Is Your SEO to Grow Your Start-up? Learn About Angel Investors

Are you trying to develop your site’s SEO because your new business is growing? Are you getting ready to move to the next level with your start-up?

I am constantly trying to see what tools are available to ease my work, and my clients efforts (especially after I set them up for success). I run across a variety of sites that are successful in short-cutting the learning curve. Instead of having to read 2 books, or sit through 5 months of classes or pay $10,000 in consulting fees, there are a plethora of solutions to help you get at least a cursory education on a variety of challenges for start-ups.

Here is another website that I found it has a great deal of wisdom in short nuggets. It is GUST.com, a website that matches investors and start-ups in one place, creating a clearinghouse for entrepreneurs to look for angel investors in a single location. But the nugget that I found that was really valuable was the hundreds of videos that they have as short 1 to 3 minute nuggets of wisdom from those that have been through the trenches before.

A matchmaker for startups and inverstors

These are investors that most often have sat on the entrepreneur side of the table. They have learned the lessons of start-ups. Most often they learned the hard way. They are often boiled down in the way investors talking to many perspective start-ups can grasp most quickly from practice and repetition. The repitition of dealing with many pitches throughout the day, giving the same advice over and over. Their wisdom tends to be in short little nuggets that you can walk away from with your mind clearer and more focused then the cup of coffee you sipped while watching. These might even be good nuggets to put around your management tables to start out at different meetings. It might also be an interesting way to kind of go through and bring in an outside person to lend some advice to some of your conversations/arguments that you and your management team are having as to how to solve a problem. Certainly, they’re not the absolute perfect answer to everything, but I do find some thought-provoking ideas in there that can be helpful in trying to map out your course, and stay on path to growing your start-up.

I know what you think about gust.com, and the idea of looking at short videos for gaining wisdom and keeping your energy level up as you go through the challenging days of marketing your business to the world through search engine optimization.

http://videos.gust.com/video/Knowledge-than-credentials;Staff-Picks

Another Analytics Tool To Understand Your Engagements

http://chartbeat.com/demo/

Here is another analytic tool to consider. It is part of the Microsoft BizSpark portfolio, this SAaS tool provides analytics in a manner different then Google Analytics. This tool is more geared towards looking at all your online channels: Twitter, Facebook, Website, mobile. Designed as a dashboard to scan for action steps next, it has a new look and feel graphic that allows for quick absorption of information. The focus here is on how long visitors are engaged. ChartBeat Analytics is that tool. It can in real time show what your traffic is doing. It will show where it is from (in bound links), what the keywords that are driving traffic to the site, what links are getting visitors to your site and more. This lets you focus on what is working to turn it up, and what is not working, to keep on experimenting. You are experimenting your SEO and site conversion,  are you not?

This tool is another example that it is not just about getting someone to your site, but are they paying attention and engaging on the site. This is the same as someone running in the brick and mortar store because of the shiny display, only to find it does not correlate to the products inside. That user will just turn right back around,, and head back into the next store in the mall. Or the person in the mall that’s just looking for a restroom, and in 10 seconds head to the restroom, does their business and turns around and heads back out. The person didn’t buy anything, and best case your store maybe made a slight impact on him. So the next time they are looking for something like what you have in the store will consider you, probably not. You fooled them once shame on them, but they don’t want to be fooled twice. but it wasn’t a true engagement.  What they are really looking for is not real engagements, and their lifetime value to the store or your website is absolutely minimal because you failed them the first time to match your SEO to your real site.

Analytics are tools that help you understand who your visitors are, and allow you to get a sense of how they perceive your website and what the value is to them.  While it does not ask the question directly, you can infer that if they are staying on the site for longer periods of time, they are often more engaged and more interested in what you have to offer. This indicates a good correlation to your SEO and SEM efforts. Unless of course they just got distracted by a phone call.

 

Are You Looking at Your Website from a Cusomers Perspective?

What you’re looking for someone who’s looking for what your store is generically offering comes in to see if you have what they are specifically looking for work. You can convert them to being a true engagement while they’re there.

