Neil Patel's Quick Sprout

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We are in Cupertino.

We are the team behind Mokriya Craigslist. Time, Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Xconomy, and a slew of tech bloggers raved about it. Check it out. http://craigslist.mokriya.com/

We are a team of engineers, UX designers, and thinkers. We have worked for some of the hottest tech startups in Silicon Valley, including Path, MixPanel, Threadflip, SimpleGeo, SideCar, etc.

Google has us on a list of "best mobile development teams in the country" so we get calls from them occasionally too.

About You

You're a Technical-Geek/Copywriter Hybrid. You are a technophile by nature, and love learning about and exploring new technologies. You don't have to be an engineer, but you should have a solid grasp of things like MVC, agile development, etc. If you know the other side of the shop (user-centered design), you get bonus points. Basically, you need to be able to speak intelligently about software development, specifically as it relates to Mobile.
Also, you should be very good at breaking down complicated ideas into bite-sized morsels of "oohhh, I get it" gooeyness. Our target audience are the business-people who make decisions about technologies to use inside of companies. The rare few are engineers. Most are not. If you can connect well with these people (the challenges of working inside a big co., getting projects out the door, playing the political games, etc.), then you will get more bonus points! :)

About the Work

We are…

I somewhat disagree with lavish that your marketing methods depend on your business category. In some cases you might choose one channel over another if it suits your content or audience better but, generally speaking, the core concepts of good marketing don't change much across industries and time.

I've consumed a great deal of information on marketing and I can tell you that most (quality) materials are going to give you similar information. The tactics of marketing change depending on the platforms you use, but the actual principles of marketing are quite simple.

Most of the useful information you'll come across is geared toward understanding your audience and mostly centers around a series of steps similar to the following:

- understand your brand (what your mission is, etc...)
- identify your audience
- identify where your audience spends time
- engage with your audience in an honest and authentic way by sharing valuable information (helpful, funny, inspiring, etc...)
- build funnels to move people from interest to your end goals.

Telling compelling stories and offering valuable content are lessons that pop up time and time again.

Like I said above, the core principles of marketing are simple and timeless. The most effective kind of marketing is the kind where you're not really "marketing" at all, you're just sharing valuable stuff that gets your audience excited in some way.

For a very comprehensive collection of online guides, I'd take a look at QuickSprout:…

Everyone knows SPI likely has BS numbers made from very creative accounting. I wouldn't doubt that, that's the case with many of them. I'd be interested to know how much they actually make. I think that this type of thing - going beyond superficial aggregation or testing - would keep your traffic there.

Anyway Nathan Barry, the founder of an email marketing company Convert Kit - a company on your list, says it pretty well: the best way to drive traffic to your products is to first drive traffic to yourself.

https://vimeo.com/95680313 - A talk by Nathan Barry
(Check out that Vimeo account for more talks from founders)

Driving traffic to yourself is typically done with content marketing. Here's a podcast from Empire Flippers - a company on your list - interviewing the founder of another company on the list, WP Curve.
https://empireflippers.com/wpcurve/
(Note that podcasting and blogging is Empire Flippers' form of content marketing, and a big reason why they're as big as they are)

And here's an in depth guide by Neil Patel
https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/
(Quicksprout, which seems to be an umbrella company for niche sites, also looks like it has transparent revenue btw)

In closing, I'll reiterate that it's probably most important that, like Y Combinator itself says, you build something that people want.

You can shoot me an email if you want. I'm a willing wall to bounce ideas off of.
ryanacalvo /at/ gmail

It's been written about quite extensively. Google stuff like "eye tracking study conversion optimization" and you'll come up with a ton of hits. Lesson #6 on this[-2] blog post also has another example.

A/B test everything, and, while this isn't a hard rule, generally the model's eyes should be looking where you want to viewer to look.

The reason I think 37Signals successfully breaks this "rule" is because the headline is by far the most dominant thing on the page.[-1] Not so with OP's design.[0] On the Basecamp site, it's virtually impossible not to be able to see the headline first and read what it says before moving on to anything else on the page. 37Signals would be wrong to have the model's eyes looking in any other direction. If she were looking to the left she'd be looking away from the call to action. If she were looking to the right she'd be looking away from the social proof. This is one of those times that they understood the "rules" so well that they were able to break them for greater effect.

[-2] http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/01/7-conversion-optimization-lessons-learned-from-eye-tracking/

[-1] http://i.imgur.com/0XWFn9v.png

[0] http://i.imgur.com/HAW2JTv.png

Yeah, I'm just cranky before my coffee. It's my bad.

It's not a matter of total spend. Advertising, and marketing in general is about a lot of tests. The best way to approach it is to read a lot of material beforehand. Then map out the outcomes you want out of the advertising. Figure out what your KPIs are, set goals for those KPIs based on what you've read. Then set a daily budget according to your goals. And start running tests. After a month you can look at your results and see what worked, what didn't and you can start thinking why those things happened or what didn't happen.

The budget is something specific for every individual business. You can't really say, you need $X to get started. It is not an easy process. That's why I sometimes overreact to statements like OP's. Advertising is not something you can do in 15 minutes before bed. You need to educate yourself, be dedicated and persistent to make it work continuesly.

If you want to make it work, I suggest Neil Petel's quicksprout university for a very, very basic introduction.

http://www.quicksprout.com/university/

Here’s Neil Patel doing for a different vertical [1]. That article and the commenters from there can take you a long way. FWIW, don’t jump on to these things without following the links and spending a month or more researching. Writing is hard. And you have to produce around 4-10 pieces of audience intended content every month.

When we started, we didn’t care about the traffic. We did it because we loved it.

Content updating happens every year or during vacations when we get bored or when we learn a new technique. For example, when we learned that good photographs increase the CTR by 10x, my wife started learning photography. When we learned that Pinterest optimized vertical images get 5x+ CTR [2], we implemented that a year back. There are many Facebook groups for these discussions.

[1] https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/11/how-im-going-to-achieve-the-100k-a-month-challenge-without-using-my-name
[2] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/527554543833038696/