?

A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:

• Google “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.”
• Search for your product keywords on YouTube.
• Use tools like FollowerWonk and Klout to find top twitter accounts in your industry.
• Use social mention to find sites with the most frequent mentions for your keywords.
• Talk to people to figure out what your target audience is really reading online.

You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?

• Milestones like raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier.
• A PR stunt.
• A big partnership.
• A special industry report.

A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:

• Submit the story to link-sharing sites like Reddit and HackerNews
• Share it on social networks
• Email it to influencers in your industry for comment.
• Ping blogs in your space and tell them you have a story that’s getting buzz.

Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

• Half.com renamed (Halfway, Oregon) to Half.com and launched it on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon.
• Richard Branson made his press conferences as outlandish as possible (dressing like a woman, driving a tank through the streets) to get the media talking about whatever Virgin was launching.
• WePay (a PayPal competitor) placed a 600-pound block of ice at PayPal’s conference entrance.
• DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard highlighting its privacy focus.
• Blendtec created a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” where they blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone.
• When Grasshopper did a rebrand, they sent chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential people.

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

• Consider expanding your ads to the content network of non-Google sites.
• Consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. These ads often convert better as they’re aimed at prospects who have already visited your site. (Be warned that it may feel creepy to certain people)
• Consider using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust your ads to perform better.
• Use negative keywords to prevent ads from showing for certain keywords you don’t want to target.
• Consider using programming scripts to manage your ads.

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

• You can save money by signing longer ad contracts.
• Look for remnant ads which are ad space that’s unused; publications accept almost any price when selling empty ads near print deadlines.
• You could track ad effectiveness by using unique web addresses and promo codes. You could also try adding “How did you hear about us” to your sign up process.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

• Provide a self-addressed envelope.
• Use handwritten envelopes and cards.
• Have a clear call to action.
• Investigate bulk mail to get reduced pricing.

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.

• “Wooden toys” is fat-head.
• “Wood puzzles for 3-year-olds” is long-tail.

When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

• Publicity - Get covered by a publication.
• Product - Produce shareable web pages.
• Content marketing - Create strong shareable content. Content that’s highly shareable include infographics, slideshows, images, and original research.
• Widgets - Give site owners useful things to add to their sites which link back to yours.

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

• Overcome writer’s block by writing about the problems facing your target customers.
• Use infographics because they are shared 20x more.
• Show your readers that they have a problem they didn’t know about.
• Engage in online forums where your target customers are, and try to contribute.
• Do guest posting on other popular blogs.
• Keep a regular content schedule.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

• Build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.
• At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.
• Create a short free course related to your area.
• Consider advertising on email newsletters.

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

• Determine the steps necessary for customers to get value from your product
• Create targeted emails to make sure people complete these steps.
• You can use tools like Vero and Customer.io to automate these messages.
• Send an automated personal email 30 minutes after they signup to ask they if they need help.

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

• Use an email marketing provider that helps ensure deliverability like MailChimp.
• Use A/B tests for every aspect including subjects, formats, images, timing, and more.
• Send emails between 9 AM and 12 PM in your customers’ time zone or schedule them at the time they registered for your email list.
• Learn copywriting techniques by checking resources like copy hackers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

• Measure your viral coefficient and cycle time from the start
• Run as many A/B tests as you can. Focus on big changes that would result in a 5-10x improvement in a key metric, like a new email autoresponder or website design or onboarding flow. Then optimize smaller stuff.
• You need a constant stream of new customers entering the viral loop. This is called “seeding.” You could use SEO and online ads for that.
• Copy those who have done it before.

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

• Provide something of true value.
• Make the offering extremely relevant to your core business.
• Put microsites and tools on their own domains. It makes it easier to share and does well with SEO when people search for your tool.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:

• Standard partnership, like Apple and Nike producing Nike+ shoe that communicates with the iPhone.
• Joint ventures: Two companies working together to produce a new product. Like bottled Starbucks Frappuccino produced by Pepsi.
• Licencing: Spotify licensing music from record labels.
• Distribution deals: Groupon works with a restaurant to offer a discount to Groupon’s mailing list.
• Supply partnership: Deals between suppliers and Walmart.

