How I promoted Bitcoin-2

[Fizpok]

It took some time before I desided to share that one. On one hand, spam is BAD. On the other, it is not exactly spam, but rather an elaborated trap... Well, judge for yourself

First of all, about the target audience. After asking 14 people at work - all of them are software developers and I assure you, advanced ones - I found that only three of them have recognized the word "Bitcoin", and none was able to provide solid explanations - or any explanations at all.

Which means, Bitcoin needs to be promoted.

So how do we approach promoting the thing, if we know the programmers are a target audience? We send them spam... No, stop! Cancel this!

We cheat, instead.

First of all, I have created a "shareware directory" site (nothing fancy, here: soft.snowcron.com). A very basic site, really, though it has all - again, basic - functionality one would expect. A week of work, no sweat.

Then I did some basic (again - basic!) promotion tricks. As one would expect, it ended up on Google's first page on "shareware directory" search.

Then, the site was discovered by automatic submission bots I didn't do anything! But now (2 months later) I have about 10,000 entries in the database, thanks to robots.

And - did I mention the submission form? It has an "e.mail" field in it.

So, every time I am getting a software info submitted to the database, the author of that software gets (and this is not spam anymore!) a "thank you" email.

Which, pretty much, says, that "as an author of a computer program, you might be interested in our Bitcoin Store Engine, that makes online software sales easier".

So, 10,000 (a bit less, as robots tend to do multiple submissions) people learned about the Bitcoin.

[drawingthesun]

So how do we approach promoting the thing, if we know the programmers are a target audience?

Whilst everything you did to promote bitcoin indirectly was a good idea, I do not think programmers are the target audience for Bitcoin.

Who is the target audience for Bitcoin? Everyone. Thats the point of a currency, that everyone uses it. Programmers might be good to target because they might eventually build Bitcoin services, but lets not fall into the hole that Bitcoin is for our ideology or our field of expertise. Bitcoin is neutral. Thats the only way it can gain acceptance as the worlds currency.

Apart from that, nice work.

[The Bitcoin Co-op]

Seconded about the everyone thing. We should strive to make everybody love Bitcoin, not just certain demographics. In Vancouver we are trying to have a diversity of events and businesses, like yoga and night clubs. We can't only do what's fun for people in programming and finance.

It doesn't hurt to tell more programmers, though. It doesn't hurt to tell more anyone! You should keep doing it.

[drawingthesun]

Its actually a really cool sneaky idea though. I hope many of those 10,000 are people that will at least read into Bitcoin now.

[Fizpok]

So how do we approach promoting the thing, if we know the programmers are a target audience?

Whilst everything you did to promote bitcoin indirectly was a good idea, I do not think programmers are the target audience for Bitcoin.

Who is the target audience for Bitcoin? Everyone. Thats the point of a currency, that everyone uses it. Programmers might be good to target because they might eventually build Bitcoin services, but lets not fall into the hole that Bitcoin is for our ideology or our field of expertise. Bitcoin is neutral. Thats the only way it can gain acceptance as the worlds currency.

Apart from that, nice work.

Thank you. And yes, one of the reasons I wrote this, is to suggest doing the same to other target groups.

[seafarer124]

Get people to watch this Youtube video I posted in "Economics", it only takes ten minutes.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281620.0

The video shows why BTC must survive.

[The Bitcoin Catalog]

We are planning to do paid advertising for our What is Bitcoin page.
We are still working on it but in 1-2 month we will launch a facebook campain with random audience and see how this turns out.

[Fizpok]

With your permission, I'd like to link to it, too. Can I
?

[The Bitcoin Catalog]

Of course!

[franky1]

trying to promote bitcoin to EVERYONE is still a little early. especially when the main selling point is still mining, which has in the last few months just moved out of the 'everyone' can do category.

what is needed is more merchants, and business development of bitcoin. and a big publicity move to show the world where all of these merchants are.

i know there must be over 20k merchants selling legitimate goods and services yet i cannot find a single webservice to even locate more then 1000 in one go.

the general public need to know there is always a service or person within driving distance to use or exchange coins with. so that they are not reliant on banks linked to full-on exchanges such as MTGOX as there only use of bitcoins.

[Winslow Strong]

I mainly promote it by pointing out the mountains of debt hanging over the developed world, and asking people to ponder what the central banks are going to do about them, and then to ponder what the implications are for the value of currency or bond savings.  People are in love with the status quo tho