startup hustle

If you have tried to join the beta for Microsoft’s new Gatineau Analytics Tool without any luck, I have good news. The new beta round is starting, the only catch is you have to be an advertiser with adCenter, the Microsoft version of Google Adwords.

This might be a small obstacle if you currently do not use paid search for your startup, in which you might want to wait for the public release. Here are a few words from the adCenter blog:

“With the Gatineau beta, you can learn more about where your visitors come from and easily measure your marketing campaigns across any medium and from any traffic source.

Features include:

• Click and visitor tracking reports
• Marketing campaign reporting and conversion tracking
• Unique demographic and geographic information from your site visitors

Of course, Project Gatineau is a beta service so we are still adding features and working hard to improve.”

Visit the Gatineau page to sign-up for the new beta.

You just launched a new site for your startup and you are ready for the traffic to flow. Lets not fight the obvious, being indexed by Google (and to a lesser extent Yahoo) is important for future traffic goals. The common rule of thumb is if a website is linking to your new startup site, the search engines will find it. To start, lets determine if your new site has been found.

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The Adwords crew missed the Google Webmaster Central Blog post about the new SiteLinks tool in Webmaster Tools.

Or they have a real love for the Mozilla FireFox Start Page.

StartupHustle doesn’t usually discuss the blogs we read. All sites under “Marketing Sites” and “Startup Sites” to the right are actual sites we use/read but we have found a new blog that we cant stop reading.

SEO Theory – SEO Theory and Anaylsis Blog

SEO Theory describes itself as “Search engine optimization theory focuses on algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques and related topics such as industry news.” The blog is written by Michael Martinez of 1st Query.

SEO Theory is not for beginners and every article has relevant information to continue your SEO education. The topics are thorough and well written. We have never dug so far into the archives of a blog

To get you started, we suggest you read “Site Search Optimization 2.0“.

This is a definite RSS feed you need.

The eastern European country of Montenegro is getting its own domain extension, and it has the chance to produce some fun domain names. Montenegro’s new domain is “.me“. If you have any entrepreneurial bones in your body the potential is filling your head. Examples:

• buy.me
• find.me
• hire.me
• pay.me
• text.me

The domains are are scheduled to be available for registration during the first quarter of 2008. Do remember, nothing replaces a “.com” domain but it is not essential for success. Just look at del.icio.us.

Have you thought of using banner ads in your marketing? Ad blindness (aka banner blindness) is becoming an increasing issue for advertisers. Think of Times Square (on the left), do you really get anything from all of those billboards, or do you just ignore them?

When marketing on the internet, banner ads are a common medium for sites that are trying to reach a target market. Ads are often in the same positions on the majority of sites. This makes it simple for people to ignore banner ads. Are banner ads worth the cost when ad blindness is an issue?

For example, you decide to post a banner ad on a Blog A. Of course the cost varies, most often on the traffic stats of the publishing site. You eagerly watch your analytics for the traffic and conversions. After a month the blog owner is ready to sign you up for the next month, but after looking at your stats you are hesitant. Were your expectations to high? Was Blog A the best site to advertise on?

I often evaluate the effectiveness of banner ads as if they are pay per click ads. I compare the cost per click of the ads (total clicks / month ad cost) as well as the number of conversions. The most common result is a banner ad that is competitive in the cost per click, often slightly higher, but low conversions. This draws the conclusion that ad blindness is not as prevalent as reports indicate.

Maybe banners ads are not a conversion generating advertising medium.

Did you ever think of banner ads as brand advertising? Your logo displayed on a market relevant blog could insinuate quality. The question I often ask is what do internet users perceive of the ads on a site. If you deem a site as quality, do you consider the sites that advertise to be quality as well? Are companies that advertise on Techcrunch better than companies that advertise on StartupSquad?

Banner Ads could be a “safe” version of text ads.

Now that Google is trying to reduce paid text links, banner ads might help get the PageRank pushed through to your site. Just make sure that you negotiate the removal of the nofollow tag.

There is not a defined answer of how well banner ads will work in your marketing mix. Like all aspects of internet marketing, testing is necessary. Let us know how banner ads have working for your site.

The group at SEOmoz are revamping their “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization”. If you have not taken the time to better understand how the search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) work, then it is time to start. The majority of you are working on internet startups or at the very least have a website for your B&R shop and the search engines control new customers picking you or a competitor. Rand has released the first two articles (I will continue to update this thread as new articles are released) :

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I just walked out of a meeting with a startup, fighting the continual battle of what priority does SEO have when put into the programming queue. This meeting worked in my favor because a month ago the SEO plan was deemed “low priority”. This week, as traffic numbers slump, SEO has been bumped to “high priority”.

The problem is SEO does not work overnight.

If the changes had been implemented a month ago we might not see the affects yet (even though it is an established site with high PR), but I’m positive rushing SEO at this point is not going to help. SEO work has to be planned well in advance. On-page SEO, from a programmers standpoint, sucks but it is not that time consuming. SEO needs to be implemented at least a few months in advance before you really see results. That time frame can shift depending on how established a site already is.

Regardless if you outsource SEO or have the in-house marketing team do it, is there enough emphasis on search engine optimization?

The online marketing community is buzzing about the new Google PageRank (PR) update and the number of sites that are dropping PR. If you are a seasoned internet marketer this update creates enough problems, but those new startups with fresh sites, you have a chance to stay clear of the new line Google has drawn.

The new PR update shows evidence that Google is trying to fight link buying. Selling and buying links is a popular way to increase your PR, especially if you are a new startup that needs love from Google. The link buying process will become even more covert now that Google is penalizing sites that are buying and selling links.

Be very careful with buying and selling links as you launch your new startups site.

The last thing a startup needs is to fight a Google penalty out of the gates. As Google is turning link buying into a black hat SEO act, it would be best for young entrepreneurs to stick with white hat SEO techniques till the dust settles.