You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

• Create an exhaustive list of all your possible partners.
• Send it to your investors and friends for warm introductions.
• Approach potential customers with a value-focused proposition that outlines why they should work with you.
• Make sure to find out who is in charge of the metric you’ve targeted, and contact them directly.
• Make the negotiation and term sheet as simple as possible

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.

• How many employees do you have?
• How is your organization structured

Problem questions. Use sparingly.

• Are you happy with your current solution?
• What problems do you face with it?

Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.

• Does this problem hurt your productivity?
• How many people does it impact?
• What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of it?

Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

• How do you feel this solution would help you?

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

• Process: How does the company buy a solution like this?
• Need: How badly does the company need a solution for this?
• Authority: Which individuals can make the purchase happen?
• Money: Do they have the funds? How much not solving the problem cost them?
• Timing: What are budget and decision timelines for purchase?

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:

• Remove the need for IT installs
• Free trials
• Channel partners
• FAQs
• Demo videos or Webinars
• Testimonials or case studies
• Email campaigns
• Low introductory price (less than $250/mo for SMB, $10,000 for enterprises)

I removed the last sections because of the post character limit. Here are two:

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
​
Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:

• You get knowledge from traction efforts, so you’ll build the right product for your customers.
• You get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly.

Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
​

Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!

– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
2. How many customers are available?
3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?

You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:

1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.

There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:

1. How many people landed on the website?
2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?

A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:

• Google “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.”
• Search for your product keywords on YouTube.
• Use tools like FollowerWonk and Klout to find top twitter accounts in your industry.
• Use social mention to find sites with the most frequent mentions for your keywords.
• Talk to people to figure out what your target audience is really reading online.

You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?

• Milestones like raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier.
• A PR stunt.
• A big partnership.
• A special industry report.

A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:

• Submit the story to link-sharing sites like Reddit and HackerNews
• Share it on social networks
• Email it to influencers in your industry for comment.
• Ping blogs in your space and tell them you have a story that’s getting buzz.

Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

• Half.com renamed (Halfway, Oregon) to Half.com and launched it on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon.
• Richard Branson made his press conferences as outlandish as possible (dressing like a woman, driving a tank through the streets) to get the media talking about whatever Virgin was launching.
• WePay (a PayPal competitor) placed a 600-pound block of ice at PayPal’s conference entrance.
• DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard highlighting its privacy focus.
• Blendtec created a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” where they blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone.
• When Grasshopper did a rebrand, they sent chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential people.

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

• Consider expanding your ads to the content network of non-Google sites.
• Consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. These ads often convert better as they’re aimed at prospects who have already visited your site. (Be warned that it may feel creepy to certain people)
• Consider using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust your ads to perform better.
• Use negative keywords to prevent ads from showing for certain keywords you don’t want to target.
• Consider using programming scripts to manage your ads.

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

• You can save money by signing longer ad contracts.
• Look for remnant ads which are ad space that’s unused; publications accept almost any price when selling empty ads near print deadlines.
• You could track ad effectiveness by using unique web addresses and promo codes. You could also try adding “How did you hear about us” to your sign up process.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

• Provide a self-addressed envelope.
• Use handwritten envelopes and cards.
• Have a clear call to action.
• Investigate bulk mail to get reduced pricing.

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.

• “Wooden toys” is fat-head.
• “Wood puzzles for 3-year-olds” is long-tail.

When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

• Publicity - Get covered by a publication.
• Product - Produce shareable web pages.
• Content marketing - Create strong shareable content. Content that’s highly shareable include infographics, slideshows, images, and original research.
• Widgets - Give site owners useful things to add to their sites which link back to yours.

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

• Overcome writer’s block by writing about the problems facing your target customers.
• Use infographics because they are shared 20x more.
• Show your readers that they have a problem they didn’t know about.
• Engage in online forums where your target customers are, and try to contribute.
• Do guest posting on other popular blogs.
• Keep a regular content schedule.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

• Build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.
• At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.
• Create a short free course related to your area.
• Consider advertising on email newsletters.

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

• Determine the steps necessary for customers to get value from your product
• Create targeted emails to make sure people complete these steps.
• You can use tools like Vero and Customer.io to automate these messages.
• Send an automated personal email 30 minutes after they signup to ask they if they need help.

