Comments on: Startup Marketing Part 2: Why Focusing on Traffic Can Kill Your Startup

By: Brett Miller

Brett Miller — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 02:37:54 +0000

Great article. You can’t “Spend” your traffic or twitter followers. At least my mortgage company will not take them as payment.

You need to split your marketing time between increasing traffic and converting that traffic.

By: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding | Software by Rob

Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding | Software by Rob — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 04:28:47 +0000

[...] startup marketing. The first 6 (not required before you read this one) are available here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part [...]

By: Chris Waldron

Chris Waldron — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:43:12 +0000

Often early on we focused on traffic then realized it was only a fraction of our funnel. As a subscription service we don’t worry about the size of our traffic but the growth of our profits. Great post here.

By: Startup Marketing: The Nine Levels of Traffic Quality | Software by Rob

Startup Marketing: The Nine Levels of Traffic Quality | Software by Rob — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:43:44 +0000

[...] Startups By now we’ve discussed the fact that you should first plug your funnel, then improve conversion rates, then work on sending as much traffic as possible to your [...]

By: Startup Marketing Mistake: Losing People Through the Bottom of Your Funnel | Software by Rob

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:32:55 +0000

[...] ← Why Focusing on Traffic Can Kill Your Startup [...]

By: Daniel Kuperman

Daniel Kuperman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:46:48 +0000

Rob,

Your comment about good marketing being invisible is right on target. How to arrive at “invisible” is a tricky thing. Very few can do that. We’ll keep trying!

Great post.

By: Ray Wenderlich

Ray Wenderlich — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:00:11 +0000

Wow great point – I bet I would have fallen into the “traffic, traffic, traffic!” mindset without reading this article. Thanks for sharing!

For others who are reading this – I’d recommend you check out Rob’s links to additional info on A/B testing, he has a great screencast that shows how easy it is to get started with Google Web Optimizer.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:28:36 +0000

> What exactly does un-optimized mean?

I simply mean a website or sales funnel that has never been A/B tested for improvements. With this kind of virgin territory it’s reasonable to expect 50-100% improvements in conversion rates fairly quickly.

Of course, this depends on a number of factors including the strength of your initial design, the strength of the new design, the quality of your traffic, etc.

But once you’ve done a few rounds of optimization it gets harder and harder each time to beat improvements from the previous round.

Always Be Testing is a good resource for getting started with A/B testing.

By: Al Tenhundfeld

Al Tenhundfeld — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:14:21 +0000

I’m more of a back-end guy and very ignorant about this realm. In a future post, I’d love for you to elaborate more on this sentence:

“Especially with a completely un-optimized sales website, which is the easiest kind to improve.”

What exactly does un-optimized mean? I assume you generally mean a user experience not optimized for conversion. But specifically do you mean design, information architecture, user registration, etc.?

Or you if you could just recommend some existing books or articles, that would be helpful too.

Thanks.