How To Use Social Media to Launch a Business in 24 hours

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a junkie for product ideas. The beauty of the web is that you can rapidly test market an idea. If you get traffic and conversions great. If not – put it down and try another. You’re only out a few bucks – and what a rush! In most worlds, it’s called rapid prototyping.

I like to call it rapid proto-marketing.

Basically, you’re using the social web to launch, test and iterate a product before you really start investing any time and money into it.

Here’s how I did it with www.weightnags.com. A service site I launched in 24 hours, picked up 250 users in 2 hours and was on BBC radio in 6 weeks. Now I’ve got roughly a thousand users and we’ll be in Inc. in April ‘09.

1) Pick a service
There’s an old adage in the direct marketing and information marketing world that says that you should find a small group of raving fans who have money to spend on their passion

The first thing you’re going to think about is golf. Thousand and thousands of men and women spend MILLIONS of dollars every year just to hit a little white ball around. There are other examples of this all over the place – from mountain bikes to foodies. People out there are obsessed about something.

In the case of WeightNags, I chose weight loss and motivation. If you haven’t heard, people spend Billions of dollars to look prettier, feel younger and lose weight.

2) Be edgy

In “The Purple Cow,” Seth Godin writes that you should give people something that’s literally remarkable – something that they can remark upon, something that they can point to and say, “That’s different.”

Weightnags was an exercise in the theories that I learned in “The Purple Cow.” And they bloody well work.

In order to find something that’s remarkable, you have to get out on the edges. That’s where life’s interesting and that’s where you get the most chaos, chatter, and buzz that coalesces around your product.

2) Launch Fast. But Launch Simple.
There’s an information marketer out there – Joe Vitale- that says money loves speed. I don’t know if he’s right about that. I do know that you should keep your site as simple as possible and get up fast.

Set up your site so that it’s absolutely simple for people to sign up. Don’t get in the way of them enjoying the value of your services. And in this Web 2.0 world people are used to seeing sites that are BETAs.

For inspiration, check out the folks at 37signals.com. They are masters of simplicity.

For WeightNags, I used a simple layout, wrote some snarky content, and hooked it up to an autoresponder from iContact. It’s not perfect, but it’s simple and you know what you’re supposed to do.

3) Keywords
Okay, now that you’ve identified your industry, break out your SEO Toolbar and the Wordtracker Gtrends tool and see what what people are searching for. You’re doing this for a few reasons -

- To find popular search terms
- To estimate traffic
- To identify long tail words
- get pricing on Adwords (if you actually want to spend money on it)

For WeightNags, I found weightloss motivation to be the best fit. Each click was only a few cents so testing with Adwords wasn’t going to break the bank.

4) Social Bookmarking
Now that you’ve got edgy copy in a popular industry you want to launch it to the social web. Here’s where I put www.weightnags.com
- www.springwise.com
- Digg
-StumbleUpon
-Twitter
- Delicious
- Reddit

That was it. I actually did advertise on Facebook and Adwords, but got 0 traffic out of them. Eventually I wound up shutting them off.

After releasing the site into the wild. I had about 250 people sign up in 2 hours. By the end of the week, I was interviewed by the Canadian press, and in a few more weeks, I had an interview on the BBC.

What’s the magic? Being remarkable. Being on the edge. Seth Godin is right.

There are loads of sites that teach you how to generate traffic.
Check out www.webmasterworld.com in our dear own Austin, Texas for the down and dirty on generating traffic.

The guys out at the 30 Day Challenge also have a great step by step approach. You have have to be VERY careful because some of the tactics are on the edge of black hat and spamming. You can get slapped if you’re not watching what you’re doing.