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

• Use an email marketing provider that helps ensure deliverability like MailChimp.
• Use A/B tests for every aspect including subjects, formats, images, timing, and more.
• Send emails between 9 AM and 12 PM in your customers’ time zone or schedule them at the time they registered for your email list.
• Learn copywriting techniques by checking resources like copy hackers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

• Measure your viral coefficient and cycle time from the start
• Run as many A/B tests as you can. Focus on big changes that would result in a 5-10x improvement in a key metric, like a new email autoresponder or website design or onboarding flow. Then optimize smaller stuff.
• You need a constant stream of new customers entering the viral loop. This is called “seeding.” You could use SEO and online ads for that.
• Copy those who have done it before.

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

• Provide something of true value.
• Make the offering extremely relevant to your core business.
• Put microsites and tools on their own domains. It makes it easier to share and does well with SEO when people search for your tool.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:

• Standard partnership, like Apple and Nike producing Nike+ shoe that communicates with the iPhone.
• Joint ventures: Two companies working together to produce a new product. Like bottled Starbucks Frappuccino produced by Pepsi.
• Licencing: Spotify licensing music from record labels.
• Distribution deals: Groupon works with a restaurant to offer a discount to Groupon’s mailing list.
• Supply partnership: Deals between suppliers and Walmart.

You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

• Create an exhaustive list of all your possible partners.
• Send it to your investors and friends for warm introductions.
• Approach potential customers with a value-focused proposition that outlines why they should work with you.
• Make sure to find out who is in charge of the metric you’ve targeted, and contact them directly.
• Make the negotiation and term sheet as simple as possible

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.

• How many employees do you have?
• How is your organization structured

Problem questions. Use sparingly.

• Are you happy with your current solution?
• What problems do you face with it?

Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.

• Does this problem hurt your productivity?
• How many people does it impact?
• What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of it?

Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

• How do you feel this solution would help you?

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

• Process: How does the company buy a solution like this?
• Need: How badly does the company need a solution for this?
• Authority: Which individuals can make the purchase happen?
• Money: Do they have the funds? How much not solving the problem cost them?
• Timing: What are budget and decision timelines for purchase?

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:

• Remove the need for IT installs
• Free trials
• Channel partners
• FAQs
• Demo videos or Webinars
• Testimonials or case studies
• Email campaigns
• Low introductory price (less than $250/mo for SMB, $10,000 for enterprises)

[This got posted and removed from cscareerquestions so trying here]
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I conducted an exhaustive job hunt and talked to almost every large company in the Valley and got several offers from top tier firms. I had a positive and professional experience with almost every company I talked to with the exception of Uber. My Uber experience was by far the the strangest experience I've had in this job hunt.
TL;DR Would not recommend interviewing at Uber
Here's a timeline of my interview experience with Uber:
Referral Advocate

• I got referred into Uber by a friend and had an intro call with a referral advocate. They went over the interview process (pretty standard) and asked I complete a coding assessment to begin.

Coding Assessment

• The coding assessment was a mixture of coding problems and a few multiple choice system design questions. I was told I passed the coding assessment and was passed to a recruiter to begin the process for an onsite. Here's where things started going awry.

1st Recruiter Call (where it goes downhill)

• The recruiter began the call by stating "Hello is this XXX [wrong version of my name]? hahaha HahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHhahahahaahHa" and continued to laugh hysterically. They stopped laughing for a few seconds then asked again "Sorry is this YYY? [another wrong version of my name] hahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA" and continue to laugh hysterically for a second bout of laughter. They then catch their breath from laughing and sputter out very quickly "Hahahaah. Sorry, sorry I'm not laughing AT you, I'm just laughing that I keep on butchering your name. HahahahahahaHahahahahahaHahaha."
• At this point, I can't tell if I'm being pranked on a radio show. Every company I have talked to has done some variation of "Hello this is ZZ from company XX. Sorry, but I don't know how to say your name. How do I pronounce it?”
• Recruiter uses unprofessional tone and diction throughout call. They start each sentence with a loud "uuuMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM" and then use the word "like" across all of their sentences. At one point the recruiter goes into a (fake?) valley girl falsetto and starts the sentence with "ohhhhh my goddddd" while making fun of how long a competitor takes to interview (Google)

Onsite
Bar Raiser Interview

• I wait in the conference room and the interview start time comes up. I wait for about 7 minutes before I start to worry that my interviewer isn't going to show up. I go outside and see someone waiting outside the room and ask them "are you here to interview me?"
• The interviewer apologizes that they didn't come in and says they didn't know they were the first interviewer so they were waiting for the previous interviewer to exit. While a minor hiccup, this reflects a general theme of unprepared interviewers.

