December 17, 2012 at 04:17Affiliate program as the most effective promotion tool on the example of Ivideon
Do not worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you will have to push them through people's throats. Howard Aiken .
Do you know what a huge gap lies between developing a cool product and making it truly successful?
Those who start their own startup almost always have the same error: it’s
enough to implement something special and at the highest level, and users will come by themselves.
Unfortunately, this does not happen. For this to happen, it’s necessary, at times, to make much more effort than for the realization of the product itself, very often bumping into a wall of misunderstanding, and sometimes even elementary stupidity:
“As soon as the Paris exhibition closes, the electric light closes with it, and no one else hears about it” Erasmus Wilson, professor at the University of Oxford, 1878.
Can this be avoided? Unlikely. There will always be people who will not believe in your idea and in your project. But there will be even more people who know absolutely nothing about him. And your task is to fix it.
Under the cut, I’ll talk about how we solved this problem in Ivideon and what gave us excellent results and what didn’t.
From the very beginning, we attracted SEO specialists to promote our site. And in general, completely in vain. And not because the specialists were bad. We did not take into account one simple thing. Nobody knows anything about us. Some analogues are absent and our potential audience is simply not looking for us.
Our goal is to create a high-quality and affordable cloud-based video surveillance service. But not as a security system, although it is possible, but as a new, convenient tool for remote presence and monitoring. From one camera for the home, to several thousand cameras for a network business with a large number of objects. And most importantly, all cameras are available in a single personal account.
Remember the Blue Ocean Strategy? At that moment, when we became interested in SEO, we tried to enter the existing market of professional video surveillance solutions, which is a red ocean with many competitors and established leaders. The same market where the video surveillance system is associated exclusively with the security service, and not, for example, with managers remotely checking the quality of the layout of goods in the store.
So SEO didn’t make sense to us. We needed to conquer the blue ocean without it.
We tested the effectiveness of contextual and banner advertising. Yes, it gave us visitors, but the result from it was not unambiguous. Very often there is a false feeling that it is enough to “throw” money into Google Adwords or Yandex Direct and everything will “automatically configure” there. Creating an effective advertising company is a very painstaking work that is not done quickly and immediately. Not everyone understands this.
It requires the work of a good specialist who would understand the topic of online advertising and the services that we provide, would be competent, effective and most importantly - well-motivated ... But how to find this?
As Walt Disney said, “you can invent, create, design and build the most beautiful place in the world, but you need people to turn it into reality”.
How not to make a mistake in your choice, given the fact that we don’t have the opportunity to hire 10 people at once and evaluate their results. And if you do this sequentially, you can miss the time.
We found an excellent and generally long-known solution to this problem.
When used correctly, an affiliate program will become one of the most important tools for developing and promoting your project. In our case, this is exactly what happened.
Among those people who, without exaggeration, can be called professionals, there are a lot of those who work exclusively for themselves. And not because it is better or worse than working in the office. In my opinion, it just gives a feeling of freedom and that everything depends only on you. This is sport, competition, drive, adrenaline. It is very difficult, but at the same time addictive.
The partnership program allowed us to attract such people to the promotion of our project. And this is not one or two SEO specialists working for salaries. These are dozens of people whose income level depends only on themselves and on their result.
We just gave them the opportunity to earn money with us.
For example, one of them owns their own promoted blogs or portals.
For them, reviews, banners, promotions or other elements are created that allow visitors to these sites to find out about our service and go to our site already. After that, if a visiting visitor makes a purchase in our store or replenishes the account of his personal account, the blog owner receives a percentage for this, significantly exceeding the cost of rotating regular banners.
Someone understands SEO and helps bring targeted traffic to our site, while also receiving a percentage of sales of equipment and service.
As a result, we get excellent specialists who help our advancement, and they, in turn, are motivated enough to work with us.
With all our wishes, we would not be able to come up with as many promotions and New Year's offers as have already been and are being implemented by our partners.
Social networks today are one of the strongest growth drivers for Internet projects. And in the case of Ivideon, this was no exception.
Firstly, we made all our applications completely free. In their capabilities, they are already approaching professional systems that cost more than one thousand dollars.
And secondly, from the very beginning we added to our service a free function to embed live video on our website or blog , and a function that allows you to simply share a link to a video , for example, on a Facebook or VKontakte wall.
Moreover, in order to motivate site owners to place a camera using the Ivideon service, we allowed them to embed not only a description of their own camera, but also place a link to their resource. Thus, if the camera is really interesting and users begin to share it with their friends, the owner of the camera will receive additional traffic to their site.
In the end, it gave its result. The number of clicks to our website from an embedded player hosted on a third-party resource exceeded several times the traffic from search engines.
Just as there is no one pill for everything, there is no single recipe for promoting an Internet project. But we can say for sure that when creating a startup it is extremely important to think over the mechanism of promotion and try to lay it at the very beginning.
Since our service is new and unique, it is much easier for them to interest the user than a discount on iron. Therefore, the affiliate program worked perfectly for us. We were able to concentrate on design and development, allowing our partners to engage in promotion and sales.
There are many more different promotion options. One of them, for example, is the holding of various joint actions, contests, exhibitions. But we have not yet been able to get enough experience to talk about it. So look forward to continuing in future articles.
I hope that this post will be useful to most of those who plan to start or are already working on their own project. Try to take a fresh look at your plans and take the time to promote your strategy. And then the probability of turning your project into a successful business will be much higher.
And do not listen to those who doubt your success. In 1965, Fred Smith was placed three for semester work in economics. And he, using the concept described in this work, built his own company, which today is known as Federal Express.
