Imran Yusuf is one of my favourites, so if you’re in Tallinn you should definitely come. More info here.

Hi Andrus! In Ducksboard we are big fans of Pipedrive emails, and I saw in Achoo that you were responsible of the copywriting. Would you be interested in a freelance position as a copywriter?

So heartwarming! Being able to track down people behind work you like was one of the main reasons we set out to create the service. And not just to hire them but to know what they’re up to, learn from them and ask questions from them. If you’ve accompished something you’re proud of, and haven’t added it to Achoo yet, you may be missing out..

This vote of confidence had an interesting effect. It didn’t trigger a celebratory mood, because the success of this venture is not up to any jury to decide, but users (also, €2000 is not enough for three people to retire on). Rather, it had a positive effect on the motivation because failing to do a great public beta launch soon would not only make our team look a bit silly, but also the people in the jury that voted for Achoo instead of many of the other ideas.

The emotion wasn’t quite as strong as in the finale of Saving Private Ryan, but I like the effect this had, and cheers to Shy CTO for nudging us to apply to Ajujaht.

On a side note, we’re bootstrapping Achoo for the time being – but I guess I’ll know more about “motivation through indebtedness” if and when we raise funds for Achoo.

All these were Amazon affiliate links by the way. If you choose to buy any of these books, I’ll use the proceeds on liquor, women and gambling, so don’t worry, this won’t result in more reading lists.

When it comes to blogs then there are more good ones than a mortal could ever read. I try to stay on top of Conversation Marketing, SEOMOZ blog and Startup Marketing blog and count on twittersphere to bring me the rest of marketing news and trends.

Also, I’m a big fan of podcasts because I can use my commute or otherwise “empty” time slots for consuming them. I regularly listen to Internet Marketing podcast which is practical and SEO-focused, and Six Pixels of Separation, which is a collection of interviews with authors and thinkers in the field of communication.

Any good ones I’ve left out?

Update March 9th

I’ve gotten some feedback face-to-face, on Facebook and here (cheers, Sepp!). And it seems I may have over-dramatized this offer. There’s little harm in having an online gaming company fund your Kiva account. So, dear /NAME REMOVED March 12th/, consider yourself linked to and thank you for letting me have a nice Kiva budget!

Update March 12th

The agency contacted me again and asked for the reference to the gaming company and agency to be removed as the advert that we asked you to place may come across a little negative to your readers. However, the email also said since this money is going to charity, we will still pay you the $175 as agreed. Though this partially motivated by not wanting any negative coverage by the sometimes-so-unpredictable bloggers , it’s still a somewhat kind thing to do. Kudos to the Gaming Company that wants to fund my Kiva account anonymously!

Update March 21st

I had removed the link and emailed my contact person in the unnamed Marketing Agency, but heard nothing back for almost a week. After my second somewhat sarcastic email last Friday I finally received 175 dollars on my PayPal account two days ago. Apparently the person making payments had been sick, silly me for starting to doubt their word [insert smileyface here]. I’ve now made my first gambling-funded Kiva loans to a micro-preneur in Mongolia and a farmer in Kyrgyzstan. To conclude:

• I now feel a tiny bit more respect towards a certain gaming company and a certain marketing agency.
• My blog has been useful in many ways, this was the first time the benefit had been financial. (Despite the money not going to me). If you like to write and don’t yet have a blog, you’re missing a trick.
• Two people out there are closer to their funding goals. You too can contribute via Kiva, even without shelling out your own money when you use this link.
• Marketing is not all bad, it seems.

I guess all is well that ends well, especially when the events unfold in such interesting manner like they did this time.

My logic at the time of posting was I’m not really using G+ that much and my friends are not there, so nothing to lose. And if someone takes action after seeing my post, it’s all gravy. There’s some sense in thinking like this but the fact is I have turned into a social media spammer. I have shat into a communally shared backyard, which to be fair I don’t use that much myself, but which is an important picnic spot for some of my online neighbours. Furthermore, as the result of this was near-zero, I had wasted my own time.

Google Plus is full of such opportunists, as is Twitter and some of it even happens on Facebook among “friends”.

Work wise I can’t quite ignore Google Plus but this was sobering. Not quite Saul to Paul moment, but I’ll aim to either remain a passive observer (which seems to be the most popular G+ user status anyway) or improve my shit-to-backyard to share-the-love ratio. AJ Kahn sums it up in his comprehensive post about Google Plus SEO.

Really use Google+. Using it for the express purpose of SEO won’t be successful. Do or do not. There is no try.

None of the above tips apply if you just want to sell a bit of goods, and not do something remarkable.

