You should have noticed that I can safely be called a tool junkie. I am no expert and I don’t like criticizing even rather a poorly created tool preferring to find some unique concepts and possible areas of implementation of any tool I come across. Anyway, I love tools and thus have to deal with new ones almost daily. The two important conclusions I’ve arrived at are:
- A tool is one of the most powerful ways to promote a site;
- With bad marketing even an awesome tool may end up never getting noticed.
So how to promote a good tool to spread the word and earn money?
- Invite beta-testers, it would be great if those beta-testers are well-known experts blogging on the relevant topic. I am often asked to beta-test new tools and I always agree because I enjoy testing new tools – apart from just loving to play with applications, this also gives me more inspiration and ideas. Similarly, many people from SEO niche I know usually agree to the offer to beta-test.
- Launch a tool for free first. Even if you are not going to make it free afterwards, you will thus get more publicity (free tools are more eagerly reviewed) and encourage more people to sign up and try it (these will be your customers and promoters afterwards). When the tool is still free is the best time to promote it with press releases and guest posts announcing it.
- Contact relevant blogs with the correct pitch: don’t push it and do listen to what those bloggers will tell you. I am for one often offered a live presentation featuring all the tools options. I usually reject the offer because I love exploring new tools from scratch: if the best features cannot be found without presentation, then the tool is not that good after all. If the developer starts bombarding me with emails explaining why I still need the presentation, I just have to stop responding.
- Create a demo account to allow bloggers and experts to login instantly and quickly check all features.
- Always offer free trial or basic free account. If people are unable to try it, they won’t buy it no matter how much positive publicity they come across.
I LOVE all the tools you share with us Ann! I’d love a post that talks about how you organize them all. You have shared so many great SEO tools, but I can’t seem to figure out how to organize them in a way that I can find them easily when I need them. With all of the tools you’ve shared, no one could possibly use them all at once! :) Thanks!
Thank you for sharing your experiences about tools! You have a very positive style that I have to learn from… :-)
@Stephanie, good idea :) look out for the post in a week or two!
Than you for an enlightening and interesting post. I consider you to an expert user of tools, so we will take your advice into consideration regarding our brand new tool.
Google and other search engines put a lot of importance on online media reports. If a website was featured in CNN.com, WSJ.com or other major online publications, it will rank much higher than the sites which have hundreds of link-farm-generated links. Does anybody know of a good list of PR firms specializing in online publicity? Publicity Guaranteed (PublicityGuaranteed.com) looks like an attractive option, as they only charge for the results, without any retainers or hourly rates; however they don’t do online-only publicity. AllPublicits.com seems to be the most comprehensive database of publicists and I posted there my RFP for publicists to bid on, but all resulting bids included traditional media. If I had a larger budget, I wouldn’t mind good coverage in traditional media, but I only seek publicity for my SEO campaign, so I need online publicity only