Sup dawgs
Let me fill you in on our business strategy for the next 6 weeks.
I’m going to focus on building the Hermes T brand awareness and readership of the blog. This will be through blogging daily with heavily researched posts, commenting on lots of other blogs & forums in order to encourage people to check out my site (& hopefully getting them hooked in as regular readers), offering free consultancies to influential people in Ireland (so they will owe me a publicity favour when Hiredhelp.ie comes out), syndicating articles to online and offline publications and coming up with other ways to access large online networks of people.
All this will ensure that when we launch Hiredhelp we’ll be able to summon large exposure and also, that the Hermes T brand name will be a solid launching pad for future projects.
I’ll also continue to take care of the technical side of Hiredhelp alongside Chee and will offer you advice and help you with your questions.
You guys then are going to be responsible for Hiredhelp.ie’s launch. Look at the big picture and think outside the box. What strategies will we need to be successful? Come up with loads. Especially those ridiculous ones that are “just crazy enough to work”. It’s a deep recession and people aren’t terribly likely to splash out money so we really should do everything in our power to convince people they need us. Read around the Internet about launching sites, marketing, persuasion, SEO etc. Follow links. Learn, learn, learn and then, importantly, strategize. Out of all the options we have, and our limited resources (most importantly time as we will launch in 5-6 weeks) what is the best way we can spend these? Remember too that the potential benefit here is huge: financial freedom - no need to worry about money ever again. This is our chance so let’s do this right.
Some factors to consider in the strategy are: SEO, offline marketing campaign, on site materials, pricing, incentives, how to ask for backlinks (beg, flatter, argue?), relevant magazines, publicity stunts, TV/ radio campaign, who to target, how to get at those people or get them to listen, videos, viral marketing….. the list goes on. Think about strategy even when your off work, doing something completely different. Sometimes the best ideas come then.
The reason I think this strategy is good is firstly because you are going to have to quickly learn the skills you need to launch a site and I’m going to have to learn about blogging and online networking skills. We are all learning useful skills and this ties in with the company philosophy of constant learning. The second reason for doing things this way is that you have a stronger incentive to make Hiredhelp work (as that is largely your brainchild and you both are in with some equity) whereas I have a stronger incentive to make Hermes T work (as this is my baby and shes all mine).
Some important points
Every day set yourselves challenging and quantifiable goals – e.g. 50 forum a/c creations in a morning. The quantifiable aspect is important as it allows you to measure your progress and you will get a good feeling everytime you get one item closer to completion.
Communicate. Call me if you’ve got any questions or need a separate opinion. I might be able to save you some time.
Make sure everything is finished and polished. Instead of some general research have all the details planned out. E.g. know what you are going to say in the forums, backlink emails, articles, tv campaign etc. Know when you are going to flyer etc. Have the timings of each event planned out in a calender
Do more work than you think necessary. The x10 rule. Instead of 30 backlink possibilities come up with 300. Instead of 5 forums find 50. Figure out how to most effectively divide up the work between you two. How can we, as a team, get more done in less time? Working long hours is a must. Nothing is ever accomplished without grueling hard work. Until we launch this should be our absolute priority. Everything else can wait. Put on some loud fucking drum and bass and just get stuck in.
You guys better be fucking inspired to work like absolute machines. I know I am.
Jack