Footnotes AD 2012:

* Fully agree to this day, I thank the year 2007 version of myselt for the reminder.
** 2012 addition: or be an entrepreneur that wants big change.
*** Back in 2007 most of my marketing career had been in media or FMCG, where there’s hardly any disruption in the business itself. So it made a lot of sense to push the limits with communications, because this was all there was. With startups, you’re so much closer to disrupting businesses and business models and there’s much less of a need to do scandalous communications.

Please help me complete the commandments of marketing. What have I missed?

One thing I absolutely love about the blog move is that it brought old post drafts to surface. I just stumbled upon a draft from 2007 called “Everything I’ve learned from marketing in 10 years”. It’s totally worth translating to English and posting here as the first proper new post, to showcase both the wisdom and the naivety I possessed five years ago. Just watch this space.

Some background: my client Flattr provides a simple way to make small donations online, which is really handy for software developers, bloggers, charities, etc. It’s a service Dave McClure would call a vitamin rather than pain killer, in the sense that although it’s a good thing you never feel an acute need for that. There is not a single person in the world that wakes up one morning with a desire to make a small donation to his or her favourite podcaster and types “small donations service” into Google. So how do you find more users to a service like Flattr? One of the ways is to make people think (about the various people that deserve their money). Or so we thought.

The basic idea for Pay a Blogger Day formed quickly and naturally, almost by itself. The thinking was that if we make more people to pay bloggers at least one day a year, more people would want to do it regularly, and of those, a share would want to use Flattr for that. Grow the pie kind of thing.

So we created a minisite, prepared a video, got a few partners aboard and talked to some bloggers and journalists. So on Nov 22th Mashable wrote a piece about Pay a Blogger Day. GigaOm soon followed, as well as Telegraph and more than 50 other blogs around the world. There were lots of great quotes, like:

While the day is obviously a great marketing ploy by the micropayments website it’s also an easy way to pay fractions on the dollar to your favorite writers.

See them all on Storify (also embedded to the end of the post), along with many great tweets. Almost all of them mentioned Flattr too, so from purely from coverage point of view it was a (if not raging then at least growling) success.

Flattr needed more than just PR though, so how about other metrics?

In terms of donations we don’t know how many more donations and purchases we drove that day. Looking at anecdotal evidence it’s probably a number in thousands of euros. One blog reported receiving 70 dollars, another one 150 dollars, Jeremy added a donations button just for a day and collected even more, this beer blog got about 10 dollars, and so on. Number of flattr clicks was 10-20% bigger than on previous Tuesdays, but this figure has been known to fluctuate quite a bit. So, in terms of donations this day bought coffees to some hundreds of bloggers, but (we hope) no one quit their day job just yet.

In terms of Flattr signups Pay a blogger day added some hundreds of users, which is less than I personally expected but it’s still a decent number.

So in terms of hard numbers Pay a Blogger was a moderately successful campaign. However, in terms of raising awareness there are now some hundreds of thousands of more people that have given some thought to the need to pay bloggers, and that now know about the existence of Flattr. As the numbers suggest, the vast majority of these people didn’t do much ie. they didn’t pay a blogger and sign up to Flattr immediately, but a seed was planted. Not everyone is an early adopter and most people need to be reached a couple of times with a message before they start taking action. Brian Chesky of AirBnB talked about their PR stunts at LeWeb this week, and he mentioned a similar dynamic.

Other learnings
Lots of tweets are no silver bullet. We planned (and built in) three main traffic sources for Payablogger.org site: tongue-in-cheek widgets people could create, tweets, and the video. Banners worked like a charm, Little Gamers alone generated more than 10000 visits to the site when they embedded the widget. But the huge amounts of tweets we got (at peak 4-5 per minute) drove relatively little traffic. According to bit.ly each tweet only got us about 3.1 visitors. So in our case banner/widget real estate on a blog or website paid off better than lots of tweets and RT’s. Video had the least impact, though people really liked it. Should have added some bare skin on kittens…

Allowing users to interact in simple ways works, be it entering URL, Twitter name or doing the FB connect. Almost 10% of people that came to the payablogger.org site entered a blog URL and generated the forementioned banner.

Invest time in doing press and blogger outreach. More than 10% of blog posts and articles came from people we reached out to, including the Mashable piece which sparked about a third of coverage. So even if your campaing is interesting for bloggers and viral, it doesn’t spread itself.

Partners buy you credibility, especially if you’re a relatively small startup. Having Posterous and some other names listed on the site or in an email to a writer from Mashable greatly helped. Also, in our case partners added info about Pay a Blogger Day to their newsletters, which generated much more traffic than their tweets or blog posts.

All in all a great campaign, with some great learnings. Shout outs to Flattr folks for buying into the idea and getting this somewhat risky campaign out. But I guess that’s what all startups need to do, take some risks and do things that are paid attention to.