What I Learned About Internet Marketing Last Week

I published NthCode’s first white paper, Porting Android to a New Device last week. The paper explains what we accomplished and learned porting Google’s Android mobile operating system to a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.

I wrote the paper to build credibility for NthCode as a software consultancy and, hopefully, make it easier for people to find us via a Google search of relevant keywords. I also wanted to share what we had learned in the process for other people who are attempting to port Android to other devices.

And I held some vague hopes that we might end up getting talked about on the Internet.

After publishing the paper on our website, I contacted the editor of Linux Devices to ask if he thought it would be useful to their readership to publish some of what we had done. The next morning, I had a reply from him saying that he thought the paper was great, and he would be honored to have the opportunity to run it in the publication.

Honored?  While writing, I’d been a bit too close to it to know if it was any good, so, with a fresh breath, I quickly reread it and decided that it wasn’t half bad.

Later that day, I sent two messages: One to Qwerty12, the hacker who had ported an earlier version of Android to an N810, and another to the message board google runs that discusses ports of Android to other hardware platforms.

At the end of the day, I borrowed a video camera and recorded a 52-second silent video of an
N810 booting Android. I uploaded the video to Youtube and embedded the video at the end of the white paper so that people could see the result of our efforts.

On the advice of a friend of mine who uses Youtube to market his wares, I set the information at
the right of the video to link to the white paper.

Here’s what happened:

At some point, someone posted a link on Digg. And then folks on Internet Tablet Talk created a thread about it. Then Linux Devices published the article. And then we ended up on ycombinator news and Engadget.

After that, we finished up the Chinese translation of the white paper and posted a few messages to Chinese message boards that we previously had targeted for recruiting purposes.

I’d aready installed Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to track traffic to your website, and was now ready to see what effect publishing my white paper had on our traffic.  First, you can see the flatline number of visitors from before the article was posted jumping to a height of 600 for the day the article ran in Linux Devices, with it then coming down to a still reasonable 300 visitors/day.

Here is the breakdown on where the visitors are coming from:

And here is where they are getting referred from:

We aren’t selling advertisements, we’re selling software development services, so we care much more about people who might be buying the kind of work we do. Many of those people read Linux Devices, so it’s wonderful to see people coming over from there.

KLDP, a Korean software development message board, surprised me.

Here’s the most satisfying part if the analytics report — people are actually searching for NthCode by name in Google! 

Now, onto the Youtube video.

The primary purpose of putting the video on youtube was to make sure I didn’t have our ISP yelling at me because people downloaded a video from our website. As a secondary purpose, I was curious if anyone would randomly discover the video in Youtube and hop over to our site. 

Here’s the Youtube Insights summary:

That’s right.  In five days, 12,134 people viewed the video. Someone gave it a five-star rating. And six people commented.  

Again, it’s a 52-second silent video.

That still blows my mind.

Here’s a day-by-day on the number of hits:

Note: The number of hits drops to zero on December 6th, because that day hasn’t finished, yet.

Here’s a rather unsurprising demographic breakdown:
 

(Too bad more women don’t find Android fascinating.)

And by ‘interest,’ which I think is the number of page views from a country weighted for the number of internet users in that country (but I’m probably wrong about that).

The above data are greatly satisfying and make me feel that the effort I spent was not at all wasted (now, the true test will be whether or not this leads us to more sales leads — it hasn’t, yet).

So far, I’ve had a few people contact me with questions about what we’ve done and what we plan to do. I also had two folks I know in the industry contact me to say they saw the article run in Linux Devices, which was nice.

So what did I learn?

First, as you can see above, Youtube and Google provide lovely free information about who is visiting your site or watching your video. I highly recommend that anyone who is marketing on the Internet leverage these free resources.

Second, it’s exciting that other people find what we did interesting. I mean, wow. People care? I guess so.

Third, it’s interesting to see the power of social news sites and tech blogs to get exposure. I never thought we’d make Engadget, that’s for sure.

So far, I’ve had no negative feedback. I think that’s because I wrote the paper with the primary goal of sharing what we learned, kept our claim of success modest, and acknowledged the people whose work we leveraged.

Next steps

My head is now spinning about how I can better user Internet marketing to reach our potential
customers (decision makers at tech companies) and continue to share our work with enthusiasts who find it useful.

For example, what’s the right way for us to interact with the open-source community?  What about follow-on papers?  How can I leverage these types of marketing efforts to improve our recruiting? Would a mailing list make any sense?

Anyway, I think this first step was a big success. Now, to iterate and improve with the goal of making our marketing as good as our technology.