Bemba.com should become the most easy and fun way for people to share web content with friends. The product needs to be much better than ‘good’. The same counts for its marketing. Terence wrote on his The Internet Entrepreneur Diary: ‘Regardless what product you sell online, it will be either a service or physical goods. Don’t get me wrong. The quality of your services and products are very important. However, the effort to make a perfect quality product is only 30% of your total effort to make a good sale. The rest of 70% depends on your marketing strategy, which including the after-sale customer services.’
I find this ratio a little heavy for us, because I think that a good Bemba.com will also sell itself. A better Bemba.com will result in more viral marketing. Anyway, I plotted our focus areas for marketing, inspired by Tamar’s list of great blog posts and articles, and categorized them in my own way.
1. Get in contact with experts
It’s majorly important for us to get in contact with the people that understand the business. Why? Because they can evaluate Bemba.com, give tips for improvement and get us in contact with evangelists. As most of them have their own blogs, they are evangelists themselves. We will:
- Improve our Bemba Media Blog
- Participate on other blogs
- Optimize our use of Twitter an LinkedIn
- Create a social product feedback platform
- Attend web2.0 events
- Apply for start-up competitions
2. Create product features with marketing value
The product has its own marketing elements, created during product development. We thought of the following aspects:
- Smart linking
- Clever domaining
- Good search engine optimization
- Viral product elements
3. Make use of online social networks
Our target group of users already use different social networks. So why not make use of them? In the next weeks, we will start participating on social networks, regarding:
- Friendships
- Sharing interests
- Bookmarking
4. Obtain free publicity
Which start-up does not want (positive) free publicity? Once the next Bemba.com is launched, we will try to get free publicity on:
- Blogs
- News websites
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Radio
Do you feel that there’s something missing here? Please let me know! Aaron and I will post on using each of these marketing tools for Bemba.com. Tomorrow I’ll start with straightening out our blog.
Subscribe to our RSS feed 
This is why you need to put 70% effort to make your services a success after you spent 30% efforts to make sure your services provides great value.
Without knowing your name at first place, no one will every give it a try. You constantly improve your services and make it better, but people won’t notice the change without seeing your press release or news about the changes.
Those 70% effort give you the best shot on branding and marking your business to the public. I don’t think it’s too heavy. In many big company their marketing budget is way over their research budget, because they know that their marketing effort can cover some of their bad products and still make a good profit.
I will add one more thing for your #4.
Make a good video introduction to YouTube.
Good luck to your Bemba!
Many thanks for your comment Terence! I’ve thought about it, and yes I still need to get used to the 30/70. But that’s just me and you’re probably right. Lot’s of work ahead of us. If you have any more tips, please don’t hesitate. Cheers, Arne