That’s why retailers count how many people are coming in and how many people are coming out there also counting how many of them are actually purchasing. I have worked with over 100 different retail chains from single retailers to Office Big box stores. They are counting by the month, day of the week, hour of the day (I know, I installed the counters that go back to the corporate databases). They are counting how many of customers are actually signing up for the e-mail list. They’re counting how many of purchasers are return customers from previous orders. There also counting what is the average amount of each visitor’s spending. Retail stores count the numbers in so many ways you would be amazed. Just like you need to on your website. Your website is not a black box. You need to be paying attention to what’s happening.

If these types of customer engagement don’t make absolute clear sense to you, then I would suggest you go and spend some time and with brick and mortar retailers. Consider even working as a retailer. Learn how retailers convert the looky loo’s into true engagements. Yes we have all been shopping, but look at how retailers work with other customers not just yourself. Learn how retailers try to customize to the needs of each person, not a one size fits all. It is important that you learn how to look through a store or website through the eyes of a customer. It is important that you understand that the customer is always right in their perspective, and how they are looking at the world. And if you don’t understand their perspective, it will be very hard to understand why they’re not buying from you. If that same attitude of understanding is what a potential customer or visitor is looking at when they see a store and their perspective also becomes very useful.

This attitude of looking at your website and how you design your SEO and SEM. Did you need to present the right kind of signage from the street to get the customer to pull into the parking lot? Once they get inside the store, they need to see what the sign promised is fulfilled. SEO and SEM is about creating it signage from the street. You can fake a man once or twice but once you do, they will ignore your sign for the rest of their life, because you made them cut across left-hand lane and pull into your parking lot. And they will tell their friends to ignore you or worse. You need to create a good ‘sign’ in your SEO/SEM to attract your visitors into your store. But you also need the sign to be a good indicator of what is in the store.

Just as stores don’t (at least those that survive long term) have the same layout year after year, websites also must evolve and continue to improve based on what works and what does not. This should be done as measured experiments. You can follow the models used in Lean Start-up (Eric Ries) and E-Myth (Micheal Gerber).  Those experiments need tools like Google Analytics and other tools like ChartBeat. Topics of other blog posts.

Oh, not selling products on your site?  I would place heavy odds on your sellling ideas – be they the idea that your service is better then someone elses, or your idea is more important then the next bloggers. Remember to look at the website through your visitors eyes in the path they took to get to your items.

 

New World order – customer perspective 1st, Company perspective 2nd

Who do you think the business is behind this site?

Check out this website and their whole approach to marketing. Let me know how long it is before you figure out who’s actually the big company behind the totally different approach to marketing.

Here is what stands out in looking at this as an effective marketing tool:

• it is fun and colorful
• it has movement – both in the rotating graphics as well as in the variable typefaces being used.
• It is inviting,  both from its graphics and it’s ability to share with others, and the ability to easily find information
• it states what it can do for me in a non-sales format way before I ever can get to the point of finding out what I can buy from them.
• It focuses on community and how we can interact locally, rather than with a big mega Corporation.
• It’s quick, concise, clear, and the messaging text is easy to figure out what it’s about, then get on,  get off, and move on to my next task at hand.
• the navigation is easy to follow. While I usually don’t like the drop downs and chase the cursor type websites, this one is easy, because the targeted areas are large,  and easy to click on, with a single layer drop-down.

I think the key here is that they are starting from a customer perspective, rather than from a corporate perspective, which is very key for any business these days, especially in working with the younger generation.

https://www.nextdoorchi.com/

This site may or may not be the best for search engine optimization. Although it really is not clear exactly what terms they would be trying to optimize for anyways. They do rank at the top for “next door Chicago”. Which if that is their brand focus here, it is a good approach. But I imagine in the list of site objectives, SEO was lower on the list, and they are more successful in other site objectives.

I would love to have your perspectives on this.