1st Algo Interview

• I get escorted back to the conference room after lunch for my first technical interview. The interview start time passes up. After 8 minutes I email my coordinator. I then text my referrer as well. After 20 minutes (the interview slot is 45 minutes) an interviewer rushes into the room.
• Interviewer seems unprepared for interview. Specifically they mention that it is "bar raiser" interview several times, and I correct them by showing them the paper with the interview schedule
• After interviewer realizes that interview is not behavioral, they pause and quickly think of a problem on the spot. The problem is explained poorly in a rushed and unclear manner. I am able to start work on it because I’ve covered the topic before (topological sort). Any person unfamiliar with this problem would not be able to work on it because the problem description was stated in 30 seconds of rushed, broken, and hard to understand English.
• I ask the interviewer if I can type out the solution and they direct me to use the codesignal site. The site doesn’t work and the interviewer says they do not know how codesignal and asks me to use a whiteboard.
• Interviewer gets phone notifications several during the interview and appears distracted. I catch myself talking for large amounts of time without any communication or interaction from the interviewer side. I ask them if they are following me to ensure they are listening to me. I also notice that the interviewer is distracted and looking at their phone several times while I’m explaining my solution. (My hunch is the interviewer is getting messaged by someone at work or maybe paged for an issue)

2nd Algo Interview

• Interviewer comes into room with paper printout of an algo problem. The problem involves matrix multiplication, and since I am not too familiar with matrix multiplication, I ask how matrix multiplication works. The interviewer pauses, pulls out their phone to check how matrix multiplication works (???), and then explains it to me. It is clear from the pause and the paper that the interviewer is asking a question that they have never studied before. They confirm this by casually mentioning they don’t know the optimal solution to the problem they are asking since it’s a new question.
• Codesignal has technical issues again and the interviewer does not know how to use it. The interviewer attempts to use hackerrank but realizes their Hackerrank login doesn't work anymore. We give up and switch to sublime text.

Overall, I found this onsite to be a mess. All of my algo interviews were poorly run, the interviewers were unprepared, there was technical issues with their coding tools. I also got little to no time to ask questions during the technical interviews due to all of the issues.
Recruiter onsite follow up

• During the follow up call, the recruiter mentioned they had good and bad news. The good news was that most of the feedback was positive, but the system design interviewer felt they didn't have enough information to assess me. The team was passing, but they wanted me to come back in for a system design interview and if that went well they would match me with another team.
• At this point I was completely confused. If the system design interviewer couldn’t assess me, this meant that the 3 technical interviewers all failed as interviewers.
• I was debating coming back given how problematic my onsite was. At this point I had been told by 4 companies including Google I would have an offer.
• The recruiter started laughing uncontrollably during this call again when I voice concerns about impending deadlines. This time it occurs after I state that I am at hiring committee Google and might not have time to come back to interview. The recruiter starts laughing again at me: "hahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAAhahaha. You are totally not going to get an offer from Google in time for your deadlines. hahahhahahahaHahahahaHahaha”. They then started making fun of Google and Amazon by saying they are too slow and would not make the deadline I have with another company. I notice that this is the 2nd time the recruiter is belittling competitors.
• [As an aside, the recruiter was not correct. Both Google and Amazon gave me offers exactly when they promised too and met the deadlines they communicated to me.]

Ending the Process
This whole process felt stressful and disrespectful. I felt like I was on a prank show where they were seeing how they could far they could go by insulting me before I would walk away from the company. After sleeping on it, I told the recruiter I won't be continuing the process and to have Uber never contact me in the future given how unprofessional the experience was.
Overall Thoughts

• My interview experience gave me the impression that Uber recruiting does not communicate respectfully with its candidate, employees are not prepared for interviews they conduct, and the process is conducted sloppily. I have had some anecdotal confirmation from other friends that many of these issues are not uncommon.
• I understand that hiccups happen at interviews but I did not see anything approaching these issues at the other companies I am talking to. To give context, I have finished onsites rounds at Pinterest, Lyft, Google, Square, Amazon, Yelp, etc. All of these companies were professional, respectful, and prepared.
• I have never had a recruiter laugh at me in our calls.

