Market your product using videos. Decent video production is hard to do, and takes a lot of time, but Google places relevant videos at the top of certain searches. It's easier to get on the first page of a video search than it is on the first page of a regular Google search.
Blog, blog, blog, blog. Google primarily indexes text for it's search. The more fresh, well written, original content the better. That being said, it will take months before you start to see that have a solid effect on your bottom line.
Find each and every single forum devoted to learning Chinese. Become a member on those forums and interact heavily. Build credibility on those sites by providing valuable interaction, and then feel free to post appropriate links to your software. A lot of forums let you have a link to your site in your sig. That can only help you in the long run. * disclaimer * I'm not suggesting spaming, I'm suggesting good, solid interaction. Geeks don't really use them that often, but normal people use forums quite a bit, and Google loves to index forums.
Connections. Email anyone and everyone that might be interested in your product. Develop relationships with people interested in learning Chinese. Find cross marketing opportunities. Read some business and marketing books, take those ideas and run with them.
Become a sales expert. Start reading books like crazy on sales and marketing. Your technical co founders are going to be working like crazy to get the software side of things up and running. Every idea that you can bring to the table is going to help them out, and make your product better.
Study usability like crazy. A lot of times, technical people can get really wrapped up in making something work. They can often get too close to the product to be able to see it objectively and relate to how a customer uses their product. They need to know what problems the customers are having with their products, and what is confusing to them. Help them do that.
Do usability studies. Find friends and neighbors that have never used your product, and get screen captures of them using your product, and video their facial interactions with them using your product. Meetup.com does this for every new iteration of their product.
Find new uses for Mechanical Turk with your product. You can do some amazing things with Mechanical Turk and a little HTML knowledge. Have Turkers test one or two specific aspects of your software, and get their feedback. Pass that on to your engineers. Manage A/B testing through Mechanical Turk.
Video is something we hadn't thought of, thanks for suggesting it. I'll do a proper ROI calculation and figure out how many uniques we'd have to get to make that worth our while. I also majored in Cinema Studies, and have a lot experience making videos, so it would be fun and easy for me to produce quality material, its just a question of recouping our costs.
We've been trying to ramp up the blogging recently, and it's good to know that it takes a while for it to affect pagerank. We were getting down because it hasn't given us a big quick boost. We're dedicated to continuing a lot of blogging though (most of which I'm doing now).
There are a few internet forums for this, and I'm a member, but I don't participate regularly, maybe I should change that.
Usability has been (pardon my French) a bitch. I thought I had a great UI eye when we first started. After 3 sitewide redesigns, 4 iterations of the vocabulary interface, and numerous leaky conversion steps later, I'm pretty humbled. Do you have any specific recommendations for UI reading? I pay attention to Nielson, I've read Landing Page Optimization, and Call to Action, but I'm only starting to put their lessons to use.
Usability has been (pardon my French) a bitch. I thought I had a great UI eye when we first started.
Usability is really hard to get right. And, companies like Apple spend a lot of money on usability and design. So, don't feel bad that it's hard.
I'd suggest letting Mechanical Turkers find usability problems for you. When I launched my social news site (now defunct), I asked Turkers to use my site, and post a comment if anything was confusing or could be streamlined. They gave me a lot of great feedback for $0.10 a piece. Turkers are surprisingly well educated and tech savvy. I use the service every time I can.
Comments
Market your product using videos. Decent video production is hard to do, and takes a lot of time, but Google places relevant videos at the top of certain searches. It's easier to get on the first page of a video search than it is on the first page of a regular Google search.
Blog, blog, blog, blog. Google primarily indexes text for it's search. The more fresh, well written, original content the better. That being said, it will take months before you start to see that have a solid effect on your bottom line.
Find each and every single forum devoted to learning Chinese. Become a member on those forums and interact heavily. Build credibility on those sites by providing valuable interaction, and then feel free to post appropriate links to your software. A lot of forums let you have a link to your site in your sig. That can only help you in the long run. * disclaimer * I'm not suggesting spaming, I'm suggesting good, solid interaction. Geeks don't really use them that often, but normal people use forums quite a bit, and Google loves to index forums.
Connections. Email anyone and everyone that might be interested in your product. Develop relationships with people interested in learning Chinese. Find cross marketing opportunities. Read some business and marketing books, take those ideas and run with them.
Become a sales expert. Start reading books like crazy on sales and marketing. Your technical co founders are going to be working like crazy to get the software side of things up and running. Every idea that you can bring to the table is going to help them out, and make your product better.
Study usability like crazy. A lot of times, technical people can get really wrapped up in making something work. They can often get too close to the product to be able to see it objectively and relate to how a customer uses their product. They need to know what problems the customers are having with their products, and what is confusing to them. Help them do that.
Do usability studies. Find friends and neighbors that have never used your product, and get screen captures of them using your product, and video their facial interactions with them using your product. Meetup.com does this for every new iteration of their product.
Find new uses for Mechanical Turk with your product. You can do some amazing things with Mechanical Turk and a little HTML knowledge. Have Turkers test one or two specific aspects of your software, and get their feedback. Pass that on to your engineers. Manage A/B testing through Mechanical Turk.
Video is something we hadn't thought of, thanks for suggesting it. I'll do a proper ROI calculation and figure out how many uniques we'd have to get to make that worth our while. I also majored in Cinema Studies, and have a lot experience making videos, so it would be fun and easy for me to produce quality material, its just a question of recouping our costs.
We've been trying to ramp up the blogging recently, and it's good to know that it takes a while for it to affect pagerank. We were getting down because it hasn't given us a big quick boost. We're dedicated to continuing a lot of blogging though (most of which I'm doing now).
There are a few internet forums for this, and I'm a member, but I don't participate regularly, maybe I should change that.
Usability has been (pardon my French) a bitch. I thought I had a great UI eye when we first started. After 3 sitewide redesigns, 4 iterations of the vocabulary interface, and numerous leaky conversion steps later, I'm pretty humbled. Do you have any specific recommendations for UI reading? I pay attention to Nielson, I've read Landing Page Optimization, and Call to Action, but I'm only starting to put their lessons to use.
Usability has been (pardon my French) a bitch. I thought I had a great UI eye when we first started.
Usability is really hard to get right. And, companies like Apple spend a lot of money on usability and design. So, don't feel bad that it's hard.
I'd suggest letting Mechanical Turkers find usability problems for you. When I launched my social news site (now defunct), I asked Turkers to use my site, and post a comment if anything was confusing or could be streamlined. They gave me a lot of great feedback for $0.10 a piece. Turkers are surprisingly well educated and tech savvy. I use the service every time I can.
Or find `real' humans to test. You can recruit students or so.
Do you have any specific recommendations for UI reading?
You should read Don't Make Me Think if you haven't yet.
Second Krug's book. It's UI 101 and really well done. I used it as the textbook when I taught.