Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

Let your Web 2.0 application do its own marketing

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on September 30th, 2007 filed in Marketing, Advertising


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One of the most costly part of a web app deployment will usually be on the marketing stage. Web startups spend tenth of thousands of dollars in advertising to get a bunch of audience to use their app. They send hundreds of emails to the many Web 2.0 medias out there such as TechCrunch and Read/Write Web to get some coverage and generate the buzz. They hire expensive PR firms to do the harsh marketing works on their behalf, and they also spent numerous amount of time/money doing offline marketings by participating/sponsoring in seminars, opening up booths and so on.

Nothing’s wrong with any of them. Afterall, a marketing is a marketing. But if you can code your application to do 90% of the effective marketing for you, you can save a huge amount of time and money and focus more on delivering high quality service to your users. Here are some of the ways to do that:

5 ways to let your web app market itself

1. Emphasize on SEO

Search engine is one of the best marketing tool out there on the net. If you can tackle search engine, there’s a high chance that you’ll receive a consistent flow of new users stumbling onto your app each day. Simply focus on the content of your app (allow UGC), use friendly URLs all the way, craft relevant page titles, use tagging folksonomy… and you’re on your way to the top of the search results for a lot of keywords. And remember, meta keywords and meta descriptions DO have its place in SEO, so don’t forget to utilize them as well.

2. Create useful/interesting widgets

People love widgets… especially bloggers. Widgets are small embeddable programs which can be included into any webpages by just pasting in some small chunk of codes into the site. This widget can make use of the information you have in your app to do interesting things. Take an example of Kiva.org, the microloan application which provides a widget that shows the loan status of a person you’d like to help (see example here). Or simply take a look at Flickr which allows users to create a widget of their own photo album and publish it in their websites. Meebo becomes more successful after launching their Meebo Me and Meebo Room widgets. YouTube, SlideShare and many other famous web apps out there also becomes famous because of the availability of embeddable widgets. If your widget is creative enough, everybody will start to use it and it will spread like virus. That’s massive ‘free’ marketing for your app without you having to lift a finger.

3. Allow members to send invites to their friends

Provide a simple page in your app which contains some hassle-free HTML forms to allow your users to invite their friends through e-mail. Call it a “Tell Others” or “Invite Others” page. They can simply key in a few of their friends’ email addresses into the form with a template invite message automatically inserted for them, and hit submit. This method of marketing makes use of the proven “word of mouth” marketing. Believe it, a simple function like this can do wonders. So make sure you have a function like this before launching your app.

4. Provide buttons/badges for members to help spread the word

Happy users will happily volunteer to promote your app — as long as you provide them the tools. Design some nice and cute buttons or badges and place it in a page called “Help us promote” (be sincere) along with the HTML codes of the imagelinks so that your die hard fans can easily help you promote your app without costing you a dime. The cuter your buttons are, the more likely that people will voluntarily place it into their sites. Not only will this help you reach more audience, it will also create the brand for you. Meebo used this method with their GoMeebo and they worked perfectly. You’ll be surprised to see how many people will voluntarily place your buttons into their sites.

5. Leverage RSS

If your web app allows user-generated content, there’s a high chance that you can convert their contents into RSS. As long as the content has a title and a timestamp (and possibly a category), you can definitely ‘RSS’ them. A huge amount of Internet users today rely on RSS on a daily basis. If you don’t provide RSS subscriptions for your app, you’ll lose that amount of potential users. The good thing about RSS is apart from allowing your users to stay updated, they can also be submitted into many relevant websites that accepts RSS feeds. What happens next is when your RSS is updated, it will also be updated to the thousands of readers on those sites, thus reaching more potential users.

Of course there are more ways that you can do to make your web app do the marketing by itself. But I think the list up there are some of the most basic and yet most effective method for passive marketing. It’s a good idea to have all these functions ready before launching your Web 2.0 app.

Are we ready for Web 3.0?

