We are looking for marketing and sales partners

Internetmarketing
Would you be interested in (internet)marketing our startup-s? If yes, send us an e-mail! The SLA calculator would be the first project.

What we have:
We can develop good (mini) web sites for our startups that are SEO friendly, userfriendly and OK for selling the product.

What we lack:
- Real hands-on experience in global (internet)marketing. How to market our startups in the global market or in specific markets. We have read a lot of internetmarketing how-to-s, but never done it large-scale.
- Contacts with bloggers and journalists. How to use their help in marketing?
- We are also incubating services for businesses that might not be in the Web 2.0 world. Small retailers, small and mid-size building companies etc. How to market to them without spending thousands on traditional marketing?

Sales
Besides marketing we need sales. Our plan is to track people through marketing to our website and if they seem interested then contact them and tell them more about the product. This is where the salesforce is needed. Interested? Drop us an e-mail. We would pay for results.

Challenges of internetmarketing 2

Yet another challenge of internetmarketing is "How to get the attention of the people to whom your product or service is useful, but who don't have any idea that there is such a useful product available?" An example: We are prototyping a mass e-mail service. The potential customers are small and medium sized businesses. Most of them do their own business and don't ever think that there can be a convinient solution for registering their potential customers and sending ad-emails for them. Therefore they don't ever do the "mass e-mail" Google search and don't ever find your product and all the effort in SEO is useless.

In such cases is buying banner-ad space the only possible solution? Does anyone have a more intelligent solution?

Key challenges while doing internetmarketing

While I am a fan of internetmarketing, good websites and SEO there are some issues you have to deal with when doing it.

If you use "ordinary" marketing for your service - advertising, press-releases etc. then marketing is quite straight-forward and something you can easily outsource. You pay the agency, they interview you and you get the campaign you are willing to pay for.

In internetmarketing matters are different - you have to blog, talk in forums, use twitter, write articles in the press. The trouble with that is, that you need a good writer who, on the same time, is an expert of the service you are providing or the field of business you are in. You cannot really outsource that. For example, if you provide a book-keeping Software-as-a-Service you need a good "writer-financial expert" to write the articles you need and blog posts and comments and forum posts etc. So for a successfull startup you need a somebody who is a good specialist, a good writer and a good (project) manager all at the same time and really motivated! Well, ain't much people like that in the world. 1%?
That key person also has to spend a lot of time on the PR (blogs, forums, articles) and in a startup you need him to do that during the time when his specialist and manager skills are most needed.

The other challenge of internetmarketing is time. You need months or even years to get good Google positions and build a customer community.

So my thoughts:
- Every company and a startup needs "a face person" - somebody who is in the press and who actively blogs. Like Scott McNealy and Jonathan Swartz in Sun. If you are a startup and you dont want to be the popular face of your firm, then find a partner who is smart and a bit vain. :-)
- Start your internetmarketing efforts early. Months before you have a product or service launched.

Easy way to earn for web magazines

Working with new e-business ideas makes you look on the world differently and search for new ideas for potential services.

Here is an idea for a service for web magazines.

Idea: To give a possibility for employers to turn off the possibility to comment news and articles from their network during workinghours.

What will become better: IF you are not working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or doing internet marketing then writing comments to articles during work is wasting your employers money. If reading news and articles is educational and for some jobs a necessity then commenting them in most cases isn't.

On the other hand if the employer just turns off the whole news portal from their firewall they create a lot of bad motivation and besides then the web magazine also looses some of its readers.

Therefore the possibility to turn off just commenting for work hours is a good soft solution for the problem and as employers would save a lot of work time then they would be happy to use this service.

Technical solution: Very easy and almost free. Usually the employers network is protected with a firewall that is seen on the internet with one IP or they have an IP range. The script that handles the "submit comment" action must check in the beginning whether it is worktime and from where the comment is coming from. If it is from an employers network who wants to restrict commenting then the user is redirected to a page.... with a picture illustrating this post. (If you don't understand russian it states: "Farm work does not wait!") The whole programming and testing should not take more than an hour from your web programmer.

Here you can check to whom an IP address belongs to: RIPE andmebaasist.


Possible additional services:
- Statistical overview to employers on how much reading and commenting is done from their network. In the beginning you should do a statistical overview anyway... The top 100 "commenting networks" will give you the first 100 employers whom to send a preposition of the new service.
- Turning off the non-educational pages during work time for employers networks. If you have tabloids or yellow news pages also in your web magazine.
- Consolidating this service with the sales of banner-ads. For example you could give your biggest advertizers a free possibility to turn off commenting from their network and vice versa.

...or do they offer this service already?