As entrepreneurs go, you would expect them to keep their hard won skills and knowledge to themselves. Buzz is just not going to be that way, and has many things to say about how he has marketed his product, ActiveWords using bloggers to help carry his story, and create buzz around his project.

Buzz brought up a blogger in New Zeeland, RobiNZ who is a CAD blogger, and has written a lot about the product and how he uses it to automate his CAD operations. The blog can be found here, and he has 28 articles on the use of the product and how he has used it to automate many of his operations at work.

What was interesting was that in 2002/2003 when blogging was a generally unknown resource, just getting started from the ashes of the dot com bust, Buzz as he put it during his techwag interview said,

“There was an intentional courting of bloggers across the board”, and “that he had set a personal mission to court every “A-List” blogger to see what kind of buzz could be created”

By choosing a conscious path in his relationship with bloggers, he essentially developed a marketing plan that was part of the conversation that people would have around the product. This kind of marketing is generally free, and in the right hands can create a lot of buzz around the product.

The good part is that he let bloggers use their own voice, he talked to them, he showed his product, and bloggers from all levels, zero through A-Level have been able to draw their own conclusions. What was interesting is that the blogger in New Zealand mentioned

“…I have looked at activewords…just doesn’t seem like it’s something I need right now.”

I responded: “Nobody needs ActiveWords, until they use it – then you can’t use a PC without it.” Source: RobiNZ

As a marketing building buzz with bloggers, you cannot get better marketing, and as a strategy, it has paid off for ActiveWords.

They survived on buzz and downloads during the Y2K/DotComBust/9-11 cycle of boom and bust because of a marketing plan that cost little money, and involved a lot of talking, meeting with people, and be willing to sit down with bloggers to get the word out.

This is highly authentic as a form of marketing, but the key to this is developing the relationship with the blogging community, and this is something that we as a tech blog for Seattle startups have not seen much of. While it is great to build out a product, you have to build out the relationship with everyone to get people to try it. That adoption bubble has to start somewhere, bloggers and in general, technical bloggers are all early adopters, love to try new stuff.

Advice for startups, court bloggers early, get them excited about your product and get them blogging about your product. Give them a free copy of the product and see what they do with it. They will let you know everything that is right and wrong with it, as well as expand testing into people who the company otherwise could not get nor afford.

Some of the best free marketing and free marketing advice you will ever get.