Do you know what a huge gap lies between developing a cool product and making it truly successful?
Those who start their own startup almost always have the same error: it’s
enough to implement something special and at the highest level, and users will come by themselves.
Unfortunately, this does not happen. For this to happen, it’s necessary, at times, to make much more effort than for the realization of the product itself, very often bumping into a wall of misunderstanding, and sometimes even elementary stupidity:
“As soon as the Paris exhibition closes, the electric light closes with it, and no one else hears about it” Erasmus Wilson, professor at the University of Oxford, 1878.
Can this be avoided? Unlikely. There will always be people who will not believe in your idea and in your project. But there will be even more people who know absolutely nothing about him. And your task is to fix it.
Under the cut, I’ll talk about how we solved this problem in Ivideon and what gave us excellent results and what didn’t.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO
From the very beginning, we attracted SEO specialists to promote our site. And in general, completely in vain. And not because the specialists were bad. We did not take into account one simple thing. Nobody knows anything about us. Some analogues are absent and our potential audience is simply not looking for us.
Our goal is to create a high-quality and affordable cloud-based video surveillance service. But not as a security system, although it is possible, but as a new, convenient tool for remote presence and monitoring. From one camera for the home, to several thousand cameras for a network business with a large number of objects. And most importantly, all cameras are available in a single personal account.
Remember the Blue Ocean Strategy? At that moment, when we became interested in SEO, we tried to enter the existing market of professional video surveillance solutions, which is a red ocean with many competitors and established leaders. The same market where the video surveillance system is associated exclusively with the security service, and not, for example, with managers remotely checking the quality of the layout of goods in the store.
So SEO didn’t make sense to us. We needed to conquer the blue ocean without it.
Advertising
We tested the effectiveness of contextual and banner advertising. Yes, it gave us visitors, but the result from it was not unambiguous. Very often there is a false feeling that it is enough to “throw” money into Google Adwords or Yandex Direct and everything will “automatically configure” there. Creating an effective advertising company is a very painstaking work that is not done quickly and immediately. Not everyone understands this.
It requires the work of a good specialist who would understand the topic of online advertising and the services that we provide, would be competent, effective and most importantly - well-motivated ... But how to find this?
As Walt Disney said, “you can invent, create, design and build the most beautiful place in the world, but you need people to turn it into reality”.
How not to make a mistake in your choice, given the fact that we don’t have the opportunity to hire 10 people at once and evaluate their results. And if you do this sequentially, you can miss the time.
We found an excellent and generally long-known solution to this problem.
affiliate program
When used correctly, an affiliate program will become one of the most important tools for developing and promoting your project. In our case, this is exactly what happened.
Among those people who, without exaggeration, can be called professionals, there are a lot of those who work exclusively for themselves. And not because it is better or worse than working in the office. In my opinion, it just gives a feeling of freedom and that everything depends only on you. This is sport, competition, drive, adrenaline. It is very difficult, but at the same time addictive.
The partnership program allowed us to attract such people to the promotion of our project. And this is not one or two SEO specialists working for salaries. These are dozens of people whose income level depends only on themselves and on their result.
We just gave them the opportunity to earn money with us.
For example, one of them owns their own promoted blogs or portals.
For them, reviews, banners, promotions or other elements are created that allow visitors to these sites to find out about our service and go to our site already. After that, if a visiting visitor makes a purchase in our store or replenishes the account of his personal account, the blog owner receives a percentage for this, significantly exceeding the cost of rotating regular banners.
Someone understands SEO and helps bring targeted traffic to our site, while also receiving a percentage of sales of equipment and service.
As a result, we get excellent specialists who help our advancement, and they, in turn, are motivated enough to work with us.
With all our wishes, we would not be able to come up with as many promotions and New Year's offers as have already been and are being implemented by our partners.
Social features
Social networks today are one of the strongest growth drivers for Internet projects. And in the case of Ivideon, this was no exception.
Firstly, we made all our applications completely free. In their capabilities, they are already approaching professional systems that cost more than one thousand dollars.
And secondly, from the very beginning we added to our service a free function to embed live video on our website or blog , and a function that allows you to simply share a link to a video , for example, on a Facebook or VKontakte wall.
Moreover, in order to motivate site owners to place a camera using the Ivideon service, we allowed them to embed not only a description of their own camera, but also place a link to their resource. Thus, if the camera is really interesting and users begin to share it with their friends, the owner of the camera will receive additional traffic to their site.
In the end, it gave its result. The number of clicks to our website from an embedded player hosted on a third-party resource exceeded several times the traffic from search engines.
Summary
Just as there is no one pill for everything, there is no single recipe for promoting an Internet project. But we can say for sure that when creating a startup it is extremely important to think over the mechanism of promotion and try to lay it at the very beginning.
Since our service is new and unique, it is much easier for them to interest the user than a discount on iron. Therefore, the affiliate program worked perfectly for us. We were able to concentrate on design and development, allowing our partners to engage in promotion and sales.
There are many more different promotion options. One of them, for example, is the holding of various joint actions, contests, exhibitions. But we have not yet been able to get enough experience to talk about it. So look forward to continuing in future articles.
I hope that this post will be useful to most of those who plan to start or are already working on their own project. Try to take a fresh look at your plans and take the time to promote your strategy. And then the probability of turning your project into a successful business will be much higher.
And do not listen to those who doubt your success. In 1965, Fred Smith was placed three for semester work in economics. And he, using the concept described in this work, built his own company, which today is known as Federal Express.