We launched our product (https://missiveapp.com) in closed beta last Autumn, and I can assess from our experiments that the only thing we did that gather a lot of attention was our "A Brief History of Email Apps" (http://email-apps-timeline.missiveapp.com/), a timeline of all the email clients released since the '90, a side project.
We are probably not good at writing compelling and viral content. It's hard. It's a unique and rare talent. You need to write about subjects that matter to people, subjects of our time.
marketing's incessant notion that lying to people is like a science of making money just makes me sad. make a good product, be honest about it, change plans if noone cares, what's so bad about that?
Competition. If you don't do it, you'll get outcompeted by those who do. It's not true in many areas (where the market isn't oversaturated), but that's the perception - so people go and blatantly lie even if they don't have to.
It's a kind of problem that should be solved by social norms and regulations. They are way too lenient right now, and the continued acceptance of advertising as a respectable occupation perplexes me.
The 'if you build it, they will come' mentality is awfully naive...marketing doesn't have to be about lying, good marketing will get your product in front of people who want to use it, who may never have stumbled upon it otherwise.
>good marketing will get your product in front of people who want to use it, who may never have stumbled upon it otherwise.
The problem is there's only so much work that can be done in that area, and way more marketing agencies than quality work. The excess labor bleeds into mercenary work where advertising companies shill for whoever pays them, regardless of merit or ethics.
Marketing helps products that would succeed anyway based on merit succeed faster and harder, and also helps unseat incumbents who have inertia but a bad product. It also allows products that should by every right sink like a lead balloon lurch haphazardly above the waterline, leaving behind a wake of cheated customers.
Oh, if only we could trust people in marketing to refuse help to the latter.
The only ads that I've ever clicked are those of the Deck Network. Every business needs to reach out to people to find customers, but lieing is not necessary by any means. Tell us what you really do, and we'll buy if we are interested. If a company tricks me into buying their product when it is not the most adapted one, it's worse because I will switch away as soon as possible. If there is no lies and the service is good, I'll renew or suggest.
Their homepage header: "Work with the best designers and developers". This is at least exaggeration. It's the first time that I see the OP, so don't know a lot.
In marketing there are these all the time. A company I worked for had this "style test" which new customers completed, and we suggested them a "personalised, designer-curated" items list via mail. It was not even ML, we splat them into three profiles based on the test, and made three different mails, sent each of them to the members respective profile. Each mail started with a title like "Your personalised style guide, tailored for you by our designers"... It's not a big blatant lie like saying "USA is a democracy", but still, it's a lie.
>Articles that provided practical utility—actionable advice and tips—were shared far more than those that were merely interesting or even surprising.
Reading this gave me a bit of a chuckle, because this is exactly how bad advice spreads too. Like bonsai kitten. At the end of the article, all I could think about was how the post was basically talking about "diversification" without ever using the term outright, even though it's a more suitable concept to employ than "side projects" IMO.
Side projects are always a good thing. Whatever your idea is, with time permitting, get it out there. Regardless of how silly it may be seen from others, it gets exposure, and gets you experience. Every side project I work on, builds on some core technology I learned from the last project. I've got a million ideas, and when I'm done with one, I move onto the next. Keep your mind busy!
I agree that side projects are the future of marketing, and many companies are already doing this. A while ago I made a list of companies that have created inspiring side projects for marketing purposes: https://www.stayintech.com/info/sideprojects
Heh, marketing has gone so far around the curve of wasting peoples time they're approaching actually doing useful things for society from the other side.
The key is to provide value to the reader or consumer.
Blog posts can be valuable (by educating or entertaining, for example), but writing valuable blog posts is a lot of effort.
Side projects can be valuable, but creating valuable side projects is effort.
So I guess it depends on what you're good at. A side project is usually something you're passionate about, so it's a good starting point. But if you like writing, blogging is still the way to go.
After reading this, seems like this should titled "how to veil your advertising in blog posts..." Not to sound overly cynical but this seems to be again about pushing the new products created through content advertising.
That said, I did click on one and while howmuchtomakeanapp seemed cool, the site was so slow that i closed it after two questions.
Well, I guess this is a counterpoint to both: I've now read this blog, and I've used unsplash for free photos, but I have no idea what crew is or does.
All our blog posts failed to gather eyeballs. We tried on our blog (https://missiveapp.com/blog) and on Medium (https://medium.com/@plehoux).
We are probably not good at writing compelling and viral content. It's hard. It's a unique and rare talent. You need to write about subjects that matter to people, subjects of our time.
To me, 37 signals (https://m.signalvnoise.com) are the master of this game.
I don't think blog post are dead; it's just harder to get noticed. But isn't it the same for everything else.
I enjoyed the blog post and did, in fact, learned about the crew product. :)