iPhone Development Zen

Inbound marketing by Halligan and Shah is as practical as you can get about SEO and Social Media without actually describing the installation of blogging software, HTML code and HTTP server configuration files. The book starts by explaining what is inbound marketing and how it is different from outbound marketing (the current interruption based advertising model). Inbound marketing is all about driving leads towards your business, when they are seeking information or reading on a topic relevant to your business. The authors then build a case for why inbound marketing is important in today’s world and why it’s much more effective than outbound marketing.

The book is divided among four sections:

• INBOUND MARKETING
• GET FOUND BY PROSPECTS
• CONVERTING CUSTOMERS
• MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

The structure is quite logical having first explained you the basic concepts, it then moves on to increasing your reach within Google and Social Media, converting prospects into customers and eventually measure how well your inbound marketing efforts are doing.

The interesting thing about the book is that most of the advice is common sense and probably not new to anyone who has been following last 6-7 years of Web 2.0 and Social Networking boom (yes, I used the dreaded word). After convincing you, that inbound marketing is the most effective lead generation tool you have online, the authors then explain how to use modern social networking sites and Google to get found and build a following. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon – it’s all covered. There is some practical advice on SEO, but this is not an SEO primer. The book contains basic and most important (and legit) SEO advice and doesn’t go overboard in telling you tricks to exploit current bugs and loopholes in search engine algorithms. The whole promise is to build long term assets which would keep on giving after you have long stopped attending to them (however, if you want to keep maintaining and growing your leads quantity/quality you are never really done with SEO and content creation).

The last few chapters contain good pointers on how to effectively measure everything you do online from lead quantity/quality to internal staff efficiency. This is good enough for a start, but I believe every company would like to build their own matrices and measures. As Jack Welch said in his famous “Straight from the Gut“ book: what you measure is what you get.

I try to keep up to date on online trends and read most new books on the subject. Some of my recent good reads include The Long Tail, Everything is Miscellenous, Groundswell and Free along with whatever Gladwell and Godin write . This is a different sort of book and a comparison is not Apples to Apples, but this book stands tall even in such distinguished company. And that’s saying something about the first book by the authors.

Having said all that, there is one caveat, the era of outbound marketing is not over yet. You have to explore both inbound and outbound marketing approaches to make sure you attract the right segment for your product/services. The authors say this much even in the book that outbound marketing can be useful especially in the beginning when you are just starting to build your inbound assets.

Grab it at http://bit.ly/inboundbook, it will enrich you in every sense of the word.

A lot going on around the CrunchPad story. Michael today announced that the lawsuits are now imminent. I also remember reading somewhere a conspiracy theory that this whole thing might just be a promotion gimmick and the involved parties will miraculously come to an agreement and do a join launch. Whatever the case, there are some lessons which startups can draw from this story:

• Have foolproof contracts: my lawyer tells me, if it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist.
• Never get into a deal unless your goals are aligned.
• IP is the single most important asset in today’s high-tech world. Shared IP is mostly trouble and not worth it.

Here is a bonus lesson , and not just for startups, most people are not inherently good or bad. It’s mostly a matter of their motivations and circumstances. Which goes back to lesson two above, in a common venture there should be no deal unless all parties have their goals aligned.

I just finished listening to this great talk (stanford ecorner podcast) by Eric Reis titled “Evangelizing for the Lean Startup”. The whole podcast is full of great advice for the startups but two of the major points I found really important were:

• Startup Dollhouse Fallacy: startups are not miniature large corporations and therefore the startup internal structure should not mimic a large corps structure. The ideal structure for a startup is to split it along the two cross-functional lines – Customer and Solution. Those are the only things you should care about as a Startup.
• Minimum Viable Product: build the product which has just enough features as to be barely usable and allows you to get feedback on the product. This is also what 37signals has been preaching forever.

Rest of the technical advice like continuous deployment, release early release often etc. are quite well known in IT circles. It’s amazing that all of what Eric says is common sense, but how often we end up following the wrong models, and run the companies right into a wall.