Should I Upgrade to the New Version of WordPress? Testing Plans for Success

As I wrote about yesterday, One of my projects is helping out a small non-profit with online presence and social marketing. Their simple site is in WordPress, so when WordPress.org let them know that a new version was out. Of course, they recommended upgrading just days after the release. So the executive director asked the natural question: Should we upgrade our site to the new version? Seems logical, newer is better, right?

Well not so fast.

WordPress 3.3 was release 4 days ago. My short answer was not now. It is probably best to add this to the list of todo’s for next year. But I was not in a short answer mood. A big part of the issue was risk management, and the software layers involved like the layers on a wedding cake.

In one of my former lives, I was an event photographer. I always vowed (pun intended) to not do weddings. The reason – the expectations are unreal.

A similar situation exists with a ‘simple’ WordPress website and its’ many layers of software that are used to let someone see our site. Tomorrow I will run down the different layers, but for now, here are the reasons that most jump out to not upgrade.

Now don’t get me wrong, I feel WordPress is a great tool for most websites (since most websites are simple in objective and construction). Those that is is not (more complicated) the conversation becomes far more nuanced.  And I recommend WordPress as the 1st consideration for a site. Even if it does not belong on WordPress, it becomes a great prototyping tool and scrum development platform for at least a place to converse with key stakeholders about how to meet the site’s goals.

Recently I was asked ‘should we upgrade to the latest version of WordPress?’ So my reactions were:

• New releases are best tested by others. Unless they are fixing a core issue that is not working today. I am so appreciative of the thousands in the Internet and in the WordPress community that will find all the other ways a new release does not work on all configurations all the time. They will share with all the different layers and get those problems fixed. Hopefully before we upgrade.
• This release does not really improve our world today. This new release does not really change the limitations of the template, it may make new templates easier to build or old templates easier to improve, but it will not ‘fix’ the limitation of the existing template. So this is another reason not to upgrade right away. Tomorrow I will go over all the different layers and what risk I estimate they add to such an upgrade, but here are a couple of highlights:
  • Whenever changing software and its many layers, it is important to have a testing plan and program. We have not had the time to develop that, and it should be done before we upgrade releases.
  • Add all the risk up (sorry the risk is cumulative), and the potential risk to upgrade is around 1 in 18 upgrades will have some challenge. This is where a testing and roll-back plan (the ability to undo the changes in case they make it worse then the ‘upgrade’) come into play.
• There is no testing plan in place yet. A testing plan minimizes these risks by being able to duplicate the above issues as close as possible, and determine if in our specific circumstances, if there is a problem. For usually very few dollars, a test bed can be set up (usually less then $50 per year). Costs usually include:
  • ‘testing domain’  – $10 per year
  • setting up a 2nd domain/website – $10
  • Reinstalling WordPress, plugins and all the other layers listed above. The key is they need to be all the same version and configuration except the one change/upgrade (in this case new version of WordPress).
  • Possibly some testing software (although there are many low volume free versions) to thoroughly test a site, and some monitoring software to see how the ‘new’ version works.
  • This does not include the extra time on various peoples part to:
    • Define a testing plan.
    • Set up the testing platform.
  • But, once a process is defined, it will be much easier for all future upgrades, and far less stress before, during, and after (if there is a problem, there is a test bed to go see what is happening, and how to troubleshoot it, especially if the site is not fully down, but only ‘damaged’.)
  • This of course assumes a low volume, simple site. Issues, and solutions scale up as the sites objectives and complexity scale up. However, these fundamentals still apply, we have to add other considerations.
• Other questions to consider:
  • Has the hosting company added the new release to its auto install packs?
  • Have they tested the new release on their servers (at least on one of them, they should all be the same, but as you can see from above there are a lot of areas where variations can be introduced)?
  • Has the theme tested itself on the new release?  Their site or page should list comparability with the current release.
  • Have all the plug-ins (or add-ons) been tested as compatible with the new release? According to the page http://www.projectrace.com/wp-admin/update-core.php it has not yet be tested.
  • These three ‘pre-tests’ will be very helpful in determine when to start considering when we should install the new release. Relatively speaking this is not a major release and does not seem to add much.

