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.

Webkinz are stuffed animals that were originally released by the Ganz company on April 29, 2005. The toys are similar to many other small plush toys, however they come with a special code on their labels that allows access to the “Webkinz World” which is a website to own a virtual version of the pet for virtual interaction. There are also smaller, less expensive versions of the toys called Lil’ Kinz. The More Webkinz you buy the more money, rooms and items you get.

Each Webkinz stuffed animal and Webkinz accessory comes with an 8-character code. By registering this code on the Webkinz website, you “adopt” this pet in the virtual Webkinz World, which is an online play area with its own economy. The user receives money (called KinzCash) by adopting new pets, playing online games, answering general knowledge questions, and through daily activities like clicking “I love my Webkinz!”, spinning the Wheel of WOW, playing Wishing Well 2, or completing jobs (minigames) available once every 8 hours. Each day, there is a Game of the Day which can be played for bonus KinzCash, and other bonuses are available each hour, full days on weekends and afternoons only on weekdays.

Users can spend their KinzCash at what is called the W Shop, where they can purchase food and clothing for their pet, items for their pet’s room or to build additional rooms onto their house, or outdoors areas etc. Users can decorate a room for their pet with pre-made themes, or mix and match their own furniture.

The online world also contains many rare or exclusive items. Some of these items require developing a friendship with the Curio Shop owner to purchase, while others you get for registering other Webkinz accessories you purchase in the real world. Each type of pet gets a special food available exclusively for them. Also, a Pet of the Month is announced at the beginning of each month. If a person registers the announced pet in that month, they will receive other exclusive items.

Many of the tasks in Webkinz World involve collecting items. For example, recipes are released for the players through cookbooks you can purchase or one of the TV Shows called The Secret Chef. Gems can be mined once a day at the Curio Shop, with a full set of gems being turned into the Webkinz Crown of Wonder and buy exclusive items. You can also go to Dr. Quack for a check up on your Webkinz’ health.

Some other features of Webkinz include:

• The ability for players to create their own shows with the Webkinz Studio, and enter to be chosen to appear on the Webkinz television.
• Buying a swimming pool, where you can have your Webkinz swim around. This increases their health.
• Sending gifts or letters to friends on a peer-to-peer network.
• Invite a friend over to your house, where you can chat and interact with some board games and items.
• Participate in the hourly events, which can earn you prizes, KinzCash, and coupons, among other things.
• Play Wacky Bingoz, a form of Bingo where you get one, two, and three ball games every day.^[1]
• Brushing your pets teeth, hair, washing paws/feathers/feet ect, bathing.

The More Webkinz you buy the more money, rooms and items you get? How about that for upsell?

The interviews in the book covered some important aspects of startups that any business can learn from. The founders of 32 successful startups talked about how the project got started, how they got funding or bootstrapped their company into a successful exit. They also shared in details about the obstacles they faced as a first time entrepreneur, the scaling problems they experienced and how they dealt with it. There were also some really interesting conversations about the marketing strategies that were used to find users and customers with a limited budget. In the interview with Sabeer Bhatia, he talked about viral marketing and how a simple message in the footer of every Hotmail’s message helped grew the users based to 300 millions in less than two years.

The success of these Internet startup were not overnight as the media made it sound like. The founders had problems with VC, partners, technology… It took more than just an idea and product to make it big. It was the founders’ passion, determination, and persistence that led them to success. Awesome book, thanks Jessica.

Interviews:

David Heinemeier Hansson
Partner, 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails

Charles Geschke
Founder of Adobe

Ron Gruner
Founder of Alliant Computer and Shareholder.com

Steve Wozniak
Founder of Apple

Philip Greenspun
Founder of ArsDigita

Evan Williams
Founder of Blogger.com and Odeo

Craig Newmark
Founder of Craigslist

Joshua Schachter
Founder of Del.icio.us

Joe Kraus
Founder of Excite and JotSpot

Blake Ross
Creator of Firefox

Caterina Fake
Founder of Flickr

Joel Spolsky
Founder of Fog Creek Software

Paul Buchheit
Creator of Gmail

Ray Ozzie
Founder of Groove Networks and Iris Associates

Sabeer Bhatia
Founder of Hotmail

James Hong
Founder of HotorNot

Mitch Kapor
Founder of Lotus

Bob Davis
Founder of Lycos

Arthur van Hoff
Founder of Marimba

Mark Fletcher
Founder of ONElist and Bloglines

Ann Winblad
Founder of Open Systems and Hummer Winblad

Max Levchin
Founder of PayPal

Mike Lazaridis
Founder of Research in Motion

Mena Trott
Founder of Six Apart

Dan Bricklin
Founder of Software Arts and creator of VisiCalc

James Currier
Founder of Tickle

Mike Ramsay
Founder of TiVo

Steve Kaufer
Founder of TripAdvisor

Paul Graham
Founder of Viaweb and Y Combinator

Brewster Kahle
Founder of WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet

Steve Perlman
Founder of WebTV

Tim Brady
First employee at Yahoo!