Hey what’s up everybody, and greetings from The Shire, My name is MMH, founder of https://TheOrganicMarketer.com and welcome back to The OTT Experiment!
So the big question here that the OTT experiment will be taking on is simply this — why pay for traffic that’s already there?
So how do entrepreneurs like us market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out of the world without having to run paid ads? In this experiment we will be building social media accounts from the ground up and providing daily actionable steps so you can follow along and see how this thing grows!
So let’s jump right in!
We probably don’t need to tell you that mastering Facebook marketing is a must for any brand that hopes to succeed in 2020 and beyond.
You already know that Facebook has a huge audience. A whopping 2.4 billion people use it every month.
But maybe you didn’t know how often people are using Facebook to interact with businesses of all sizes — two-thirds of Facebook users say they visit a local business Facebook Page at least once a week.
Potential customers are already looking for businesses like yours and mine on Facebook. A clear, focused Facebook marketing strategy is the only way to tap into this existing audience. As Facebook puts it, your Business Page is “a cornerstone of [your] online identity.”
Here is our step-by-step guide to optimizing Facebook for business
It doesn’t cost anything to set up & once you’ve created your Page, you can use it to post content, link to your website, and communicate with Fans and followers for FREE - my favorite word - which makes a Facebook Page or Group an incredibly valuable tool for any business or marketer working with a limited budget or no budget like us
So, the first step of mastering how to use Facebook for business is preparing your Facebook Page.

1. Create your Facebook Business Page

• Before you can sign up for your Facebook business page, you need to log into your personal Facebook account. But don’t worry — the information from your personal account will not be publicly visible on your business page.
• So, if you’re not already logged into your personal account, log in now, then dive into these Page creation steps.
• Step 1: Sign up
• Go to facebook.com/pages/create.
• Select the type of page you want to create: business/brand or community/public figure. We are a business/brand, but click the Get Started button for whichever option describes you and yours.

Next, enter your business information. For your page name, use your business name or the name people are likely to search for when trying to find your business.
For category, type a word or two that describes your business and Facebook will suggest some options. If your business falls into more than one of the category options, choose the one your customers are most likely to think of when they think about your business. We’ll show you how to add more categories later.
Once you choose your category, the box will expand to ask for a few further details, like your address and phone number. You can choose whether to make this information public, or to show only your city and state.
When you’re ready, By clicking continue, you are indicating your acceptance of Facebook’s Pages, Groups and Events Policies, so you might want to check those out before you proceed. But when you’re ready, click continue.

2. Add branding images

So It’s important to create a good visual first impression, so choose wisely here. Make sure the photos you choose align with your brand and are easily identifiable with your business.
Make sure to use the optimum image sizes for Facebook so they look their best. You can google these to get the best image size for each section.
So You’ll upload your profile image first. This image accompanies your business name in search results and when you interact with users. It also appears on the top left of your Facebook page.
Now it’s time to choose your cover image, the most prominent image on your Facebook business page.
This image should capture the essence of your brand and convey your brand personality.
Once you’ve selected an appropriate image, click Upload a Cover Photo and Ta-dah! You have a Facebook business page.
Now I made all of my images in Canva, it is one of my favourite FREE tools. If you don’t know what Canva is, I’ll pop a link in the show notes but basically Canva has templates that are already made to measure, so all you need to do is create!
3. Complete your Page info
While you might be tempted to leave the details for later, it’s important to fill out all of the fields in your Facebook Page’s About section right from the start.
To start filling out your business details, click Edit Page Info in the top menu. From this screen you can share all the important information about your business.

Description

This is a short description that appears in search results. It should be just a couple of sentences (maximum 255 characters), so there’s no need to get too elaborate here. We’ll show you where to add a longer description later.

Categories

Here you’ll see the category you entered in Step 1. If you like, you can add additional categories here to make sure Facebook shows your page to all the right people.

Contact

Add all the contact details you want to make public, including your phone number, website, and email.

Location

If you have a physical storefront or office, check to make sure that your location is marked correctly on the map. You can also add details about your service area, so people know, for example, which neighborhoods you deliver to.

Hours

If your business is open to the public during specific hours, enter those here. This information appears in search results.

