Bloggers are connecting, there is a session on “Starters Insiders” being hosted in LUMS,(more news on GreenWhite) so far this seems to be one of the best thing PASHA could have ever done, the purpose of such session is to brings CEO’s, Venture Capitalists together with entrepreneur who can present up there idea of any innovative application and get funding for it. No doubt its a great event to help people build up there business, learn from experts and if this country gets gifted with entrepreneurs things will change. This session of “Starters Insiders” will focus on three questions

1.  Who is my customer ?
2. How do i find him ?
3. How and what do i sell ?

As usual i wont be able to attend this even due to my over tight schedule, but i guess the answers to these questions are related to marketing, how to market your product online ? Unfortunately there is bit lack in that field as well.

If i have to answer these question, my response might be a little different to what others perceive of marketing / selling and finding your customers,  if i talk to an average Joe about Marketing a CRM or a Web Application, people usually recommend using SEO, Google Adwords & currently very famous in Pakistan E-Mail Marketing. I am not against these but there are other ways as well. Some techniques work on some products, and some work the other way around.

The key i believe is to convert your product to a news & understand the power of bloggers,  at Bramerz when we launched buzzvines a social blogging platform for people one issue we faced was its marketing, initially we optimized the SEO, then started telling friend & family on it but it didn’t pick up pace, we needed a jump  and then on 14th August we organized an event “I still love Pakistan” with just a post and a small banner (with the words which people can post on there site), we contacted all the bloggers, our members, friends and every single person with a web presence and informed them about the event, tagged them and asked them to share there views on our site, put a our banner on there blog to celebrate 14th august. The idea picked up within few hours the buzzVines event became a news, people responded, shared and a few were offended to from the word and then end result was buzzVines traffic tripled within days, many people noticed us our membership base increased and we had a steady growth even after that event.

The same technique was latter adopted by Pak Spectators, after running a blog on blogspot the team at pak spectator initiated taking interviews of the bloggers, every blogger who got his interview published told his friend, mentioned on his blog and pakspecator ended up having traffic and audience, they also improved there content and placed stories which were controversial and still interesting.

Social networking sites are yet another base for spreading the word, in the past a band from Pakistan “Jal” got its jump start from online marketing via forums, chat rooms, and a few social network sites like mySpace at that time. But today even social network sites are clear labels as to which site you should hit for what type of customers you are looking for like LinkedIn, Xing for professionals, Facebook for college / young people and so on… i ended up having few client references from digg but ofcourse i used my profile there to publish my business services as well.

So far smart marketing & an innovative product are the key ingredients for a successful launch.