I’ve mentioned before that I have a product in the works so I’m obviously interested in how to get customers for it. While there are a number of good tips in the article a few seem off base, or at least shady.

Build a network of landing pages that target various other long tail keywords in a subdirectory on your site. The goal is to target keywords that you can rank for quickly.

Kind of seems misleading to customers and possibly to search engines. I’d rather see a blog where you can target the keywords with relevant content. Later they say not to use blog posts because they are not focused on selling, which is absolutely correct. There is no reason that you can’t have a ‘sell’ beside the blog post or in the middle of it. It’s certainly a hard balance to strike, you don’t want to piss people off with all the selling but you certainly want to make money with your product.

The post also recommends you install live chat.

The end goal isn’t to sell visitors on anything right now. In fact you may not even have anything to sell. The goal is to find and engage with them. Live chat will let you accomplish this. We’re big fans of Olark but there are other tools like Snap Engage and Zopim that provide similar functionality.

I’ve been at a few businesses that have a live chat widget on the page and they were never able to staff it in any meaningful way. Before you add live chat make sure that you can have someone on it for a reasonable amount of a business day.

Anyone have other suggestions to get people purchasing your product?

One response to “Getting Customers for a New Product”

  1. James Strocel Avatar

    I think we non-marketing types shoot ourselves in the foot with our self-talk about these techniques. If we are pissing someone off with our sales, we are actually doing something right.

    This guy is taking the same approach to marketing that many take with programming. We come up with a solution that works, not necessarily something that follows an abstract notion of what a program SHOULD look like.