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on August 9th, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Web2.0, Technology, Artificial Intelligence


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I noticed that there has been quite a number of discussions over the Internet on the topic of what the future Web 3.0 is all about. Like the current Web 2.0 itself, it is predictable that the term “Web 3.0″ will never get properly defined as well, but the term will eventually be used and mentioned in numerous papers, documents and materials, in blogs and the mainstream media to describe web apps that exhibit some sets of characteristics, features and capabilities more advanced than that of the current Web 2.0. The question is, what kind of characteristics are we talking about here?

The truth is no one knows, and only time will tell. But some of the most notable implementations mentioned around the term “Web 3.0″ includes the following:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence itself represents the future, so it is no surprise that AI is going to be one of the core implementation of the future web applications. AI is, in itself, a very broad field of study which consists of many distributed branches like Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Data Mining, Voice/Pattern Recognition, Probability Algorithms and Expert Systems. Although they sound complex, what these things do is basically trying to incorporate human intelligence into machines - or in our case - the Web. Some of the web apps around lately has already started using AI techniques in their applications. SpinVox for instance has such an impressive “Voice Recognition” engine that I’ve seen so far, and also Odiogo.com which does the exact opposite so elegantly! There are also plans to somehow “restructure” (see below) the Web as a database which can be “mined” to extract a collective human knowledge around the world. Since I majored in Artificial Intelligence back in college, the idea of implementing AI to the mainstream web gets me pretty excited.

Semantic Web

It doesn’t matter how many times I read about Semantic Web on Wikipedia, I will still have trouble understanding its concept as clearly. My understanding is that it tries to put the web information into an extensible sort-of way so that it can be “understandable” by machines (when I say machines, I mean computer programs) but at the same time can also be presented to human in a form that is described as “natural”. An easy example of this is RSS feeds, which have been widely used in content publishing. Today, the data that’s being published through RSS can be submitted to many different feed readers and websites. Web 3.0 may have higher ambition towards this by which the Web could even use, digest, understand, compare, and make decision based on all of the data being presented to them in certain formats. Semantic Web will turn the web into a so-called World Wide Database, realizing the concept of “intelligent web”. I could see that this is going to be closely related to the AI field above. Didn’t I mention that this is going to be hard to understand?

3D Technology?

This can be quite ambitious, but with the recent invention of multi-touch technology, realizing 3D experience on the web might be just around the corner. A lot of this takes the Web beyond web browsers and using the SecondLife project as an example. However, something inside me tells that 3D stuffs just doesn’t cut it for the masses. We’ll just have to wait and see whether 3D is going to be the next big thing in the future web.

Open Technologies

Web apps providing open APIs and using open identities (such as OpenID) for authentication mechanisms. This will allow multiple apps to be pieced together and distributed into many different platforms and gadgets. That’s probably what Eric Schmidt tried to convey to the audience when asked about what he thinks of Web 3.0 is gonna be about. And this may also be the reason why Facebook is kicking off this year with their extensible app API feature that they provide.

The video below shows Eric Schmidt’s attempt in defining Web 3.0 even though it was not entirely what I had expected. I was hoping that he would’ve at least mentioned “AI” :

How to monetize your Web 2.0 application?

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on July 29th, 2007 filed in Entrepreneurship, Web2.0, Business Model


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A lot of people will be wondering the same thing the first time they hear about building businesses around Web 2.0, “After creating a Web App.. what happens next? How do we generate money out of it?”

Its nothing complex, really. As long as you can build an interesting or useful app, there comes the quality traffic. Quality traffic always comes with quality users. And when there are quality users, guess what? There’s money… lots of `em too. Look at Friendster and Myspace. Their founders are now millionaires.. how do you think they pull money out of those apps?

You need to have some kind of business model before you build that app… or at least an idea of how to generate money out of it

We’re all in the business of making money here. Depending on what type of services your web application offer, there can be many different ways to monetize it. A lot of these have been practiced in the offline business world for ages, but the fact that we’re doing it “the web way” makes some new people in this industry a bit confused.

