finding customers ain’t THAT hard, a blog on startups, marketing, & technology

Have you ever came across an interesting web service, or white paper, or article that you want to try out or read but don’t want to register with your own email?  With mailinator, you can just sign up for anything without worrying about your privacy.

I’ve learn about this mailinator site while reading Paul Tyma’s blog, Technical Revenue, an excellent blog by the way.  The great thing about this service is you don’t even have to sign up to use it.  Basically, it creates an email inbox for you and keep it in the server memory for a few hours. You can go sign up for anything with an email from mailinator (something@mailinator.com).  One you signed up on the website you were interested in, go back to mailinator to check your email and then forget about it.  Simply genius.

What is Mailinator?
Mailinator is a different kind of email service. The biggest difference is that you don’t need to sign up. Any email name you can think of already exists at Mailinator.com. Want BrianTheSkink@mailinator.com? You got it. Want to be JacquesKooStow? ScaryGavyn? GraysonTheMason? No problem. They exist when you create them and they are just waiting for you to check your inbox.

I’ve had the chance to work with Manticore for the last year and a half and it is by the far the best demand generation tool that I’ve seen.  Manticore first got our attention when we were looking for something new to meet the needs of our much higher marketing goals.  Within ten minutes of visiting their site, without filling out any forms on the site, we got a call from their rep asking about our needs and offer solutions to help with our goals.  At the time, we had no idea how they did it but we told them whatever they were using to do that, we want it.

It turns out their tracking code looks up our IP address, do a reverse DNS lookup and email the rep the domain.  The rep went to our website, get our contact information, and request to talk to the VP of Marketing.  They even gave us sometime to look over the website before calling.

That’s only one small feature of their now complete demand generation and marketing automation software suite called Manticore Technology.  Below are the key features:

* Demand Booster™
Through intuitive, easy-to-use workflow configurator, develop automated marketing campaigns, driving leads deeper into the sales pipeline, and ensure a constant flow of qualified leads.

* Prospect Builder™
Build powerful, targeted marketing lists based on salesforce.com fields and detailed marketing response data for more effective email and direct marketing.

* Prospect Pages™
Deliver personalized, relevant website content to sales prospects; increase response rates through pre-populated forms with little or no IT involvement.

* Deep Salesforce.com Integration™
Create a virtually unified sales and marketing platform for powerful data sharing and improved communication between the groups.

* Web Analytics
Gain complete insight into website visitor behavior, identify bottlenecks and implement improvements for increased registration rates.

* Email
Execute large-scale email campaign to drive lead generation, while automatically engaging recipients based on their response behavior.

Basically, the suite allow you to automate, monitor, analyze your marketing demand generation programs.  There are many features that I like, for example, when a lead come back to the site for the third time, the app send an email to our rep to do a follow up.  You can also build a completely automated lead nurturing process using a drag and drop interface.  They also have a decent email marketing tool, the only thing is you can’t attach files to an email.  One of the most important feature for us was the Salesforce integration which I think still have rooms for improvement but still better than most of the other solutions we looked at.

Over all, it is the most completed suite of marketing software and pricing is not outrageous.

Hubspot is a new set of tools that also look very promising which I will look into next.

Beginning June 3, Google will add automatic matching to all Adword account by default. Here is the email I got from Google describing what it is:

Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or lower than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic.

Automatic matching won’t affect the traffic you’re currently receiving. In addition, automatic matching will have no impact if your campaigns already capture the majority of relevant traffic.

See a list of frequently asked questions about automatic matching at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=13669&hl=en_US.

You have the option to opt out but I don’t see why anyone would. If you monitor the keywords that you use in Adword and keywords that people used to get to your site, you’ll see why it’s a good thing to have Google do the automatic matching for you. It’s time consuming and tricky to have all the different combinations of the keywords or phrases for your ads. I rather have a few highly target keywords in the ad and let Google do the rest of the fuzzy matching with their algorithm.

Of course, this means more money for Google and you might not like some of the clicks that you get with the new auto matching. The good thing is, you will also get a lot more of the clicks that you wouldn’t have without it. You’ll also quickly find out about the keywords that you are missing that you should be using on yur site for SEO.

Today, I was trying to remember how to get to a blog that I found yesterday. I didn’t bookmark it in Google Bookmarks or del.icio.us. I’m not on the same computer that I saw it on so I can’t go back on my browsing history. I forgot which keywords I used to find it.

So Google Web History came to mind and what do I find? Everything and in the exact timeline. Google Web History has all your searches, the websites you visited, what time, how many times. You can even search your searches. Who needs bookmarking when you have this?

Finding this out is a bit scary and exciting. No wonder Google is so successful. They know what you are looking for, what you’re thinking, what you’re reading, what time you’re doing certain things. It’s no wonder that their search results and ads are so relevant and have such high conversion rate compare to other ad mediums. I’m sure it’s not just the algorithm and the web indexes. I’m sure they’re using some of this information to show you the search results and ads.

So this brings me to a point, what is the best personal bookmarking tool out there? del.icio.us used to be pretty cool and popular but it doesn’t even come close to what Google Web History can do. The best bookmarking tool is the one that bookmark stuff for you without you having to do anything.

So I created this blog on Friday last week and it took me almost two days to find and install the plugins.  It took a few hours to find a decent theme and customize it to look and work the way I want.  So far, I think it is a great tool but it is still way too complicated, at least for me, to setup the Google Analytics, the Feedburner, the widgets, and the theme.

Is there any website out there that have a point and click tool to design a theme and install plugins without having to search or set it up yourself?  If not, that could be a good idea for a startup, how about that?

Let me know what you like, don’t like about the theme, or how I can make it better.

I started to really read blogs about a year ago and I’ve been an avid reader of Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Techmeme, Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Seth Godin, and recently Fred Wilson. I thought about blogging a few times but didn’t think I would have the time or a good reason to start one, until I’ve read this post from Fred Wilson. Here’s an excerpt:

And it works. About 50,000 people come to my blog every month. The site brings in about $30,000 a year now in ad revenue, and I donate it all to charity. Most important, I’m getting to know entrepreneurs of all kinds - in India, Australia, England, China, and Silicon Valley. They read my blog, correct me when I’m wrong, pound the table when they agree with me. I get to know them, and they get to know me. When it comes time for them to raise money, they know who to ask. And for me, the blog acts as an amplifier and a filter. I see many more opportunities, but they are also way more relevant. It makes me a better investor.

While reading this post and the comments, it just hit me. Blogging really IS the future of media. Blogging is about sharing and learning, and it is much more personal and relevant than any books or newspaper can offer. It’s a two ways conversation and a powerful form of communication. Imagine having 50,000 people to ask for opinions and spread the words for you. Imagine having 50,000 people to learn from, to correct when you are wrong, or support you when you are right.

Having 50,000 people reading your blog is not easy or can be accomplished overnight, but it can be done. Fred Wilson sits on more than a dozen of startups’ boards, a partner in two venture capital firms, have a family with three kids (I’m guessing from looking at the picture on his site). He still have time to do a post or two a day and manage to keep his 50,000+ readers reading.

So here I am giving this a shot and will start with one post a day, one reader a day, one user a day.