At a recent meetup I talked a bit about how I’d been using blog posts on other blogs, both free and paid for as a primary user acquisition tool. I was very shocked, when several were surprised and curious on the method for this. In tech startups coverage is common, but its usually just that press, not paid for press. I must say I love how the tech community doesn’t force people to pay to get the word out, but it is very much a competition; that might be just as much work as paying.

In contrast the wedding industry is very much a pay to play space. If you give some money you can get some attention.

In a couple of various places I’ve seen light requests of how to put autocomplete in for a Django web application. Here’s a really light weight version with a view and autocomplete functionality using:

from django.utils import simplejson
def autocompleteModel(request):
    search_qs = ModelName.objects.filter(name__startswith=request.REQUEST['search'])
    results = []
    for r in search_qs:
        results.append(r.name)
    resp = request.REQUEST['callback'] + '(' + simplejson.dumps(result) + ');'
    return HttpResponse(resp, content_type='application/json')

For the jQuery autocomplete and call:

We’ve talked some about SEO, media/blog posts, adwords, no one of these is a magic bullet. Some work better for different reasons. As I mentioned in the first post, if you haven’t checked out the post on tactically measuring metrics then please do. If you have followed those steps and explore each of these options, then you should have an idea of which one works well for you and which doesn’t. The final piece of marketing may be a bit harder to measure, but is going to do great things towards growing your brand to users and visitors.

For this third part on the series I’m going to dive into what people perhaps most traditionally think of with marketing startups, online advertising. Online advertising can work, but its definitely not cheap and it does take a good about of pounding at it to know what works. I’m going to break up the three key types of advertising, based on the way I’ve utilized them and evaluated them recently.

For the second part of the series we’re going talk a bit about finding the influencers in certain industries. We’ll get to more traditional means that people think of later, and if you’ve missed our first post that dealt mostly with SEO make sure you check it out first. In most online ventures there’s a key set of influencers, often times these are blogs or podcasts. Blogs can receive a huge readership, which are often very loyal.