1. SUBSCRIPTION BASED MODEL

This is one of the widely used business model in the industry of Web 2.0, specifically for those web apps that provide “uniquely” useful services and don’t have so many scary competitors. Usually those that uses this approach will also provide FREE subscription plan but with limited functionalities. This strategy is implemented just so that the users will be able to try out their services before deciding later on whether they want to upgrade to a paid subscription if they need the extra functionalities. Some people upgrade because they want to remove ads and other types of annoyances in their account. According to Ryan Carson, in most cases 98% of the users will be on the FREE plan and only 1-2% will actually upgrade. However, if you have a REALLY huge user base, 1-2% may actually be worth it. Basecamp, Freshbooks, DropSend and Shoutmix (a Malaysian shoutbox provider) are some of the famous Web 2.0 startups that uses this approach.

2. ADVERTISING MODEL

Reserve some space on your web app for advertisers to put their advertisements on. This can be done in many creative ways depending on your application’s behavior and not necessarily just by putting banner ads on the webpage. Take for example Revver, an alternative online video sharing service like YouTube. They append short video advertisements at the end of each uploaded videos. Some widget-based web companies will put small ads on their widgets too. Feedburner allows putting ads in their user’s RSS feeds. This type of business model is mostly used by apps that has massive amount of target audience or users. Most of them usually provide absolutely FREE service/accounts to attract that number of traffic.

3. SELL STUFFS ONLINE..

Although selling stuffs sounds a bit traditional but it still is very practical and web2.0-ish if you do it the right way. Check out CafePress for instance… the company that actually allows you to design t-shirts online (and also caps, mugs, etc), and buy it without any minimum order. To make it better, they would even allow you to open up your own e-store with those designs you just created and get commissions out of it, shippings handled 100% by them. Isn’t that idea just plain brilliant? I think I should create an app like that someday…

4. REVENUE SHARING MODEL

This is also a type of “advertising model” with the exception that instead of taking all the advertisement revenues for yourself, you also share a few percentage of it with your users who help spread the ads across the web. Such examples are Google AdSense, PayPerPost, Text-Link-Ads, Advertlets and ImageFly. By giving some percentage to your users, you’ll instantly create the buzz and attract lots of participants very quickly. This will exponentially increase your advertising network and thus giving you the extra credibility to attract bigger advertisers. This is a business model with a marketing influence injected to it. The disadvantage about this approach however is that keeping up with your publisher’s payouts could be very troublesome and time consuming. You need to constantly make your publishers happy cuz one mistake might get you into lots of trouble in terms of reputation.

5. REVENUE THROUGH PPC PROGRAMS

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. This is one of the easiet way to generate money out of your web app because you only need to place some non-intrusive ads around your application and get paid for every valid clicks made on those ads. It can actually be implemented in almost any web app of any types and combined with other main business models. Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and Bidvertiser are some of the PPC programs out there widely used by many apps to generate revenues. Example apps that uses this monetization method are Friendster and Flickr. Possibly worth it for high traffic apps.

6. SELL YOUR WEB APP

A lot of web startups out there dreams of getting acquired or bought off by the giant web companies out there like Yahoo and Google. While this is not really a business model, it does give you the monster-bucks (we’re talking [b][m]illions here ppl ) very quickly. Basically it is selling off your business so that you can stop managing your web app and just enjoy the money. Few months ago YouTube and Feedburner was sold off to Google for about 1.65 billion and a hundred million bucks respectively. Now their founders are living in heaven. You need to be very good in statistics to attract these buyers tho, because you need to prove to them giants that your app is really worth that much.

OTHER MODELS.. THINK.. THINK..

I can’t possibly list all business models here. What I have stated up there are some of the major business models used by many Web 2.0 companies. Companies like Paypal and E-Gold for example have their own business model on the base of electronic-currencies which I haven’t yet stated in the 6 points above. Ebay, Amazon and Alibaba also have their own unique business models. The point is that by being a little bit creative, you can turn money out of almost any ideas you can think of. The most important part now is to start building upon that idea!