You can't just make a web site anymore and hope people will come. You can't even blog anymore and hope people will come, although good blogging software like Wordpress has built-in SEO (search engine optimization). You have to do something to get your content out to where the people are. Even large corporations are often disappointed by the amount of traffic to their corporate sites -- people just don't go to sites. In the early days, people "surfed" the net. Now we all know it's too big to find things randomly. Rather, we take advice from friends, follow links from Twitter and Facebook, or take whatever result comes up on Google or Yahoo searches. So do your visitors.
The marketplace is full of companies that supposedly help your site get attention. While some are good, some resort to methods you might not want to be associated with if you care about your corporate image. So don't just hire a company and entrust it with the responsibility of carrying your image out on the internets. Take the time to learn a little about the most important marketing tool you have -- your web site. Develop it correctly and it will be found even without outside help.
There are several simple web site development tools that are almost free (Weebly, Wordpress, Squarespace)
or support themselves through hosting services that I use when I want
to turn a site over to a client who will be able to maintain it
him/herself in the future. Use one of them if you are doing a site youself.
Or ask your web developer to abide by these simple rules, and your content will get out into the world at large. Search engines work on complicated alogrithms that usually involve changes, links in to your site, and good keywords. So here are seven simple ways to get people to look at your site.
1)Create quality. Forget brochureware and product sheets, unless they already contain the keywords your customers and clients will be looking for. No one is looking for "complete real-time solution." Make your terms crystal clear, without jargon, and repeat them naturally in your copy. Hyperlink terms to other places on your site. If you were buying, searching, comparing in your own category, what would you be typing into a search engine?
2) Add a feed to your site. This allows someone who comes to your site to subcribe to your content. At the very least, create a Twitter feed that will automatically make your site changes or blog posts come up as links in your Twitter posts, where your followers can click on the links.
3)Change the content often. Search engines look for changes. This is why blogs work. And don't accept a web site that can't be updated and managed by you without having to call the web developer. It's called a "content management system," and you want one. Static web sites don't get found.
4)Make your site social. Put a Share this button on your site, so if someone wants to send your content to a friend or a social site, it's easy for them to do. There are many different widgets that allow your readers to share your content; just choose one. I've got nothing invested in ShareThis, other than its ease of use.
5)Use anchor text wisely. Search engines crawl it. So every time you write "click here," you are missing an opportunity. Instead, hyperlink keywords you think your readers are looking for, or you wish they were searching for to find your site.
6)Find out what the most important keywords in your sector or business area are. There's a service called Hitwise you can use to get this data, or you can get it from Google itself. Believe me, Google's Adsense program knows. Use them in your copy.
7)Stay away from Flash animations on your landing page. Flash looks good, but search engines don't search it, so if you want to be found, you can forget about it.
None of these tricks is complicated, nor will they get you in trouble with the search engine gods. I've learned them all through hard experience.
For many reasons, I’m interested in the next generation Internet. Today I’m at Launch SIlicon Valley, watching ten companies in this space present their concepts.
I haven’t finished listening, but I have already jumped to my
conclusion. According to these presenters (who were quite good, by the
way), the next generation of the internet solves problems created by
the current generation of the Internet.
In other words, it’s full of refinements and improvements, rather
than big technological jumps. A better process here, a better algorithm
there, and lots of emphasis on smart phone apps or Firefox add-ons. The
most interesting company by far was from China, which is definitely
kicking our ass in next-gen internet stuff according to this presenter,
the first Chinese company ever to present at this conference.
World’sLaw is a legal service. Its competitor is Legal Zoom, but these guys have attorneys, while Legal Zoom is only document preparation services. By Jobi
– a power search with saved search with timelines and keywords,
language and location, domains and file types. It’s a power search
built on top of Google GazoPa-
similar image search. Uses features such as color and shape to find
images, and uses the image itself, not just keywords, as the search key.
The founder actually drew a watch on his computer, uploaded it, and got
photos of watches back. Even now, it has an iPhone app to upload
pictures from your iPhone and search images.
With current mage search engines, if large volume of data, can’t return
images quickly. But for them, the more data they have, the better they
can return Gliider-
manages travel for you. It holds on to your travel information,
replacing bookmarks, cut and paste, printed documents. ‘There’s no good
way to hold on to my travel info when I am planning a trip.” It’s now
in private beta, and is a Firefox add-on. Gamexiu.
