For new startups everything is about two things traffic and distribution. If you can supercharge these two then your growth can be exponential.

A lot of startups and products use PR for #1 traffic. They weave a great story about their product or what they hope their startup can do for the masses. It’s all about hype and can rely heavily on perception. If you’re a first time, this can be really hard to create.

Enter partnerships, which implies something that should be mutually beneficial, which can both drive traffic and be a terrific distribution channel. Organic growth can take forever, but you can supercharge traffic by leveraging a partnership. Vero highlights some big hitting partnerships like between Unbounce and Kissmetric, as well as Stripe and Squarespace, but those are seriously long term partnerships with tons of integration.What I’m suggesting is Affiliate partnerships that also include Content partnerships like native ads.

Good affiliates can send great qualified leads to the top of the funnel. Though you do have the pay for partnerships like this, usually it’s based on completing an action like actually buying your product so at least it’s all performance based marketing. You only pay when that affiliate actually converts a user and now you have a distribution network. Here’s some info on how to start a No Cost Affiliate Campaign.

On the flip side, you can also reach out to blogs who might be interested in posting an article about you in exchange for getting paid to do it AKA native advertising. Usually it’s a combo of a fee to post the article and some payment on each conversion. This can be tough since it’s not as focused of an audience, but what you get in return is a high ranking domain with links back to your site plus content so it’s a double-dip.