startup hustle

Four of the largest blog networks in the startup industry have come together to form the Crunchies. TechCrunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat have created a community nominated competition for startups.

It is hard to get your startup in these blogs, winning their award will give you a significant boost in not only PR, but in customers. Stay tuned as more information becomes available.

Keyword research can be tedious and time consuming but extremely important. You know all the traditional (free) keyword tools:

• Keyword Discovery (one of my favorite)
• Wordtracker
• Adwords External Keyword Tool

While I would like to argue that you have better things to do when launching a startup, keyword research is critical. The following tools represent keyword information in a more appealing way and will help expand your search for new keywords.

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I spent the last week going through a site that has been up for over a year. I went through the site as the customer. What I found was scary:

• Product confusion.
• Poor Search results.
• Differing messages to members.

The great part about working with a startup is being able to make changes and shift strategies quickly. The bad part of working with a startup is being able to make changes and shift strategies quickly. Every startup I have worked with does bug testing before a release. The problem is adding new features or lines of business to a site can have a snowball effect beyond bugs. In the consulting industry it is called the “customer journey”.

When was the last time you experienced your site from the users perspective?

The more you add to a site the more disjointed it can become. If you have ONE action your site performs, it is hard to mess it up. If you provide multiple actions, and involves a user base that needs to join, it can get crazy.

With all of the options on the internet, and the ease to copy websites, you can’t afford to provide a poor experience. Think of Friendster losing ground to MySpace and Facebook. On the other hand, if you find a site with a good idea and poor execution, well…you know what to do.