startups + marketing + nonsense
Archive of articles classified as' "Internet Marketing"
Back homeAaron 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.
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:
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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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.
I just walked out of a meeting with a startup, fighting the continual battle of what priority does SEO have when put into the programming queue. This meeting worked in my favor because a month ago the SEO plan was deemed “low priority”. This week, as traffic numbers slump, SEO has been bumped to “high priority”.
The problem is SEO does not work overnight.
If the changes had been implemented a month ago we might not see the affects yet (even though it is an established site with high PR), but I’m positive rushing SEO at this point is not going to help. SEO work has to be planned well in advance. On-page SEO, from a programmers standpoint, sucks but it is not that time consuming. SEO needs to be implemented at least a few months in advance before you really see results. That time frame can shift depending on how established a site already is.
Regardless if you outsource SEO or have the in-house marketing team do it, is there enough emphasis on search engine optimization?
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.
As facebook slowly eats away at the networking need of LinkedIn (at least in the startup world), LinkedIn actually has one valuable (guerrilla marketing) tool that facebook doesn’t….Answers.
LinkedIn Answers is a Q&A system much like Yahoo Answers but with the business slant. LI Answers is great because the responses you get are truly helpful which is rare in open forums. Using LI Answers I have been able to:
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The domain name says it all, KillerStartups.com. Do you really need us to explain further?
Killer Startups is a fantastic site that allows readers (or the Killer Startups crew) to submit internet startups that can be voted as “Killer” in a Digg-like fashion. The top 10 Killer Startups (KS) list should be the target for you young entrepreneurs. KS provides badges to insert on your site so everyone can vote for your internet venture.
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By “when” I mean down to the hour of the day. It can make a big difference considering the two largest population regions in America are separated by 3 hours. You also have to consider the day of the week.
Posting a great, compelling (linkbait?) article is most often the best way to drive traffic to your site using social news. You put in all the hard work of an eye catching title, detailed and researched articles, and then comes the traffic. You submit your article and nothing happens. It slips quickly through the newly submitted postings and in 15 minutes the hope has died. Then you question your article (which you should). Was the title wrong? Was the article too long? One often overlooked question is…..
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