The Ultimate Free Marketing Tool needs help
This must be the day of VC Dave but he needs our help. Plus he bought me a delicious breakfast at Buck’s of Woodside.
Background: All bloggers and companies that have blogs are attention whores. They want more people to read their sites. All people email. Why not combine the power of the two? Dave created Blogsigs which is the easiest way to include your latest blog entry in your Gmail, Outlook, Entourage, etc…
Problem: Not enough people know about Blogsigs. I really love the product and is super helpful in getting more people reading your blog without any work.
Question for you: How can we get more people to use Blogsigs and get it spreading like chlamydia?
Prize: Best 3 comments get Community Next t-shirts. Yes, I have way too many of them left over=)
Please leave a comment and help if you want your site, product or service to be reviewed in the future.
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Noah Kagan wrote The Ultimate Free Marketing Tool needs help on May 3rd, 2007 and there are 23 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though. Read more posts by Noah Kagan.
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23 Responses to “The Ultimate Free Marketing Tool needs help”
May 3rd, 2007
4:48 pm
Hi Noah,
I was wondering about how you got that working on the email you sent me but there was no way for me to learn more.
Rule number one of any widget is a link that says “Get this widget!” that points to an info page. Do that and you should see adoption take off.
May 3rd, 2007
4:54 pm
Ian,
Good point. The only thing, is that I remove that line because I don’t want my emails promoting a service or going into spam folders (which they often do).
May 3rd, 2007
5:20 pm
I see after installing Blogsigs that it adds that hyperlink automatically which isn’t good for the reason you mention. Spam filters are real sensitive to multiple html links so Blogsigs needs to add an option to have just a plain text link instead like:
Latest post via blogsigs.com > Online Advertising in an IP-Enabled World
I can’t be bothered with always manually updating my .sig file in Outlook each time I update my Blogsigs with a new post - kind of defeats the automated nature of the tool.
May 3rd, 2007
6:24 pm
Advertise it through payperpost, or loudlaunch, post a how to video on Youtube, favorite it on 2.0 sites like digg and stumbleupon, talk to the people behind Gmail/ hotmail beta and recommend offering it as an option/ feature, submit it to Lifehacker and other tech-junkie sites
May 3rd, 2007
7:36 pm
You should blog about it, and then start emailing people with Blogsig in your signature. Yeah, that’s it…
May 3rd, 2007
10:08 pm
Ah. So now I know your killer secret for inserting those blog links in your emails. As if I didn’t already know you were updating via RSS, seeing those links in the footer somehow convinces me to come back and make sure that I didn’t miss any juicy tips. To spread the word, I’ll blog about it (duh). Some reason I was reading an email that happened to come from you while signing a receipt at lunch and added a "5thirtyone.com paid for this, visit". at the bottom. I think Blogsigs had something to do with that.
May 3rd, 2007
10:50 pm
Instead of making users download and run an executable, how about converting it into a Wordpress plugin? Your ideal user is a WP blogger. Why not integrate it into the platform they’re already on…
Then go one step further and get it listed in the plugin repository on Wordpress.org for distribution…
May 3rd, 2007
10:52 pm
^ And how exactly would a WordPress plugin inject a snippet of text into my preferred email client?
May 3rd, 2007
11:10 pm
If the email client is web-based (gmail, yahoo, etc), the script can login and modify the sig.
I assume thats how the current app works for the web-based email that it supports
May 3rd, 2007
11:14 pm
Downloaded the application made available for Mac users and it actually requires the use of either Mail or Entourage. So, the snippet about supporting such services as Gmail and Hotmail actually means Gmail via POP or Hotmail via Entourage.
May 3rd, 2007
11:19 pm
I haven’t tried it myself… but I can imagine it being feasible to let this script run on your server (via an activated WP plugin) to login to your gmail and edit/update your signature. All behind the scenes
May 4th, 2007
3:39 am
why not put it up at cnet/downloads.com, or get some of the 9830983 ‘blog promotion tools blogs’ to talk about it?
