Jan/086
Learning Marketing : Chapter One
I decided to start writing about my marketing experiences here, as marketing is a new area for me and there is a lot to be learn – a lot mistakes to be made. 
I have been trying to market my Tips & Tricks service for a few days now, which is my first web based service, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t work right away. And it seems like it won’t be an easy job to do the marketing. 
What I tried
I sent submitted link to my site to www.reddit.com programmers side with topic : “New Programming Tips&Tricks Service Launched!”. I received 1 up and 3 down points and 2 comments, one saying : “This is a joke, right?”. Was that because of bad topic, not enough interesting or just a user that didn’t like it (everybody can’t like it)?
Sent a post to DigitalPoint forums about launching my service.. and received a warning. Should have read the FAQ more carefully, I was not allowed to yet make posts with links on them – I thought the restriction was only for the Review forum (where you can post sites for review).
I sent the post to a couple forums also, didn’t receive any feedback yet.
Then at last I created a StumbleUpon – campaign, I hope that works and will bring more users here.
Conclusion
My goal for this month is to get 500 unique visitors and that will be filled, that means that I have done something right, right?
Any ideas for marketing are more than welcome.
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1:52 pm on January 7th, 2008
Here’s my 2 cents: there’s a lot of tips and tricks available on the net for free if you know where to look. Otherwise, there’s quite a few good books to read. This means that, if you want people to pay for your tips, you’d better give them something that’s really worth their money. The 3 tips I’ve seen so far aren’t particularly impressive, which gives me the impression you’re not quite ready to teach others good practices since you seem to be lacking some good practices yourself.
To give a concrete example: NUM_SHIPS? Are you using an array to store your ships in? Why not a std::vector? And how to display code? Can’t you figure out something? You’re the one giving the tips… As for your warnings tip, why should I treat warnings as errors? Any explanation behind your reasoning?
See, if you want to earn bucks with this, people are going to be much more critical. Spreading the word is important, but what you’re actually offering should not be taken lightly, either.
Oh, and this comment form is horribly broken. No vertical scrolling?
2:00 pm on January 7th, 2008
Alright, thanks for the feedback.
You can use std::vector, anything you like. I used normal array as it is simple and clear way.
Yea, I lack experience in web programming. I’m learning all the time.
Why should you turn on warnings as errors? Because you want to get rid of warnings, if you just let them pass you easily leave them behind.
Enjoy your stay.
PS. yeah, this comment system doesn’t work right, I’ll try to find a solution for it.
3:22 pm on January 7th, 2008
With all the additional management that an array brings, I’d not call it simpler (e.g. what ship is still active, which ones need to be ignored because they’re dead, oh noes, I need more ships that NUM_SHIPS, etc). Besides, beginners often don’t know about the standard template library, so they end up doing a lot of work that C++’ standard library has already done for them. Pointing them towards better solutions is a good idea, especially at a site like this. Remember, you’re asking money, so you’ll have to offer some quality.
And why should you want to get rid of warnings? I’m not asking that because I don’t understand you, but because I’m not satisfied with a ‘just do it because it’s good’ tip. Explain why something is good practice. We’re here to gain insight, right?
As for the malformed comment form, it’s a css issue. Remove the ‘overflow: hidden;’ line from the textarea block in your style.css file and the scrollbar should appear. Oh, and requiring people to login in order to comment discourages feedback. I only registered because I wanted to comment…
EDIT: Uhh, I see you just changed some stuff… but it’s not for the better. Comments are harder to read (too low contrast) and the comment form is oversized now. As for the captcha, there are better approaches to that. For example, adding a few additional, hidden fields that need to stay empty. A human won’t see them, but a spam bot will just fill them with links and garbage. No hassle for users and probably equally effective. Besides, a bad captcha can easily be OCR’ed.
The current approach is just crap and discourages people from giving feedback even more. Ugh.
3:40 pm on January 7th, 2008
Thanks for the good feedback, I really appreciate it!
Still some problems, I’m trying out different things right now : plugins, etc. to see which ones work out.
3:46 pm on January 7th, 2008
How about Akismet then? I’ve got a blog at Wordpress and it has filtered every spam message I’ve got so far. It should be available as a plug-in.
6:20 pm on January 7th, 2008
Thanks again, I’ll try it.