startup hustle

Startup Weekend has opened the voting for the next cities that could hold the event. There are over 20 cities currently on the ballot with the majority in the North America and a few in Europe.

Startup Weekend gives you 54 hours to build a company. The company is equally divided by the founders. Startup Weekend was created by Andrew Hyde and has already held 13 weekends in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Check out the Boston Startup Weekend Blog and the Boulder Startup Weekend Blog to get a better idea of all that goes into the a “traditional” Startup Weekend.

Launching a new landing page is exciting. You spend weeks working and tweaking a landing page for public launch with hopes it will sell your product or service. After launch you are reviewing Google Analytics and CrazyEgg several times a day and keeping track of sales.

How do you gauge if a landing page is really working?

There are two web page analytic rates that you need to pay particular attention to, bounce rate and exit rate. The first thing we need to do is understand the difference between the two.

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The percentage is actually 88.5% but 90% is more intimidating in the headline. You should only be worried if you are selling a product that has poor a pay per click (PPC) record. Then again if you are selling a product that does poorly in PPC you better sell it through a different marketing medium.

When I first read about the high percentage of internet searchers that don’t use PPC I was a little concerned. The majority of startups I work with either use or have tried paid search. Most of the time it works well and I have never entered a market that didn’t receive some activity.

The major assumption from this report is most searchers use the organic listings. Thus putting more emphasis on search engine optimization tactics. Which is much more difficult and takes time.

Here you can find the Search Fact Pack 2007 from Ad Age.

In October of 2006 I joined a startup as a marketing manager, which means I was the marketing department. My only post college experience was as a marketing/product strategist for a year. I came into the startup with no knowledge of SEO or paid search, but I was responsible for both. About 2 weeks before starting I was handed Aaron Wall’s SEOBook and started my SEO education. With the help of an outsourced SEO consultant already being used by the startup, I had become versed in the meta text, keyword research and link building techniques.

The problem I have now is I’m the average SEO guy.

I want need to get to the next level of SEO. I now manage the SEO tasks for multiple sites and have the chance to test and experiment different SEO tactics (which I believe is essential). I try to read as much as I can but only find a few select authors actually provide a view behind the curtain of advanced SEO tactics. I believe, as with any industry, those that find a competitive advantage are not going to announce it on a blog or forum.

So how do I reach the next level of SEO?

I figured I would continue to test my own theories as well as those I read about from the “experts”. Then I begin to wonder if the real SEO experts are really spending their time blogging at all. SEO bloggers often keep the sites they work on secret so you can’t dissect the links and keywords they use. The only site you can judge SEO experts on is their blog.

So where does this leave me? That’s a good question.

After a discussion I had with some colleagues this evening, I was blown away with the lack of understanding of why websites are more popular/make more money/receive attention (buzz) than others. This discussion usual revolves around free sites and premium (paid) sites. Let me explain my understanding between free and premium sites (other than the obvious).

A free site allows you to reach a solution without paying for it. LinkedIn.com allows me to network with colleagues without paying. Even though they have services that require payment, I don’t need it to perform the main service of the site, networking. This is why I deem LinkedIn a free site. And then you have the super obvious example, Facebook.

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If you haven’t noticed already, Google has begin the first quarter PageRank update. Startup Hustle has seen some movement in individual post but not on the homepage. A few of the sites I work with have seen increases.

Although many deem PageRank unimportant I still contend that it is one way to tell how relevant Google deems your site.

Scott Shane wrote a guest blog article on Guy Kawasaki’s Blog about the Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship. It was a great list. I’m only going to quote the myths I found most interesting. Visit the article to read all ten.

2. Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower.

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I love researching new domain names. My first website was a forum for pay-per-click marketing. When I found the domain PerClickForums.com as an unregistered domain, I thought I was a genius. I sold the site and the new owners drove it into the ground (wish I still had the domain though). Later I came up with StartupHustle.com. What startup doesn’t hustle a little at the beginning?

When looking for a new domain you have to research to see if that great domain you just thought of is available. You might not buy a particular domain that moment as you are checking the availability of multiple names. Hopefully you weren’t doing any domain research at NetworkSolutions.com recently. There are rumors is evidence that Network Solutions is registering domains that individuals are checking the availability of, and selling them at a higher price. I wouldn’t even be able to describe my anger if that had happened to me.

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Guerrilla marketing is one of the more creative outlets that startups can use to get noticed. One of my business partners, Gabe Shultz of Bored Sketchbooks fame, came up with a great guerrilla marketing idea that involves using his companies lost and found (and I’m suppose to be the marketing mind between the two of us).

When an item is found that is deemed lost, that item is returned to the receptionist. The receptionist will take a picture of the item and email everyone in the company looking for the owner. If you turn in an item with a large URL printed the front of it, you can get that URL in front of many eyeballs, depending on the size of the email list of course. The picture above is from the actually email sent out.

I know what you are already thinking, but my company (or most companies) don’t take pictures of lost and found items. A more typical response is to send a text email letting everyone know an item has been found. If the most recognizable characteristic of that item is a URL (as the example in the picture above), how will the receptionist report it? Most likely by including the URL in the body of the email, which is even better than the picture because it will be easier to put in a browser.

Now that is guerrilla marketing.