I thought it would be a good idea to write an article on ways to promote your new web-based startup. I tend to get a lot of ideas for web-based businesses so it’s something I’m quite used to doing. Here are five ways you can get started, but I’d love for you to also contribute ways that have been helpful to your business.

A Great Design

Now I don’t know if you are a web designer who is amazing at branding but rubbish at coding, or if you are a coder who is amazing at building feature-rich applications but not so hot on the design side (you might be both!). What is important is that your web-based business looks really great.

sethgodin Seth Godin (born July 10, 1960) is an American author of business books. Godin popularized the topic of permission marketing. From Wikipedia

If you are a coder and not so good at design it’s really worth investing in a good branding person and a great designer who can really give your business an image that really stands out. At the end of the day you are launching something in to a world that is saturated with probably quite similar offerings (if not let me know as I love seeing original ideas), and you need your product to stand out. As Seth Godin says your product needs to be a “purple cow” – just Google it!

Once you have your brand, and while working with the designer make sure that you are clear about what you are offering (this will get covered in another article I’m sure). Make the unique selling points really visible on the home page, have clear “calls to action” for example the “Sign Up” or “Create Account” button, explain what your business is about (perhaps a blog?) and make sure that your users can interact with you and get in touch. Without doing these things you could have all the hits in the world but zero goal conversion, in other words thousands of people coming to your website but not knowing what you are selling.

So once you have your amazing brand and design, submit it to the plentiful (there are LOADS of them) CSS galleries on the web. There are even tools now, like in the old days of submitting to search engines, that will do all the submissions for you for a fee. I like to do it manually and try to get in touch with the author of the gallery to get their feedback and so on. Such websites you can submit your amazing design to are Web Creme (in my opinion the best, but she gets quite busy at times and doesn’t always update!), CSS Remix, CSS Beauty, CSS Elite, CSS Drive, CSS mania, 101 Best Websites, Best Web Gallery, Creattica, Konigi.

The list goes on, just Google “css galleries” and you will find many of them. The advantages to doing this is you will get a lot of hits (if you get featured), but also your page rank will go up which is great when you do your search engine optimisation strategy.

Killer Startups

Killer Startups is a great resource for new web apps and businesses. They manually read each submission and if successful will review your website and feature it. When one of my sites was first featured on KS I was so pleased with what they had written because all I had seen previously was text that I had written and submitted, whereas KS take the time to review your site and are often very complimentary.

Killer Startups receive many submissions every day, so if your web app or web-based business isn’t anything special you may either not get featured at all, or will receive a very quick write-up which doesn’t look that good when compared with some of the other write-ups on there. So make sure that your site looks good and is full of information, or in the case of web apps (particularly those in Beta) make sure they work!

Spark of Genius

I actually only found out about this today, but thought i’d share it with you as someone shared it with me. Microsoft BizSpark are sponsoring this Spark of Genius feature on Mashable whereby they will feature a new startup every day. The criteria are that you are a new and active business and that you don’t make more than $1 million dollars in annual revenue, so I’m sure that won’t be too difficult (certainly in my case!).

Tweet!

Of course, the last two are the favourites. Firstly Twitter – if you are not on Twitter, where have you been!? It’s amazing and not only does it serve as a great tool for keeping your users (followers) up-to-date with your business news but with the new search feature can be a great way of promoting your new website.

I’m not advocated spam here, and it annoys me when people abuse this, but you can Tweet in such a way that you are not coming across as too ’spammy’ yet actually really help those who are looking for a product like what you are selling. Just search for a key phrase relevant to your business/product, for example “bespoke panda widgets”, and you might find people discussing that particular topic. If no-one has tweeted that phrase in the last 3 days, I suggest you give up and find another. When you find a key phrase on Twitter that people are talking about, and it’s relevant to your product you can either:

a) Mention the users who are in that conversation and ask them if they could have a look at your business. But be polite, personal and respectful – don’t expect them to get back to you. For example “@joebloggs hey I saw you need bespoke panda widgets, my company is selling them at half price if interested tweet me back :-)”.

b) Use that key phrase in your tweet without mentioning anyone, use a hash, and don’t be too spammy. You could even post to your blog, which is helpful for those wanting to read more on your offer. For example “My company is offering half price bespoke panda widgets, read more on my blog if interested http://bit.ly/8Yz123 #bespokepandawidgets”.

Don’t tweet this too many times, or you definately will look like spam. By the way, I don’t have a thing for Bespoke Panda Widgets so if anyone is selling them I’m not interested, no PMs please.

Relevant Blogs

Obviously you should have a blog, and you should have it optimised for search engines so you can get traffic that way. But what I’m going to mention in this point is not tips on how to promote your own blog, but how you can use other people’s blogs to promote your product.

Find blog posts that are relevant to your business/product, and post a friendly comment which includes a link to your website but also information on your product and why you think it might be relevant to the post. I don’t advocate using a fake name, just be yourself, be honest and say that you are looking for people to offer constructive feedback on your new website. For example, I just found a blog with a post about “The Top 5 Panda Widgets”, and here is my comment: “Hey guys, I’m CEO of a new startup that sells bespoke panda widgets (http://mywebsite.com), would love feedback on the site and widgets if any of you get time.”.

Again, don’t copy and paste this into loads of blogs or it will only make you look bad once the search engines crawl through all your comments and people see you’ve pasted the same thing and spammed it every where. I suggest you just follow these simple guidelines when promoting your website on the web:

Be yourself, and be honest about what you are selling
Be clear about the business and what it does
Admit you are new and are learning
Welcome and encourage feedback
Be quick to get back in touch with those who contact you (great customer service is what really gets you places)

It takes time…

It will take time for your new startup to get somewhere yes of course, but it will take a LOT of your time just promoting it. You might need to sit there with your laptop at the weekend doing the steps above on lots of websites for hours before you see any traffic at all, but remember what you put in is what you get out. You’ll thank yourself for putting all those hours in at the early stages of your business, once you’re sitting in your new Yacht remembering the early days (…ok I’m dreaming).

Like I said earlier, please post your ideas and ways to promote startups that have worked for your business. Look forward to seeing them!