Sorry for giving a long answer to a short question, I got on a roll and wanted to map it out to share with others. Even if you don’t set up the testing platform, just thinking through the issues and steps to test them will improve your ability to resolve issues once they do occur. Not if, but when. So this exercise in risk management has value in many different ways. And yes it is a pain in the productivity to getting it all out.

What are your thoughts on WordPress 3.3 and upgrading software?

Which Headset Should I Use with Dragon Naturally Speaking?

Nuance seems to always be discounting Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) in November each year, probably in advance of the latest version coming out in December or right after the 1st of the year. Therefore many clients consider improving their ability to create documents and all the other promises of voice recognition.

The headset that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking is known to be crap by Nuance and others. Technically there are 2 chips used in most wired USB headsets (using the builtin connectors is a strain on the PC, although the newer computers may be able to handle it). The cost to manufacture is about 3-5 cents difference, so you can not tell by price which model is using which, and even a single brand line (such as logitech) will use both. But at $20-50 you can almost by 2 or 3, and return the ones that don’t work well.

I could not tell you why Nuance, the latest owner of DNS chooses to set so many potential customers with bad equipment that will hate voice recognition for years to come, and especially DNS, but they do. Perhaps they really do want to work only with resellers that know the dirty secret, or they want to keep expectations low for another 5-10 years. But the strategy sure seems counter intuitive.

Regardless, now that DNS is so relatively inexpensive, and decent headsets are as well, consider finishing the tool kit and purchase a decent USB or bluetooth headset before installing Dragon Naturally Speaking.

There are some inherent limitations to bluetooth, but they still work well. I researched which was best, and in talking to the engineer who actually worked on the Drgaon Naturally Speaking (DNS) recommended (even though he does not sell it) the Parrot VXi Xpressway last year when I bought mine.

DNS will create a different profile for each headset (since they are sound ‘different’ to the software), so switching does have the challenge of making a vs. b vs. c comparison a little more challenging (but better then training with mic x and then testing with mic y).

Hope this technical interlude helps.

Computer Challenge – How to Create a Bootable Disk?

From Oren S./M/Newington,CT)
Whats the best way to create a bootable disk?

It depends on version of OS that you want to create the bootable disk.  UBCD from Download.com (a CBS (the TV conglomerate) site of shareware programs that are pre-checked for virus’ and malware) is a good tool. UBCD (short for Ultimate Boot CD/Compact Disc) is a program that allows you to create and load a few programs to create a bootable CD.

• Start Menu|Run|CMD|Format a:/sys if you still have a 3.5 diskette.
  

There are other tools built into MS Vista and I believe MS Win7, but I am not as familiar with them. You can also use UBCD to create a bootable thumbdrive or flash drive if you can have your PC boot from USB port. Otherwise the install disks that may have come with your PC as operating system may work to be able to boot directly from a CD.

Marketing Insights based on Data of 3,700 Businesses from HubSpot

There are so many opinions these days in the world of online marketing about what ‘works’ and what does not. It is always refreshing to see actual data rather then opinion based on hunches and single experiences.

Hubspot has built a reputation by building a community where businesses can share their opinions of what works. In exchange, Hubspot started collecting real stories of what is happening with businesses. That has allowed them to build some tools. Those tools have gotten respect by marketers that have been around long enough to tell the difference between ‘wantabe’s’ and the real deal. Hubspot is not done building, but then neither is the Internet. So while I continue to check out their tools (and recommend you do the same), they have a gift for us. They have shared some of their insights from over 3,700 business customers. They created a slidedeck of those insights and are sharing them here: http://www.hubspot.com/charts

This slidedeck has great statistics from 2010 about marketing and social media for both B2B (business selling to Business)  and B2C (business selling to consumer) companies. While often focused for smaller companies,  I found slides 117-120 particularly interesting as it shows how stock performance related to customer response speed is real interesting. Hint faster response=more money for stock holders of Fortune 100 companies.

