startup hustle

And this is coming from a startup marketing manager. I have worked on quite a few startup products through the years and I keep witnessing the same trend. The startups that actually solve an issue or provide a unique service, don’t really need my help. I might give the initial push, but the product itself creates the snowball effect.

I’m not suggesting you get rid of your marketing guy completely. You will need someone to schedule all the interview appointments with the media.

The hardest part is getting your product to those few outlets that will start the avalanche.

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What would you do if your site was stolen and held for ransom? David Airey had built a blog, and more importantly a brand with his website that was also instrumental to his consulting business. Due to a security flaw in Gmail David’s domain name, DavidAirey.com was stolen, and with it all the link and site equity that he had built over the years.

David quickly restructured his blog at davidairey.co.uk, while it is positive, is still lost with all links pointing to the original domain. The original domain is on the first page of Google for the term logo designer (lets try to get the new site there) which is a major achievement. The story quickly flooded the blogosphere and was even picked up by the New York Times.

This story does has a happy ending as Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy) saw the story and helped return davidairey.com back to David (currently being forwarded to davidairey.co.uk).

This is an important alert that you need to back up all your files and databases as well as dont use free email accounts to conduct business.

StumbleUpon (SU) is an addictive web application that I can’t stop using. The idea is you add a tool bar on your internet browser that has a button. That one button will keep you occupied for hours. Every time you click the “Stumble!” button, it sends you to a new website. You vote (with the toolbar) if that site is interesting or not. As sites get more positive votes, the more they appear in the stumble process and traffic that site receives. You can set your interests so that you can Stumble sites that have been tagged with your tastes.

StumbleUpon has never had any real competition. Then a new site call Streakr was brought to my attention and was said to be as additive as SU. I downloaded the Streakr tool bar and went into the zone. Streakr allows you to pick which categories you dislike as well as picking your interest. The best part about Streakr is they are more transparent than SU. When you give a site a positive vote, you get forwarded to Streakr and can see the number of positive and negative votes that a page has received. SU does not show you those type of stats.

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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 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 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.

Startup Hustle has added the BlogRush widget. There has been a ton of buzz about the widget with early reports giving it less than stellar results, but we are interested regardless. This is how BlogRush works:

“By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.

BlogRush users earn “syndication credits” (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. Users can automatically refer others to BlogRush via special links on the widget, as well as through the promotion of a special referral URL they are given.

BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication Network” that rewards its users for their contributions to the network — from the impressions they provide of the BlogRush Widget to the referral of other users through 10 ‘generations’ of activity and the impressions of the widget that they provide. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content (onto related content blogs) that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.”

If we see any significant results the readers will be notified so they can too take advantage. If BlogRush sucks it will disappear as quickly as it appear.