Games and social networks are two fastest growing segments in China.
16,000,000 games, growing at 17% a year. 200,000,000 users are on
social networks in China, and the virtual goods business is a $4
billion business. Most users are single children under 25, using social
gaming as the way of getting companionship.
It’s the world’s first 3-D Internet social gaming platform. Completely
integrates into other social networks, so is also distributed. The
avatars can go anywhere across the web, and the application itself can
be embedded in other social networks.
They are a social world similar to Second Life. It looks easier to bring the user into an immersive life than SL, however. And the selling of virtual items is huge!
Here’s the second set of companies.
CellWandisn’t
really next generation of Internet; it’s mobile voice apps accessed
through abbreviated dialing codes (#taxi #home #pizza). It’s a pay per
use app ($1.25-1.79 per call), partnered with carriers. They get big
margins from loyal users, and use the wireless carriers, alcohol
companies, and media partners for marketing. CellWand is live in
Canada, and penetrates at 1 call per 250 mobile phone users. If they
penetrate similarly in the US, that would be $1m/month revenue. They
also use the carrier billing systems. They have locked up all the
Canadian carriers
Surf Canyon
– delivers relevant personalized search results. It re-ranks results
according to what you might have clicked on from the first search — on
the fly, in real time. Another Firefox add-on, also works on IE. And
for good measure, it also personalizes the sponsored links. Works with
Bing, Yahoo, Google.
Dacast,
a product of Andolis LLC believes the future of TV is multicast. The
company has a peer to peer system to cut the cost of live streaming and
unite all the Dacast users in an ecosystem. That allows for more
appropriate advertising to users. So Datacast is free for content
owners, cheaper to stream, and more carefully targeted. The company
projects profitability by end of 2010. Every player wins: Advertisers
get more clicks, users get free content, content owners get more money.
Wowd – is now in private beta. It turns the wisdom of crowds into useful work finding content, tagging itself “the web you want.”
“Wowd connects people to a planet’s worth of content.” YOICS “Your Own Internet Connected Stuff”
Cloud IT services for the rest of us. Private bookmarks only available
to you or people you are connecting to, using the internet as your own
private LAN. This could also be used for security services, and you
would be able to see it on any browser anywhere.
You can use it as a replacement for an FTP service. You can download
the Yoics app, drag a file form your computer to it, and make it
accessible to a selected group (like a graphic designer could do for
clients).
The general takeaway from this conference is the preponderance of peer-to-peer
services as a way of lowering the cost of streaming content, and the
general movement to the cloud. And I don't really think any of these companies, except Gamesxiu, stands alone. They will all get acquired.
It's everyone's patriotic duty to help Michigan. We are, indeed, at war, but it's not with terrorists, it's with the worst elements of ourselves.
I never thought I'd be saying this, but it has been a powerful day for me, a person who abandoned Amercian cars when her new college graduation gift, a 1963 Chevy convertible, lost its brakes on the Major Deegan Expressway in New York City two weeks after she got it.
It was a lesson, and I learned it quickly, never looking back.Not my responsibility, I said, as I bought Hondas, BMWs, Mercedes, Volvos and Audis at various stages of my career.
More than 40 years later, I realize that the government can't help Michigan, only American citizens can. We have turned our back on Detroit for decades, abdicating our roles as customers to provide constructive feedback. Perhaps if we hadn't just slunk away from those bad cars and bad decisions on the part of Chrysler and GM we could have made a difference. I know I sure didn't call my local Chevy dealer every three years as I went out and bought my next (foreign) car. And when I heard things were bad in Detroit, all I said was "tsk, tsk."
I'm not making a case for the car companies as well-managed, thrifty, or right in what they've done during those decades. But I am making a case for the connection between GM and everything else in the United States that is now haunting us: crime, gangs, inadequte health care, deteriorating public education, the financial crisis, and yes, even the murder of Dr. Tiller and the descent of our government into torture.
Somewhere along the way, we've lost the notion that we are connected to one another, and that we are a big community that has to learn to be resilient and take care of itself and each other. We've begun to think that, on the one hand, we can do it all individually, and on the other hand, if we can't the government will step in and save us.
Neither one of these is feasible.
Jennifer Granholm gave great interviews this morning about how Michigan was prepared to lead the country into the green revolution, generating new, green jobs for the one million people in Michigan who have been displaced by the auto industry.
