startup hustle

rssHugger.com is a new site that brings bloggers and readers together with “a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader.”

What is impressive is the link building strategy rssHugger implements, and how well it is working. To add your blog for free to rssHugger, all you have to do is blog about the site (like so). With hundreds of blogs on the system, the number of backlinks are growing like weeds.

The person behind rssHugger is Collin LaHay who has a fantastic internet marketing blog at MixedMarketArts.com.

Have you started your 2008 Marketing Plan yet? If you are lucky enough to actually have a marketing budget, you need to plan where to spend it. Most startups do not bother with such nonsense, there are more important tasks to complete. It is nice to have an established (working) plan so you can see the differences as the year progresses. Where should you spend that marketing money?

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Microsoft has launched a Webmaster Tools program to match Google’s Webmaster Tools. While it is not as feature heavy as Googles tool, it is a start and better than Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Adding your site and verification is simple as adding a meta tag to your header.

Microsoft does not provide a great deal of information. Microsoft does provide a domain rank between 1 and 5. They also provide the top outgoing links and top incoming links. Thats about it. The one down side is Microsoft does not update (spider) your site immediately. It has been 2 days and my site has not been updated in the Webmaster Tool.

Microsoft offers a forum and blog to supplement the Webmaster Tools.

TheFunded.com has been a big deal in the startup world. It allows entrepreneurs to write about their experiences meeting with venture capitalist while staying anonymous. TheFunded.com has become such a big deal because no one knew who was behind it. That and most of the reviews were negative, aggravating named VCs. The suspense even reached outside the blogosphere with magazines such as Inc. wondering “Who’s behind TheFunded.com?“.

Last night at an event at Stanford, Aedo Ressi announced he is the founder of TheFunded.com. This is a classic PR mystery move, I couldn’t but see it as a linkbait move as well. Ressi’s site received as much publicity for its unknown founder as it did for its function, reviewing venture firms. Since the story of who ran TheFunded.com has quieted down in past months, Ressi comes out and sets the startup/tech blogs pumping out articles again (like so).

While we see traditional linkbait as writing an article that grabs ones attention (usually in a negative way), Ressi just kept quiet. In the current internet marketing environment, the tactic was brilliant. Ressi didn’t write a scathing article attacking a VC to grab the attention of the Valley, he simply opened a platform that allowed any entrepreneur to do it. At the same time hiding from , instead of bathing in, the publicity that made it even more intriguing.

Thus turning in old PR tactic into a new linkbait tactic. Well Done Mr Ressi.

While I was in Ohio on business I was searching keywords in Google as I was explaining the purpose of Adwords GeoTargeting. Of course it was the perfect time for GeoTargeting to not target per my geo(graphy).

I had recently launched an Adwords campaign targeting New York (the state) in a rather competitive market, lets call it real estate. I was bidding on a term like “New York Real Estate”, and expected no one outside of the tri-state area (lets be real with the Geo part) to see the ad. I had no intention of seeing my ad come up while in Ohio, boy was I wrong.

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If not, you better register your Facebook Page.

The Facebook Pages for businesses are like domain names. I’m not positive how Facebook will police members that make pages for popular companies or products, but you should at least register your names and products before anyone else can. The best part, it is free.

Once you set up the page, you will have easy access to all of Facebook’s new ad platform options.

Post your Facebook Pages in the comments and I will put the best entries into a post.

Adwords has provided some great news for startups looking to expand their CPC spend.

Many businesses pick the low hanging fruit in CPC and soon need to find new avenues to expand. I have tested the site-targeted option in Adwords with poor results. A site-targeted campaign (now called Placement-Targeted) is used to place an ad on a website in the adsense box and was based on a CPM model. For those of you who have not used it, CPM is a payment model based on impressions. You would pay $X.XX per 1,000 impressions. If you target sites with large traffic flow, the impressions and cost could add up quickly.

With the new Adwords CPC model for site placement, you only have to pay to get real traffic. I am still running tests to gauge if the cost per click is comparable to normal search ads. I will add an updated post with results compared to normal Google search ads.

Earlier this week Facebook announced a set of new advertising options for businesses. With many big corporations already signed up, are these new advertising platforms beneficial for startup companies? The first thing you have to consider is your target market. If you believe that you have an audience on Facebook, please continue reading.

The one product any business can use is the Facebook Pages. It is the equivalent of a facebook profile page for your business. Facebook is now a social network for businesses (convenient since it was already happening).

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Aaron Wall of SEOBook has compiled a horizontal hierarchical map of all the tools you need for internet marketing, or as Aaron calls it, “Internet Marketing Made Easy“.

The more I look at the map it looks like a set of tools to launch a site….all you need is an idea.