Promoting a site prior to launch might seem like a daunting task, luckily, there are several creative ways this can be achieved without spending millions in advertising money.  These are some of the guidelines that proved helpful for us. Some of them might seem obvious but they remain effective nonetheless:

1. Create a landing page: landing pages are a simple and effective way to collect emails from your (future) first adopters. You don’t need to invest tons of time to do this. Services like launchrock.com let you do this in a snap.

2.  Make your landing page interesting: make it easy to sign up, make it possible for people to invite their friends to your site via your landing page. A simple share button would do. Offer incentives to sign up. At expulp, we promise users who invite their friends to be given priority for our Beta program.  You can also offer prizes to the top 5 users who sent the most invites.

3. Create a blog: an obvious one at this day and age. Blog about stuff that’s related to what your site is about.  A link back to your site from a well read blog (i.e. yours) is worth gold. First bring users to your blog, then remind them once in a while in your blog posts to sign up to be notified when you launch.  If they like what they’re reading, they’ll most likely do it and get other people to do the same.

4. Promote your blog: with little money you can pay for users to come to your site. Stumbleupon Paid Discovery program is a good start. Don’t bother advertising your landing page on StumbleUpon as it will get turned down. StumbleUpon favors sites with content. Facebook Ads are also another channel that, if used well, can bring your blog targeted audience.

5. Reach out to your Friends and Family:  these are the people who (usually) trust you and believe in you. Ask them to spread the word about your new and cool site, and they’ll do it.

6. Tweet: tweet about what your site does. Twitter does a good job suggesting your profile to those who have something in common with you. Ideally you are using a Twitter username that matches the name of your site. Ours is expulp

7. Follow Twitter users who you want to visit your site: identify influencers/users who you want among your initial user base and follow them on Twitter. They might follow you back. Make sure you don’t end up with considerably more followees than followers.

8. Send emails to influencers/bloggers in your field: be genuine and talk about your service before it’s out. Explain how you are solving a problem better than others and offer them a scoop. Offer them to use your service before it’s out, give them an invitation to a private event in your city to talk to you/your developers, etc… Make them remember you and hopefully talk about you one day.

9. Link back to your Blog and your site on your social accounts: add your site to your LinkedIn profile. Add it to your email signature as well. Create a Facebook page for your site. Post your updates on it. Get your friends and followers to like it.

10. Post your site to directories: it might take some time before it shows on Yahoo or Dmoz but when it does, that’s a valuable link back to have.

Expulp is actively in development as we speak. Though we don’t have a definitive date for our Beta launch, we are making great progress. If you haven’t signed up yet for our Beta program. Please do so now.

This is the second post on the info-consumerism topic. Make sure to read the first part if you haven’t done so already. In this part I’m going to answer some of the previously raised questions and clarify what activities are leading to the solutions and what might result in dead ends.

It became easier than ever to fall into a consumption only mode, ignoring the creative part of the human nature. While you are diving deep in your favorite infoholic activities – checking out blogs, Twitter, Facebook, watching TV etc. your creative juices are “fermenting and then going bad”:

• First, they “turn into wine”, which can be converted into something useful, while the ideas are maturing. That’s a good sign, if you eventually act on the ideas and let them out by designing / writing / developing, in other words making any creative attempt to implement something.
• Next, the unused “wine” turns into a real poison that starts to ruin your feeling of achievement and fulfillment. You don’t feel like you are progressing or creating something useful anymore, or at least not to the full potential. Eventually most people settle with this state and live in a comfortable status quo. There are always tons of excuses that help us to shut down the weak voice of creativity, most of which resonate with some form of  “stability is important”. Short flashbacks might happen, but they never result in real end result, while being in this state.

There are several ways of dealing with this stagnation. Or put it more precisely, there is a number of short ways and the single right way:

