This is Page 3 of the Peter Connor Interview. Read Page 1.
Bryan: How do you market your projects? Do you use purchased online or print ads, good SEO, and/or link building?
Peter: Marketing is a funny subject. It’s one way to burn a ton of money in start up phase. Over the past two years while learning the ins and outs of good site design I’ve also been looking at marketing. People think marketing is all about crazy ideas, TV, radio and AdWords. The crazy ideas I didn’t have a problem with, but budgets wouldn’t allow me run TV, Radio or in some cases AdWords particularly in competitive markets. Marketing is simply about applying a constant pressure on the consumers.
In early 2010 I looked at the idea of focusing Green Apple Media service business to work with agencies creating their online presence and I found out the following having worked with small and global players:
- Agencies I worked with farm out all their online work but won’t let the digital agency meet the client so a lot gets lost in translation
- Agencies are only interested in selling media, as this is how they make more money
- Confidence outweighs capability, and sadly drowns out a lot of the smart people working in agencies
- There is nothing an agency can do that you or I can’t
- Their in-house online people don’t Practice What They Preach, as in they’ve little online presence.
So as a startup I have a lot of things to juggle, getting client work in to pay for the development of products etc. This makes applying consistent marketing pressure difficult, as I get absorbed in the day-to-day activities of the company.
After a talk I did in Trinity College on my first year in business I was approached after by a college student called Mark Walsh. He had set up some sites and was interested in my feedback. After our meeting I did a bit of online research on him and was very impressed. He’d already sold an online company, launched a website attracting over 10,000 fans. At the same time I was introduced to one of these Agency’s online guru guys that had no online presence bar a twitter account with 5 tweets. This confirmed my feelings about agencies.
So about a month ago I approached 20 year old college student Mark to become the Marketing Manager for SetMyCompanyUp. I can’t afford to pay him a full time salary but we’ve agreed a 15% take on everything he brings in and as I build products I’ll explain how and why I do things. He’s happy as he’ll leave college with a 2 year head start on his college friends get paid better than minimum wage.
People think I’m crazy because he’s no degree in marketing, he’s too young, and he’s this or that. But to me, because I didn’t have huge budgets to blow on marketing it forced me to really think about what I needed, and I don’t think I could have got a better resource.
Bryan: What role does social media play in the promotion and growth of your projects?
Peter: Well I’m hoping a strong role. Mark was brought on because his skill set is particularly suited to social media.
Bryan: Many people feel that social media is too complex to master. What advice would you give them?
Peter: People have to remember that the internet is only about 15 years old and social media only kind of got going in the main stream in the past 2/3 years. So you’ve got to experiment with ideas, build community. It certainly sounds a lot easier to just pay €100,000 for six months of TV adverts but once that advert’s over, your traffic will go with it. With social media your efforts will linger on boards and forms for the life of that publisher.
But like all low-budget marketing you need to apply continuous pressure and this can be hard when you’re building your business. When you’re dealing with day-to-day activities your mind is in a firefighting mode but when you’re marketing you’ve to be more strategic this is a hard juggle and the firefight always tends to win. This is why I got Mark on board. He isn’t concerned with the day-to-day stuff, he doesn’t even come into the office. The key advice I’d give to low budget marketers is be aware you’ve got a limited budget, be aware you’ve got limited time. This means you don’t have the ability to create a lot of pressure. So over the weekend focus on a group using just a couple of strategies and apply pressure to only these.
Bryan: Which online tools do you recommend for businesses just getting started?
Peter: Well for startups I wrote a post on setting up your holding company site just using free tools and a 40 euro domain purchase. I’ve just created one for our new startup JustPlaySport.com (the idea came from a challenge). I see lots of offers for free sites and set myself a task of creating a free site for my own company, noting a web development company would be the most critical. Two hours later the new greenapplemedia.ie was born - blog, Twitter integration and all.
Tools I use a lot:
- To manage all my social media channels (i.e. accounts for each product, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook): Google Analytics and HootSuite
- For my start-up holding sites, I actually use it for my main company site too: Flavors.me
- For integrating blogs: Posterous
- To connect with people and comment in groups: Linkedin
Bryan: What advice would you give to someone starting an online business?
Peter: Just do it. Keep your cost very low. Keep money for marketing. Keep your job as long as you can, even if it means getting fired for working on your project. Don’t for a second underestimate how hard it is to get traffic on your site and if selling advert space is going to fund it – don’t bother starting. If you have an idea and you want some advice drop me a mail peter at greenapplemedia.ie, I love to help people.
Bryan: What is up next for you? What are you reading now?
Peter: Well the key things I’m focusing on now. Is driving SetMyCompanyUp’s traffic, the rebuild of SplitMyBill and the launch of PlaySport. I think that’s enough.
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Element’, by Ken Robinson – after seeing him on Ted.com I read anything of his I can find.
