startups + marketing + nonsense
Archive of published articles on April, 2008
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Google has updated PageRank over the last few days. I have seen increases on all the sites I work, including Startup Hustle which went from PR2 to PR3.
Remember that Toolbar PageRank is a dated version and Google does not disclose your current PageRank. The green bar you see is a few months behind. PageRank is not very important anymore when it comes to rankings but is fun to see the shifts.
Sun is holding Startup Camp – San Francisco, May 4th and 5th. I got an invite but will be unable to attend due to other startup commitments. Startup Camp is the “un-conference” networking event to learn from some of the most experienced entrepreneurs today. Since this Startup Camp is being held so close to Silicon Valley, you can expect a few of the Valley’s heavy hitters to attend. A few noticeable names include:
There are currently over 900 registered attendees, the majority being entrepreneurs looking to pick up a few tips. If you are in the San Fran area early next week you should really try to make an appearance. Startup Camp is being held at the Moscone Convention Center.
After I wrote about my frustration with Alexa, they did a major algorithm change that rendered my post less relevant. The rant was about Alexa’s lack of calculating major traffic shifts with a couple of sites I work on. Compete on the other hand did recognize the traffic increases.
Alexa made major updates to the way they calculate rankings by including more data then just the toolbar. While many sites were complaining about ranks dropping, Startup Hustle jumped almost 100,000 positions from 271,000 to 178,000. Two other sites that I spend a majority of my time marketing saw increases as well.
While I keep a record of all major competitors and their rankings, the only rank I really question was yCombinator.com. The home of YC News only has an Alexa ranking of 77,000, which seems rather low considering their rank before the algorithm change and Compete numbers.
Depending on your city and the connectivity, it can be difficult to meet with local entrepreneurs and startups. Andrew Hyde and Raymond Angel who have brought you Startup Weekend and VCWear are helping local startups connect on a social level.
Startup Drinks was created to (from the site):
A simple concept: startup culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other.
They currently have had groups in Seattle, Boulder, Fort Wayne and Austin. Startup Drinks also sets up a page for each city. Here is the Seattle Startup Drinks page. Contact Startup Drinks to have your city added to the site.
I often kept track of my competitors traffic movements using Alexa. When I started my internet marketing career, Alexa was the king of web traffic tracking. Then Compete came along, but I stayed with Alexa as that was the most used and excepted metric for web traffic.
As I was updating my weekly web traffic numbers (Alexa is weekly, Complete is monthly), I noticed some concerning issues. My rank in Alexa had been dropping for months, just a little each week. Since my traffic for the most part has been steady, I wasn’t super concerned. In the past few weeks my traffic has been great, actually breaking new records. Unfortunately my Alexa continued to drop, in roughly the same increments every week. Regardless if my traffic was steady or improving dramatically, Alexa did not seem to notice. If I can gain traffic and customers, while Alexa shows no change, are my competitors making swift movements unnoticed? Alexa is a ranking, not a solid metric like visits. A ranking is affected by many more variables than are in your control. It is best to compare yourself to others in your companies industry.
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Startup Hustle has been added to the Alltop Startup section. There are a ton of great resources in the Alltop Startup area including Hacker News (ycombinator), techCrunch, Startup Weekend and Valleywag (ha). I have added a link to Alltop on the sidebar so you will be able to check out all the startup blogs after you read Startup Hustle 
.
Last week I calculated the return on investment (ROI) of a large CPC campaign over multiple engines for a startup I am currently working on. I realized that I dont check the ROI often enough, and none of my colleagues at other startups seem to either. When your startup is profitable and you have been using the same marketing mediums over a course of half a year, you might get a little “lazy” on optimizing your marketing through ROI.
I work on multiple startups and with many internet marketers that handle the daily tasks at these young companies. As I learn new tactics and methods I try to pass them on. Unfortunately, the common tasks that should be completed on more of a monthly or quarterly basis slip through the cracks.
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Rand wrote a good post over at SEOmoz about startups lack of using (or understanding) SEO. I saw a list of blog post that provided startup marketing advice and I was hoping to see a post from Startup Hustle (because I wanted a link from Rand), but I do talk about SEO so I did not meet the requirement. Rands overall point was that SEO is basically free and a little keyword research goes a long way.
Let me just be clear on this point – not one of those posts has the word “SEO” in it, nor makes any clear reference to getting traffic from search engines. I’m forced to ask myself – are these people idiots? Are they being coy? Or have they really never experienced the built-in marketing channel that comes from ranking at the top of the engines for a relevant keyword phrase?