• The short way implies an easy shortcut giving you a psychological sense of fulfillment with a minimal effort. There is even a nice word for it “Escapism”. This is a very powerful word, just think of the root and the detailed meaning. “I’m so tired, I need some escapism”… This means: “I don’t want to understand and solve the problems, I’d rather escape from them.” Or: “The reality is too harsh to face it, as it will force me to make changes, so I’d rather just go play my gorgeous level 85 Night Elf”. This is why gaming is so popular and is growing every day. It gives you a quick and easy sense of achievement. You might note that almost every single modern game comes with a well designed achievement system, with various points, badges, unlocks and progression trees. Even the simplest mobile games are all moving in this direction – it keeps the player hooked, spending more time (and sometimes money) to get more, stand out and “achieve something”. (Disclaimer: I used to be an avid gamer and still enjoy games when I have some spare time).
• Another shortcut to a quick psychological “achievement” is social media activity. Posting important updates on Twitter, smart posts on the forum or proving “somebody is wrong on the internets” is a great way to score some points with your subconscious creative part. Since it has no rational way of determining whether it was a real act of creation, it gives a satisfactory boost to your ego. The only problem is that this is a fake boost, which fades out too fast. Just like taking a sweetener would make your taste buds somewhat satisfied, but zero calories will eventually leave your body starving for some energy.
• And here we come to the not-so-fast, but the only right way: the real act of creation. Once you start doing something useful, creating something new – this changes the whole picture. You finally satisfy the internal hunger with the real deeds and you live the full spectrum of life. It doesn’t matter what exactly you do, it depends only on your character, talents and aspirations. You can be developing or designing something, painting, writing, crafting, gardening or building something. Whatever makes you happy and of course as long as it’s legal. The physical activities and sports are somewhat close to this category, but I think that both are necessary components. Unless you treat your workouts as an act of sculpting, or getting the next belt / cup is your real kick.

                            Image: By Akbar Simonse on flickr

The startups culture is becoming mainstream today. What used to be an elitists’ club, is now accessible to almost every college kid. The technology evolution and the ease of entering unoccupied niches are probably the main reasons for this phenomenon on a physical level. However the main underlying reason is the need to create. With more distractions than ever it is hard to maintain the creation / consumption balance today. And one of the best ways to deploy yourself is through creating something new, something that might help people and improve this world. This is why there are so many startupers trying to impress the audience, their founders are just striving to maintain the golden creation / consumption balance.

On that note… We are making some progress on ours as well. Don’t forget to signup for the closed beta.

Search engines are the second most used service on the Web after email. They index Web pages then match user keywords against these pages. They are simple yet powerful, and that’s probably why they remain undefeated as a user’s first resort when looking for information on the Web. No fancy sentences required, just a few keywords that summarize what the user is looking for. This is what makes search engines powerful. They are extremely easy to use and provide “responses” in real-time.

Social Bookmarking

Though not as common or heavily used as search engines, social bookmarking services were the new kid on the block circa 2005, and although they are not primarily search tools, they do offer, by ricochet, pretty good search capabilities. Users would share their finds on the Web and tag them for others/themselves to find later. It is these tags that make Social Bookmarkers great info search tools as they provide additional categorization that Search Engines often fail to infer. Of the several social bookmarkers available back then, there was Delicious which was acquired by Yahoo at one point. Given its large user base (and consequently a large index), one could find quality hits/answers on it sometimes even before they were indexed on Google. We’re talking about a time when twitter had barely started and real time search was at its infancy.

Human Powered Search

When a search engine response is deemed too generic or the information is altogether absent on the Web, Question and Answer services (also referred to as human-powered search services) are it. When a more personalized “search” experience is sought, it is to these kinds of services that users turn. QnA services remove ambiguity from search as they allow the formulation of proper sentences. These sentences are presented or routed to other users to provide answers on. As such, the response quality is often better than the automated one given by a regular search engine.

There is currently a plethora of QnA services which compete over a growing user base including (to name a few): Yahoo answers, FormSpring, ChaCha, UClue, JustAnswer.com, Quora.com, Aol Answers, AnswerBag, the old Mahalo – before it got morphed into a HowTo video site, probably as a result of Google “Panda” updates - . Google had its own answering service back in the day as well, before it shut it down in 2006 most probably because it couldn’t be scaled as desired, or its  monetization in Googlistic proportions was hard.

Social Search

The past 3-4 years have seen a new breed of human powered search services emerge. These relatively new players, dubbed social search services, leverage social network connections on facebook and/or twitter to locate people with answers. InboxQ, Wajam, Aardvark (acquired by Google in early 2010) and Quora are among some of these new sites. Social search finds its rationale in the fact that users often resort to people they know/follow and trust for answers.

The road ahead

There’s certainly a lot to be done when it comes to knowledge search on the Web, and despite what has been done so far, we haven’t seen the emerging of a leader yet. We believe that with the wide adoption of services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as the ubiquity of mobile technology, it is now even easier to find and reach experts right where they are.  We also think at expulp that human powered search, as it is currently implemented, falls short in at least the following respects:

1. Qualifying experts: when a user is properly qualified and his/her expertise/interest areas are known, they are better targeted with relevant questions, and as such, they are more likely to give an answer.
2. Proper question routing: the model which consists in users exploring a list of questions and giving answers where they can, has proven to contribute in littering questions with sub-par answers, or sometimes not resulting in answers altogether. Question routing is key and should take into account the expertise/interest areas of a user, the social connections (when applicable) as well as a user’s geography.
3. Answering speed: ideally a question would get an answer in real-time. With all things human, speed is unfortunately limited but services that can shorten the turnaround time for a question will undoubtedly be successful.