But if no one buys the green products that will be manufactured by the retrained workers at the re-tooled factories in Michigan, will the stimulus and the cheerleading and the speeches work?
Of course not. As long as we pursue the easy (cheap) way out, buying inexpensive trendy, nearly disposable clothes that are made in third world countries that use child labor (this is what I realize I have been doing), buying Hyundais from Korea and fruit from Chile, we are enriching others.
We don't need a trade policy about this, or a stimulus package. We need common sense. We need a sense of community. Let's make this creative destruction, not just destruction.
Sramana Mitra's Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction
is a book for our time, because it's something real out of Silicon
Valley. No more stories about legendary VC fundings or startup-to-IPO
in six months. In this, the second volume of Entrepreneurs Journeys,
her focus is on doing more with less, in tune with the times. The book
comes out June 1, but I got an advance copy because this is my passion:
starting up companies without outside investment. Unfortunately, this
is another one of the books Buppy read first, so the photo isn't what you might expect it to be:-)
Sramana Mitra has herself been an entrepreneur and a strategy
consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994. She founded three companies:
Dais (off-shore software services), Intarka (sales lead generation and
qualification software) and Uuma (online personalized store for selling
clothes using Expert Systems software). Two were acquired, while the
third received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren that the company
did not accept. Now she interviews entrepreneurs to find out what makes
them tick. It's quite interesting to read some of the stories,
especially those of entrepreneurs you think you already "know," like Om
Malik, in my case.
The very first entrepreneur in the book, Greg Gianforte, begins by
saying he doesn't believe in raising money from investors. "The best
money comes from customers, not investors," he says, echoing what Stealthmode's partners have always said to our own entrepreneurs. And for the same reasons. Boseman, Montana, where Greg started RightNow,
a customer service software company, isn't a tech hotbed anymore than
Phoenix, Arizona is. And bootstrapping, Gianforte says, " is a
discovery process." He goes on to say that if you got a bunch of MBAs
in a room and asked them how to start a company, they'd say write a
business plan and go get funding. And then they'd build a bonfire and
throw the money into it. Admittedly, RightNow took expansion capital
after two years.
Both Om Malik and Rafat Ali, who have found ways to monetize content
online, were also bootstrappers in the beginning. Both came from India,
where VC money wasn't an everyday occurrence but hard work was, and
both are writers. Ali tells of how he named his blog PaidContent.org
because the .com name was taken, the Internet bubble had burst when he
started in 2001, and he had nothing else going. Om has worked so hard
at being a successful entrepreneur that he had a heart attack last
year, when only in his early forties. He has had to learn to let things
go a bit.
Ramu Yalamanchi's father was an entrepreneur, and was the FFF
(Friends Family and Fools) who gave him the first $10,000 to start the
social network Hi5. To avoid mistakes, he watched Friendster.
If you start a business that you think will get very big, plan for the
scaling issues in advance, he says, because that's what Friendster did
not do. He watched that company in the days when people couldn't get on
the site and couldn't register.
Mitra points out that Silicon Valley now is where Silicon Valley has
been many times in the past: the IPO window is closed, the M&A
market is adrift, and the VCs who can't see an exit will not make an
entrance. The economy sucks, and the layoffs have happened. The talent
is out there looking for something to do. The last interview in the
book is with Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors,
who decided during the last downturn to buy companies that were
struggling and turn them into successful businesses. Two of them he
actually bought at an auction in Redwood City. From the portfolio of
"stuff" that he bought emerged the company that's now SuccessFactors.
This book has some fascinating histories of the different paths
people take to entrepreneurship, and the difficulties they face. I
would only have wished each of the interviews to be longer and deeper,
because every story is worth the telling.
Last fall, I worked a little bit to advise a company called UserVoice, which was (and still is) a way for companies to get direct customer input and feedback about their products.
The founders of UserVoice are serious entrepreneurs; they all live
in one home, and work out of a co-working space in Santa Cruz, CA. When
I met the company, they already had thousands of users, though their
product was free. The founders in the process of monetizing it.
When Marcus Nelson, one of the co-founders, asked me about expansion
capital, I was really skeptical despite my love of the UserVoice
concept. I gave him my customary advice: “don’t waste too much time
getting funding. Startup funding is hard to get.” After all, the time
was November 2008.