This is without any inbound links, any ads, any pr. I didn’t use any secret or special seo tricks. I just follow the very basics of seo. Here are text and tags from one of the landing page:

Title: About this blog | finding customers ain’t THAT hard

Description: Many of the posts here will be about my personal experience of what works, what doesn’t, and how to find customers for your startup. I will also share in details about how to actually execute those marketing campaigns.

H1: finding customers ain’t THAT hard, a blog on startups, marketing, & technology

Body Text: See it here and here

This was no coincident nor was it the first time that I was able to get on google first page of search results in a few weeks. As long as you have the right keywords you in the title tag, the description meta, the h1 and h2 tags, the body text, and the url, you’ll have a good chance of getting on google first page of search results.

Bid: $0.56

Type: CPC

Impressions: 2,413,088

Clicks: 576

CTR (%): 0.02

Avg. CPC: $0.53

Avg. CPM: $0.13

Spent: $306.83

Number of Orders: 1 or 2 Google Adwords
——–

Bid: $0.27

Type: CPC

Impressions: 258,664

Clicks: 3,337

CTR (%): 1.29

Avg. CPC: $0.27

Avg. CPM:

Spent: $915.55

Number of Orders: 50+

The conversion rate speaks for itself.

Despite the data above, I think eventually someone at facebook or outside of facebook will figure out a way to monetize their data. Facebook knows their users’ name, age, sex, location, interests, hobbies, social connections, browsing patterns, etc. Search engines, magazines, or TV programs don’t have anything close to the demographic and behavioral data that facebook, myspace, or other social networking sites have.

Facebook Beacon is still in its infant stage but when it can leverage those data and the word of mouth quality in their user base, it will be a powerful form of advertising medium. I just hope they can get there before people give up on them.

The facebook poll was easy, quick, and pretty accurate. I created the poll and got 100 responses within a day. The report gives you detailed breakdowns by age groups and sex. The only thing I should have done different was to select the right age group. Many of the respondents were over 35 years old and didn’t need invitations. This was a bit surprising to me considering the fact that facebook started mainly for college students. It’s amazing how they got such a diverse user base in such a short period of time after opening facebook to the general public.

Over all, it’s a great tool. It was easy, fast, and accurate. I priced the invitations using the results of the poll and customers had no problem with the price.

Take a look at my facebook poll details below (click to zoom in)

* Although the facebook poll was great, facebook social ad wasn’t great at all or even comparable to Google Adwords or Yahoo ad. I’ll talk more about this in a later post.

If you have this problem even after you change your file attributes on the wp-content folder to 777.  You have to change the permission in the folder wp-content/uploads to 777 as well.  It should work after that.

Brian Solis: PR Secrets for Statups

Your investors or advisors will tell you one of two things, usually starting with “you need PR.” From there, they’ll usually recommend that you either bring on an agency or consultant, one that they’ve worked with and can highly recommend. Or, they’ll suggest that you need to do it yourself (DIY) in order to build relationships with those who are highly respected in your target markets while conserving cash.

While DIY PR sounds good, you’ll quickly learn however, that it takes more time than you think to reach those people. Besides, you have other things to focus on and any good PR program will place you in a position to build relationships with the influencers that matter to your business.

Loïc Le Meur: PR secrets? bullshit

Not a secret #1
who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product

There aren’t only bloggers and journalists looking for stories, there are also users with passion about a product that can just spread the love as the power equation between journalists-bloggers on the one side and happy users spreading the word with blogs, twitter etc on the other side has completely changed. In fact, I think startup CEOs should care more about the community members than the journalists and professional bloggers. If the product gets traction, it will get coverage anyway.

Mark Cuban:A Couple of My Rules for Startups

11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. A PR firm will call or email people in the publications, shows and websites you already watch, listen to and read. Those people publish their emails. Whenever you consume any information related to your field, get the email of the person publishing it and send them an email introducing yourself and the company. Their job is to find new stuff. They will welcome hearing from the founder instead of some PR flack. Once you establish communications with that person, make yourself available to answer their questions about the industry and be a source for them. If you are smart, they will use you.

First, I find it hard to believe that establishing communications with top bloggers and journalists today is as easy as sending them an email. This might be true for Mark ten years ago when blogging was still new and startups were still interesting to the media.

Second, if Loïc has a good product, doesn’t he want to spread the word and gain ten times more traction faster?

I think if you can afford it, do hire a credible PR firm with a good startups portfolio and let them do what they are best at and go back to building your product and business. Your time is better spent on doing something you know and good at. Sure, your users will spread the word for you if the product is great but why not spend a little money and grow the users base faster?

