When you get right down to it, all marketing is finding an audience that someone else has, and borrowing it. If I'm buying AdWords ads, it's Google's audience, if I'm getting press in the NYT, it's theirs, if I'm putting up billboards in the middle of London, it's the M4's traffic into the city.
The key is threefold: 1. audience interest & profile compatibility, 2. clear conversion points, and 3. a UVP.
Breaking those down:
1. What you're pushing out, and the interests of the audience, have to be aligned. So if you're launching a new HN-style area, you need to know who your audience are (probably dissatisfied HN-ers, some people from Reddit, programmers etc), and identify where those people are (HN, GitHub, Engadget, Bit-tech, Twitter...) and how you can reach them (ad platforms, publicity on blogs that they read, referrals, recommendations from trusted sources).
Understanding your users is key, both in being able to find them, and being able to serve them when they reach you.
2. Know what your points of conversion are. Is it getting someone on to the site? Is it having them sign up for something? Registering an account? Downloading something? Leaving comments? Starting threads? All these things are valid conversions, but it's important to know which ones you want to look at, and which ones are just going to be distractions.
Also, what are you going to do with this data? How about setting up a notifier for your first 250 users, when you reach that point, so you can email them all in person and thank them for coming along? Think about what you want to do with the data you collect, before you collect it. Data without purpose is just time invested for no gain.
3. What's your UVP (Unique Value Proposition)? Why should people come to you instead of wherever else is available? Audience quality? Signal to Noise ratio? Curation of content? Design? Features? What's the benefit that you offer over someone else?
If you can't convey this clearly, you're going to have problems. It's rare to get something like Twitter's early days where downtime and a confusing message is overcome by audience enthusiasm and the community doing your messaging for you. Ensure that you know what you want to tell people, and how you're going to do it.
That's a great contribution and really worthy of a blog post in it's own right.
But what's with the first (single word) paragraph? It seemed to me as particularly arrogant... really threw me off. I'm sure I misunderstood you intention, but it almost prevented me from reading the rest of what you had to say.
"This" as the start of a reply is shorthand for "the comment I'm replying to makes a very good point that I agree with entirely" (and usually "and here's my take on what (s)he wrote"), rather than "what you are about to read is the answer you are looking for".
It is a +1 mechanism for places that don't have voting, so far as I can tell. I have seen it quite often over on reddit. It used to be rather frowned upon here but the removal of visible vote numbers is likely to encourage it.
Basically what stonemetal said. With no vote count, it's a visual indication that I'm in agreement with what the person I'm replying to has said, and extending upon it.
When you get right down to it, all marketing is finding an audience that someone else has, and borrowing it. If I'm buying AdWords ads, it's Google's audience, if I'm getting press in the NYT, it's theirs, if I'm putting up billboards in the middle of London, it's the M4's traffic into the city.
The key is threefold: 1. audience interest & profile compatibility, 2. clear conversion points, and 3. a UVP.
Breaking those down:
1. What you're pushing out, and the interests of the audience, have to be aligned. So if you're launching a new HN-style area, you need to know who your audience are (probably dissatisfied HN-ers, some people from Reddit, programmers etc), and identify where those people are (HN, GitHub, Engadget, Bit-tech, Twitter...) and how you can reach them (ad platforms, publicity on blogs that they read, referrals, recommendations from trusted sources).
Understanding your users is key, both in being able to find them, and being able to serve them when they reach you.
2. Know what your points of conversion are. Is it getting someone on to the site? Is it having them sign up for something? Registering an account? Downloading something? Leaving comments? Starting threads? All these things are valid conversions, but it's important to know which ones you want to look at, and which ones are just going to be distractions.
Also, what are you going to do with this data? How about setting up a notifier for your first 250 users, when you reach that point, so you can email them all in person and thank them for coming along? Think about what you want to do with the data you collect, before you collect it. Data without purpose is just time invested for no gain.
3. What's your UVP (Unique Value Proposition)? Why should people come to you instead of wherever else is available? Audience quality? Signal to Noise ratio? Curation of content? Design? Features? What's the benefit that you offer over someone else?
If you can't convey this clearly, you're going to have problems. It's rare to get something like Twitter's early days where downtime and a confusing message is overcome by audience enthusiasm and the community doing your messaging for you. Ensure that you know what you want to tell people, and how you're going to do it.
Hope this helps.