As we move towards a more connected society, the likes of Expulp, Aardvark and FormSpring will become more mainstream. The Googles and Bings of the world will probably still be  the #1 stop for information and knowledge search, but they will most probably evolve to also include human powered search capabilities, just like they evolved in the past few years to include map services, business directory services, flight search, etc. … The acquisition of Aardvark in 2010 by Google is a strong signal on how the search arena of the future will be shaped. A patent recently filed by Google confirms this vision.

Hello all and welcome to our new blog. My name is Michael and I’m one of the co-founders at Expulp.com. We are going to try and keep this blog revolving around startups, web technologies, social media, business and other interesting topics. But we’ll also cover bordering areas such as psychology and personal development and will try to spice it up with some details from our personal experiences from time to time. So stay tuned, I hope you’ll like it here. ☺

Today’s topic is somewhat philosophical, and it has been on my mind for a long enough time to let it out “on paper”. For the ease of reading I will split it into 2 parts.
We have all been caught up in consumerism culture in the modern world. And it is not limited to physical shopping process only, but more importantly it became a philosophy that drives our day-to-day activities in multiple areas. You might wonder what am I talking about? Well, let’s take a look:
• Web browsing – “let me just check out this and that for 5 minutes” and you suddenly find yourself spending half an hour just surfing the web and reading the blogs.
• Social networks – how many people don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account today? And how much time is spent checking-in, posting “important” status updates etc.?
• TV / Radio – some might say “I’m barely watching any TV”, but you are still exposed to the news / ads / shows all the time, even if you’re just driving your car from point A to point B.
• Movies / Theaters / Reading – somewhat selective activity, but still a pure consumption.
• Gaming (Console / PC / Mobile) – ever growing trend. And I’m going to reveal one of the biggest reasons why below.

As you can see this is a pure mental consumerism. Our brain has been trained to act as an info-shopaholic. Like it or not, you are in a constant hunt for more information, and the lack of content creates a tangible vacuum in your brain. Imagine yourself without your smartphone, computer and an internet access for a month. Or even worse, imagine that you lost all connection with the external world while being on some forgotten island. No doubt that you will go through the withdrawal effect strongly missing the crack of consumable information.
Why is this happening? For one simple reason: the information is a king, in the recent decades it became a real consumable product, just like food or gas. Marketers are fighting for your mind 24/7 from all possible screens and audio sources. Today’s kids are substantially different from their parents at the same age. They barely spend time outside anymore, they don’t depend much on tangible toys, like guns, dolls and constructors. Before he can even speak well, a 2 years’ old baby already knows his way through iOS and plays games on the iPad, 4 years’ old kid already plays Wii, by the age of 6-7 they have basic skills in computer graphics, at 8-9 some start programming. The world has changed permanently. Being always connected is a norm, social networking is almost equal to real relationships and the fine line between “real” and “virtual” is really blurry.
You might wonder: all this is fine, we are simply evolving, so where is the problem? This will be the topic of my next post, so stay tuned. ☺

P.S.: Don’t forget to sign up for our closed beta.
And add our blog to your Google Reader (or whatever you use for RSS).

We will be launching in the next few months. A definitive date has not been set yet, but you can request a Beta invite here. We are currently collecting emails along with social accounts for those who prefer connecting via Facebook or Twitter. I personally do.

So what is expulp.com?

Expulp will match people with problems/questions with people who have answers or solutions to those problems/questions. The idea of course is anything but new. In fact, it has been visited and revisited many times with varying level of success, but we think our take on it is quite unique.

Expertise is available online. Not only is it available, but it is also abundant, however, it’s still not optimally accessible. To put it in simple words, if I need help with something, I’d like that the right help come my way fast. That’s where Expulp comes in:

1. Fast and accurate routing of question to the right expert(s). i.e. to the user(s) that will mostly likely deliver a fast and quality response.
2. Expert qualification using algorithms to rank and qualify users based on info we gather on them.
3. A great way to lend a hand or make money.

…and a few more goodies which we will unveil at launch.

We are really excited to be launching the expulp.com blog. This is where we’ll bounce ideas off of you, make product announcements, give you behind the scene news and last but not least, tell you stories about our entrepreneurial adventure.

We are the guys behind the future expulp.com. We are based in Toronto, Canada, come from different parts of the world but share the same vision and are determined to make expulp.com a success in the social search arena.