Book of the Day - Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Book of the Day - Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares is a must read for those of us with serial entrepreneur goals. Whether you are trying to build the worlds largest company or a boondoggle of a web site, such as rickrolled.com Traction covers the core tools used to gather eyeballs on your project.
My largest takeaway from the book as it pertains to my own goals and how I’m seeing momentum build on hackerfinance.com is that writing articles that shows you are an expert in the space will help you build an audience, but it won’t happen overnight. It could easily take six months worth of blogging content before your audience catches on. At that point you have an audience to leverage towards your ideas.
In my case, I didn’t realize I was leveraging the “micro-site” technique. Using the micro site technique is when you take all of your ideas and test them out by building separate websites for the ideas. As you can see with my “startup idea of the day” topic I’ve taken a handful of those ideas and launched websites for each of them. The hope long term is that as I develop more content for hackerfinance.com this audience will be curious about these other projects and go check them out.
The major tools in Traction were moz.com for SEO tracking and Unbounce.com for landing pages used to capture and converting your audience into customers. I only recently finished this book and have yet to dive deeper into unbounce. I did try the landing page builder, but it required a subscription and frankly, I’m tired of yet another subscription. I have multiple squarespace subscriptions, domain subscriptions, web forum subscriptions, phone subscription, internet subscription, Netflix subscription, I could easily list another 5-10 subscriptions that I have and signing up for one more just to build a landing page for a 14 day trial that required me to enter my credit card number felt like lock-in to me and I’m not interested in a quick Unbounce trial if I’m not going to put a solid focus on using it and measuring the success or failure of it.
Back to the book. It’s a great book. With tons of use it now, actionable content.