I have personal experience in this as well. When I started my first business in college, I wanted to have a complete business plan with all the financial forecasts, sales and marketing strategies, executive summary… I spend countless hours designing logos, business cards, brochures, websites. I also worried a lot about getting a business phone number and a formal business address so that it doesn’t look like I’m working out of my mom’s house.

Long story short, the business didn’t work out, I wasted time and money on business plan, logo, business cards, brochures, flyers.

The point is why spend time writing a business plan when you already know what it is. Why spend too much time thinking about business name and logo when it’s going to change. (Apple, Microsoft, Google all had their business names and logos changed). How can you have financial forecasts when you don’t know if anyone will buy your product or service yet? A nice looking business plan and logo will not impress investors if you have no users or customers. Also, no one is going to care if you have an 800 phone number. No one is going to investigate where your address is or use Google earth to zoom down your house to look for you. You wouldn’t want that kind of creeps for customers anyways.

If people need your products or services, they could care less about your business plan or how your business cards look or what type of phone number or address you have. People pay you for your products and services, not your business plan or stationaries.

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.

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.

If no one is willing to pay for my products, that means I either have to change my sales/marketing strategy or change my products or change something. It is much better to find a few customers in the beginning to see what you need to work on in the sales and operation process.

Before you waste your money, think about these things:

1. No matter what the sales rep tell you, of those millions of emails, maybe 100 are your target audience. These 100 people will be pissed at you for spamming them and probably hit the “Report Spam” button. The rest of the emails are either invalid, email addresses from China or Kazakhstan, or of people that are sicked of getting spammed from the same email vendor. They will probably hit the “Report Spam” as well.
2. Your website domain will get black listed fairly quickly with ISP and mail servers. When this happen, you won’t be able to send legit email to customers or anyone. You’ll have to change the domain, the hosting server, the name, etc.
3. You lose all the money and won’t get a refund because the vendor made you pay first and made you sign a contract that say you won’t get a refund.

If it was that easy to reach millions of people, you think companies will still spend money on marketing? You’d have a better return for your money by handing out money to people on the street and ask them to go to your site. The first thing I would do is try out Google Adwords. If is so much easier to convert a lead when they are actively looking for what you are selling than to try to sell to someone who’s already pissed because you’re spamming them.

Today, I learned about trackbacks and its benefits, Teli Adlam pretty much sum it up here is his post, WordPress Trackback Tutorial, so no need for me do it here.

From his post on trackbacks, I also find his blog, optiniche, a must read for new bloggers like me.  Check it out.  With so much more to learn, sometime I wish I can substitute sleeping with reading.

Wedding Invitations
Buy Wedding Invitations & Envelopes
Now Online at David’s Bridal.
www.DavidsBridal.com/Invitations

Stunning Invitations
Custom Artwork + Beautiful Papers
Textures and Exquisite Details
www.passionpaper.com

When people are searching for a specific product, they already know what it is. What is the point of writing an ad telling them that you are selling that product? Tell them about your benefits, your differentiations, your specialties, tell them something they don’t already know.

By the way, those are the actual ads, I didn’t make them up. Bigger companies doesn’t mean they have better marketing.

—————

Follow up From Posts:
finding customer ain’t THAT hard, start with Google

If you choose the right keywords, with the right titles, description, and write a decent article about your products and website, you can get on the first or second page of Google natural search results in a day or two.

Don’t count on it for too long because once spammers figure this out and flood the poor site with junks, Google will change their algorithm and it won’t have the same effect. For now, Scribd is a great seo tool that can direct the right traffic to your site. Give it a shot, you’ll be surprise, it worked for me.

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.

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.

If you are a startup and trying to find that first customer, first user, or first order and your friends, families, and fools are not the right target, create an ad with Google Adwords. Google became Google because of Adword. Adwords works for plumpers. It works for startups. It works for corporations. Yahoo ads and Microsoft ads also works, but not as well as Google simply because there are more people using Google.

I made the mistake of spending thousands on buying email lists, direct mail lists, sponsored email campaigns. They simply didn’t work anywhere near expectations and I even got black listed on AOL mailing server. Most of these email list vendors are scammers, which I will get into in another post.

Even with Google ads, you have to be careful in writing the ads and keywords. If you choose keywords that are too broad, you will find that pretty soon those clicks can cost a lot of money and not generate any revenue.

So there you have it, if you are stuck on finding customers, start with Google Adwords. Of course, there are more into Adwords then just simply create an ad, throw in some keywords, and redirect it to your website. There are things that you need to do with the ads, the keywords, the landing pages to maximize the returns and track your roi. Google talks about this stuff to on their site too but at a high level. I will get into more details and the how-tos down to the designing and coding level in the follow-up posts.

————–

Follow up Posts:
sell the benefits, not the product, when writing an ad

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.