marketingDue to recent Bitcoin boom I figured to get into Bitcoin business about 18 months ago. I developed an idea about a ‘different way’ of mining Bitcoins and hired contractors on Elance an Odesk to make the system - spent around £4000 and then realised that I cannot market efficiently.
This happened due to high cost of Bitcoin related keywords, on average I would get one registered user for $51 (PPC Google adwords). Since estimated profit per user was $0.50 - $1.00 per month I have stopped the project immediately.
To regain costs spent on acquiring users I would need them mine Bitcoins for ~10 years. Before system was built I could not see a way to measure what costs on getting one user will be due to to many factors.
Update:
I could not afford to wait for users to come to me, so I was rather willing to throw money at it. Another problem which is specific to Bitcoin business is getting critical mass of users mining for it to be able to produce consistent payouts.
We are talking on 500+ users in a matter of 1-2 weeks otherwise users get tired of mining without getting paid and will leave.
Could I have avoided this failure?
Is there a way to get price per user estimate without having a ready product to try it on?
This is the internet era, with so many established ways of marketing for free.
hth.
When considering product development, you do need to consider how you will monetize that product! You appear to have only looked at attracting users by buying Google adwords with related Bitcoin keywords … and you did that after you had sunk costs.
For your present state, you should look at a different way to attract users … word of mouth; social media; or “earned media” … see if you can market your story to press outlets (either talking about BitCoin “unknown world” or other human interest path.
[Your story also shows the risks one may encounter by jumping onto a “hot get-rich quick” area of endeavor.]
Another way you could have avoided the problem might have been to buy some Google Ads before you sunk your development dollars and see how many folk would be attracted to find a “new way” to mine bitcoins (or a story about how to do that). $150 would have gone a long way. Your Google adcampaign could have sent folks to a survey to get their take on what they would want (e.g. better way to mine Bitcoins .. would you pay $1, $5, $10 per month, do you want the service , ….).
Any marketing campaign needs at least 3 or 4 different types of advertising. Google Ads is only one and its not very efficient. If you can identify a group of people yourself that you would market to, then you need to find a way to reach them directly and not hope that Google Ads will get to them eventually.
As others have mentioned, the best way are blogs and social media. Find the biggest users of twitter for your area and tweet directly to them. Keep tweeting on your own to talk up your product.
Create a blog at the same time and post more detailed info there than on your twitter feed. Go to other blogs and add useful comments about how your software will help them and also direct people to your site/blog.
The next thing to do if possible, is meet people in the industry if there are ever meetups close to you. This all depends on your location, but there are actual bitcoin groups that come together to talk about using it more. Even talking to a merchant that accepts bitcoins is a potential customer for you.
This will be much faster than relying only on Google Ads words. You said time was critical and this is important for everyone to understand that small ads on websites generate only a few leads and are expensive.
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