Some other observations from the slides:

• It is interesting to see how video is shifting our online conversation. Many more people will share a link to a video than just a photo. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but moving pictures are worth more (plus there is audio). Want to get more sharing of your site? Post interesting video on your blog, website, Facebook Fan Page. (Slide 9)
• Comments are easier for photos then video. I wonder how much of that is the number of sites that allow comments without logging in for photo’s compared to video (especially when directly linking to a YouTube.com or similar tool). Of course videos may just speak for themselves and not need more editorializing. (slides 9-10)
• Having a clear voice and adding your insights gets more views as we continue to have more choices of content to read/consume. ( slides 11-18)
• Readability is important. Don’t write at a college level – The Wall Street Journal does not, for a good reason (Juicy’s Interpreting the Results) (slide 20)
• Giving something of value (webinar, whitepaper, download, chapter, tools, report) increases conversion (slides 30-34)
• Your conversion rate on forms drops after 3 fields. Sorry, our desire for information scares away customers and relationships. Start with a little information and share some value. ( slide 35)

More insights from this treasure trove of information to come.

Hubspots’ full webinar is at http://www.hubspot.com/the-science-of-blogging/

The download PDF and PPT are accessible at http://www.hubspot.com/charts

Mashables’ 5 Essential Small Business Tools

The cost to start up a business these days is lower then ever. As the needs for technology and communication sophistication keep increasing, the cost for these tools keeps dropping, at least to get started and prove your concept. Voice phone calls and voice mail is free (once you pay for Internet access) with Google Voice and many other solutions. Video conferencing is free with a little technical know how using Skype and other services. The list goes on (I keep trying to keep an updated list, but the best in breed and abilities change so frequently).

One of the ways of determining some of the best of breed is to look at the many (many, many) end of year “best of” lists. These often consolidate and update the author’s finds from throughout the year.

Here are some cool types of tools for businesses looking for low cost (free on up) solutions to business communication and learning challenges. Cloud solutions are going mainstream. Even the GSA (goverment Services Administration)  is using the cloud (they choose Google Apps and will save 50% of email costs in 5 years).

From the Mashable site http://insr.us/SeoDamian5Essential

Comment on what are your favorite tools that you could not live without, and what tools have you discovered this past year that you are keeping in your tool box for 2011

More Thoughts on How Thanksgiving is like Search Engine Marketing

I saw an interesting blog post (http://www.seonoobie.com/2010/11/how-search-engine-marketing-is-much-like-thanksgiving-dinner/) in one of my LinkedIn groups on How Thanksgiving is like Search Engine Marketing.

Here are a few of my additions to look at:
Remember that different people refer to the same food in different ways. Yams/sweet potatoes… The guest is correct, even if you have to translate to the chef to smooth out the egos. In Search Engine Marketing, the customers keywords are the correct keywords, even if you have to coach the CMO.

Sometimes the guests/family prefer the lesser ingredients (canned cranberries over fresh cranberries), salty canned gravy over homemade. Listen and understand, your objective is to make a happy celebration for all the guests at the table. The less precise keyword or more generic keyword that customers click on are the correct keywords. Seborrheic dermatitis may be the correct term, but far more people are searching for Dandruff shampoo.

While the dinner is very important, the whole day is a celebration – conversation, flag football outside, the game(s) on TV, waiting for Sue to get off work or drive from Milwaukee all are important factors. Dinner may be the centerpiece of the day, but not the only consideration. With SEM, understand that customers determine when the best time to close a sale are and ask questions, not your staffs desires.

Mistakes happen, the pie is burnt, the dip gets spilled, dad forgot the …. – it happens, so determine if a substitute is needed and adapt. If you need a simple dip rather then the wonderful family favorite 7 layer, because that is all that is left at the Jewel closing in 5 minutes, adapt. If you need some FAQ’s that are not the best written, to keep visitors from buying at the next site for cyberMonday, then do the best you can and deal with it (let the call center know that these may not be the best and to expect more).

Of course all of the similarities are based on the fact that both Search engine marketing and Thanksgiving are for people that have different desires and needs. Those people want to be treated special and with respect. If you are the host, you need to adapt to the needs of your guests, or brother George may be going to his in-laws next year rather then your dinner table, even if he gets divorced.