A ‘tell a friend’ feature would be helpful: a nice piece of text explaining it (with pics?) that I can copy-paste in an email to friends.
And an ‘I use blogsigs’ button to put up on my blog… and maybe remove the ‘already downloaded 83 times’ until the number is actually impressive.
May 4th, 2007
3:45 am
Also, maybe make it actually work..i just downloaded the OS X version, and I can’t get it to work: it will not let me select a signature to use…
May 4th, 2007
6:30 am
It may be a little tricky, but try this:
If someone clicks on a blogsigs link, they are taken to a different flavor of the blogpost than the normally public accessible post. The only difference with this post is that it has a text box or whatever saying “You arrived to this blog via blog sigs, click _here_ to integrate it in your blog” - that way the message is only for people who used the blog sig…which might be a similar group of people who would actually use it, I’m not sure.
Or maybe you can place a non-intrusive little badge/widget on all blog posts (regardless of where they came from) saying “This blog is [insert word here]ed via blog sigs - the plugin that adds a blog link to your email signature. Click _here_ to get it”
May 4th, 2007
8:33 am
1 - Remove the “downloaded 87 times” text from the site, it makes it sound like nobody is even download it
2 - integrate into gmail with a firefox plugin, submit to Likehacker and all such related sites.
3 - integrate “I last digg: some story” and submit to the digg crowd.
May 4th, 2007
9:00 am
[...] Noah finally spilled the beans on how he has managed to insert the latest headlines from his blog into the footer of his emails. I had always assumed that there was some type of manual cut ‘n pasting going on, but the true secret was a free application known as Blogsigs. Blogsigs eliminates the tedious task of cut ‘n pasting URLs and text snippets into your email footers and automatically inserts content before emails are sent. Blogsigs is incredibly easy to use and works with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail (via desktop your preferred desktop mail application). Available for both Windows and Mac, this free marketing tool will surely add a few more eyes to your readership with very little effort. [...]
May 4th, 2007
9:43 am
Wow. Great responses! Anybody who wants a shirt please email me shirt [at] okdork.com
May 4th, 2007
10:43 am
Andre,
Are you looking for a job?
May 4th, 2007
2:02 pm
Thank you all for the fantastic thoughts, comments, and insights. This is amazing and some incredible marketing ideas here. We’ll go to work and give you an update. Keep ‘em coming!
May 5th, 2007
10:13 am
Put a PR plan behind it.
Collect redaction mailaddy’s and send out a pressrelease.
Invite reporters to look at it closer … let them test it.
In return they give you an article into there fancy magazine.
People read fancy magazines and will test it!
Make it known to people :o)
May 6th, 2007
10:30 pm
This has great potential, but there is no reason why this has to be a standalone app- all it does, really, is parse and format RSS. A much better approach would be something like a GreaseMonkey script, which would work for any web-based email without the privacy concerns of giving up passwords. The key to adoption of anything is removing barriers and thus maximizing the benefit to the user while reducing the cost. Downloading and installing a program is a barrier- a single-click script is less so. Change your focus- make it a simple widget that people can embed in their MySpace. Or, adapt the application to also append the latest blog post to the user’s AIM away message. Have it send Twitters, even!
Even if you don’t change the application, sell it to the right crowd. Contact the metabloggers(those who blog about blogging) like Problogger or the people you see attending blogging conferences. Get adoption by a few key people and your user numbers will soar.
The basis behind of all of this is community-focused marketing, which is the strategy I’ve developed for use in my own marketing efforts. It’s far beyond the scope of a single blog comment, but I would be happy to discuss it further.
May 7th, 2007
12:34 am
We’d use it for EduRev but Reemer and I are both using GMail on Macs. No soup for us!
May 17th, 2007
11:53 pm
Dave just unleashed a new firefox extension of the product which is slick:
http://www.blogsigs.com/
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