Extra options

If relevant, enter your impressum, price range, and privacy policy link. An impressum is a legal statement of ownership, and it is generally only required in some European countries.
Click Save Changes under each section to implement your changes as you go.
Feel free to have a look at ours and model what you can.

4. Create your Facebook username (aka your vanity URL)

Now I’ve already done this but if you haven’t, this is pretty important. Your username helps people find you on Facebook. Click Create Page u/Username to make one. It can be up to 50 characters long. You want it to be easy to type and easy to remember. Your business name or some obvious variation of it is a safe bet.
Click Create Page u/Username in the left menu to set this up

• Choose a search-friendly Page name. In most cases, this will be your brand name.
• If possible, use a consistent username across social networks.
• Such as ours, u/theottmethod

Click Create Username when you’re done. A box will pop up showing you the links people can use to connect with your business on Facebook and Messenger. Now we will go deep into messenger another day but not today.

5. Add a call-to-action button

A call-to-action button gives people a quick and easy way to reach out to you, shop for your products, or otherwise engage with your business. Click Add a Button under your cover photo to set one up, add a url, link to a video, contact you, shop now — the options are many here so knock yourself out! Ours currently points to the create your login page for our FREE members area.

1. Tell your story

You’ve filled in all the simple details about your business, but there’s not much here yet to tell people why they should engage with your business on Facebook.
Fortunately, there’s a section of your Facebook business page where you can add a longer description of your business. To access it, click See more in the left menu, then click About, and then click Our Story on the right-hand side.
In this section, you can add a detailed description of what your business offers customers and why they should Like or Follow your Page. This is a great place to set expectations. How will you interact with fans through your Facebook Page? Offer a compelling reason for them to stick around.
Enter a headline and text for your story, then upload a relevant photo. When you’re finished, click Publish.

7. Review your Facebook Page settings

Your Facebook Page settings give you custom control over who sees what on your page. Take a look to make sure you understand the privacy and security settings in particular.
That’s it! Your Facebook Page is set up and ready to go So feel free to publish your page!
Our page is live but we aren’t publishing posts yet — we’ve got a lot more accounts to get optimized before we dive straight in. But we will get to that very soon!
We want to make sure that whatever we post offers value for our visitors, so they’ll be inclined to stick around when we do.
So that’s facebook done! If I’ve missed anything or there’s something new I don’t know about — please let me know — I love to be educated!
Now let’s answer a question that came in over the weekend… How do we follow along?
OK, So I have something pretty cool for you! within the next few days I will be filling the members area with a few training courses to get you started. Now the great thing about this is, not only will I be putting my training in there as we go along, but I’ve spent the last few weeks securing the Master rights to most of the programs that I’ve done over the last 3 months. I couldn’t get all of them, but I’ve got most of them & I have so much content for you to get your hands on!
So these are programs that I have paid to take, and completed and now I have purchased the rights to all of these training courses so you can follow along! There’s podcast tutorials, , blogging essentials, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and hopefully even a TikTok course but I haven’t pinned that one down as of yet.
But there’s videos, checklists, mind-maps, email sequences, audio lessons, ebooks and much much more, all that good stuff and all for social media beginners and organic traffic beginners!
Now I have one hurdle, I’m not allowed to give it away for free.
So I’ve got it to as near to free as I can and will be charging just one dollar for all this content which will be available in the members area in the next few days — yes i did say $1. The members area is free to access but if you want the full content, it’ll be just one dollar to unlock all this juicy content. Nice, huh?
Now there’s 2 great things about that $1 deal
1) you’ll get lifetime access to all the programs in there
2) you’ll get access to all the fresh content before anyone else
So I think that’s fair, I want to give it to you for free but to be honest for a dollar, it’s an absolute steal! All you have to do is go to theorganicmarketer.com, login to the members area and wait for this super hot content to drop in the next few days!
And don’t forget to please share us with your friends, family, work colleagues, bosses, or a local business you may know that needs baby steps getting online. Let’s blow this experiment up! And remember, even though this is an experiment and sounds scientific, I promise absolutely no technobabble, just straight up easy to follow actionable content! Thanks for reading!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I would love for you to join the experiment! Please come and find us on social media u/theottmethod or join the facebook group the organic marketer (official) and if you want to access our super hot content just go to https://theorganicmarketer.com.
https://www.canva.com/join/relish-clambering-candy