startup hustle

By “when” I mean down to the hour of the day. It can make a big difference considering the two largest population regions in America are separated by 3 hours. You also have to consider the day of the week.

Posting a great, compelling (linkbait?) article is most often the best way to drive traffic to your site using social news. You put in all the hard work of an eye catching title, detailed and researched articles, and then comes the traffic. You submit your article and nothing happens. It slips quickly through the newly submitted postings and in 15 minutes the hope has died. Then you question your article (which you should). Was the title wrong? Was the article too long? One often overlooked question is…..

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Startup Hustle has added the BlogRush widget. There has been a ton of buzz about the widget with early reports giving it less than stellar results, but we are interested regardless. This is how BlogRush works:

“By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.

BlogRush users earn “syndication credits” (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. Users can automatically refer others to BlogRush via special links on the widget, as well as through the promotion of a special referral URL they are given.

BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication Network” that rewards its users for their contributions to the network — from the impressions they provide of the BlogRush Widget to the referral of other users through 10 ‘generations’ of activity and the impressions of the widget that they provide. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content (onto related content blogs) that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.”

If we see any significant results the readers will be notified so they can too take advantage. If BlogRush sucks it will disappear as quickly as it appear.

Many startups are located outside Silicon Valley (Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle) and have trouble getting press. The majority of the startup media is located in the Valley and likes to talk about…..the Valley. A growing startup needs all the press and mentions they can get, so take advantage of your “exotic” location by submitting your venture to Outside the Valley.

Outside the Valley is a blog that scores startups to determine the success without the help of the Silicon network. Here are the categories a startup will be scored by:

Outside the Valley Score
Location: City, ST = 3
Founders: Experienced = 1
Technology:Some new technology = 1
Funding: Principals and a few private investors = 2

Total Score – 7.0 Definitely outside the valley……

While not scientific, the whole concept is quite interesting. Connections to Silicon Valley as a negative while everyone is trying to establish themselves with the Valley media. My metaphoric hat is off to you Outside the Valley.

As new screen shots of Microsofts up coming analytics software named Gatineau are being released, we are still anxiously awaiting an invite to the beta. Reports from around the blogosphere are the beta should launch sometime this week.

Startup Hustle is looking forward to a competitor to Google Analytics. The more data points you can use in your analytics research the better. Plus we want to see if Microsoft can provide a better challenge with Gatineau that it did with adCenter.

If you are interested in being part of the Gatineau beta, sign up here.

I know, I know…..who would do that? Apparently it is a growing problem that can be an expensive mistake.

It happens (most commonly) when you copy a keyword list from Excel or even Word and grad the header of the list called…..’Keywords’.

If you search the term ‘Keywords’ in Yahoo you will notice a few companies that have nothing to do with the term ‘Keywords’ and made a mistake.

It can be small but expensive mistake. Make sure you run through your keywords before you publish them live. Thanks to Bill Hartzer for noticing this PPC mistake.

The other day I got a call from the CEO and Founder of a company I work for asking why his main keywords, which are usually in positions 2-4, were either at the bottom of the first page or not on the page at all. As I run through the possible reasons in my head, I jump over to Adwords to see where Google says the keywords are positioned. Adwords says the keywords are in positions…..2 to 4, exactly where they should be.

So….Google tells me the keywords are exactly where I want them, but the keywords are showing much lower in the search results, which is what the CEO is looking at.

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