Still, there were all those users…really liking the product. I made a preliminary phone call to Howard Lindzon, one of the bravest, most contrarian investors on the planet. And then I went back to tweeting Marcus every once in a while.
Then I get an email from Marcus, asking to meet last week. I refuse,
because I’m still in Phoenix. But Marcus is releasing big news on
Monday. He sends me some language: “…drawn to the UserVoice vision,
Baseline Ventures recently led a group of angel investors in an
$800,000 funding round. Baseline was joined in the round by Dave
McClure at FF Angel LLC (seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund),
Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, TAG, Vincent Worms, and Howard Lindzon.
As a group, the angels give UserVoice excellent business connections;
expertise in messaging, marketing, product design, and international
exposure.
And about a new member of the Board of Advisers to the company: “as
the former vice president of communities and conversations at Dell Inc., Bob Pearson bolsters the hands-on, enterprise credibility at UserVoice. At Dell, Pearson led IdeaStorm,
developing an industry-leading approach to the use of social media that
included 25 blogs, forums and wikis in seven languages worldwide with
200 million page views of annual interaction and coordinated the
company’s approach in Twitter, Facebook and other key sites.”
Pearson likes the company even more than I did: “UserVoice is
democratizing the idea generation model, so customers can plug and play
at their convenience, gain feedback from customers, and do so without a
major investment of IT resources. It’s very complementary to the great
work of Salesforce.com for IdeaStorm and, in many cases, will extend the reach of existing idea communities worldwide.”
And now for the real good news: It’s spring, and UserVoice has additional hundreds of paying
customers that run the gamut from technology to more traditional
organizations, including Intuit, NASA, Facebook, Xing, Nielson,
Genentech, Blackbaud, University of Wisconsin, Animoto, Seesmic, Stumbleupon and TweetDeck.
Marcus and his housemates are going to use the money to do a white
label product, so any company can communicate with its customers in the
product development cycle, and find out what’s working and not working
before it’s too late.
Last fall, I worked a little bit to advise a company called UserVoice, which was (and still is) a way for companies to get direct customer input and feedback about their products.
The founders of UserVoice are serious entrepreneurs; they all live
in one home, and work out of a co-working space in Santa Cruz, CA. When
I met the company, they already had thousands of users, though their
product was free. The founders in the process of monetizing it.
When Marcus Nelson, one of the co-founders, asked me about expansion
capital, I was really skeptical despite my love of the UserVoice
concept. I gave him my customary advice: “don’t waste too much time
getting funding. Startup funding is hard to get.” After all, the time
was November 2008.
Still, there were all those users…really liking the product. I made a preliminary phone call to Howard Lindzon, one of the bravest, most contrarian investors on the planet. And then I went back to tweeting Marcus every once in a while.
Then I get an email from Marcus, asking to meet last week. I refuse,
because I’m still in Phoenix. But Marcus is releasing big news on
Monday. He sends me some language: “…drawn to the UserVoice vision,
Baseline Ventures recently led a group of angel investors in an
$800,000 funding round. Baseline was joined in the round by Dave
McClure at FF Angel LLC (seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund),
Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, TAG, Vincent Worms, and Howard Lindzon.
As a group, the angels give UserVoice excellent business connections;
expertise in messaging, marketing, product design, and international
exposure.
And about a new member of the Board of Advisers to the company: “as
the former vice president of communities and conversations at Dell Inc., Bob Pearson bolsters the hands-on, enterprise credibility at UserVoice. At Dell, Pearson led IdeaStorm,
developing an industry-leading approach to the use of social media that
included 25 blogs, forums and wikis in seven languages worldwide with
200 million page views of annual interaction and coordinated the
company’s approach in Twitter, Facebook and other key sites.”
Pearson likes the company even more than I did: “UserVoice is
democratizing the idea generation model, so customers can plug and play
at their convenience, gain feedback from customers, and do so without a
major investment of IT resources. It’s very complementary to the great
work of Salesforce.com for IdeaStorm and, in many cases, will extend the reach of existing idea communities worldwide.”
And now for the real good news: It’s spring, and UserVoice has additional hundreds of paying
customers that run the gamut from technology to more traditional
organizations, including Intuit, NASA, Facebook, Xing, Nielson,
Genentech, Blackbaud, University of Wisconsin, Animoto, Seesmic, Stumbleupon and TweetDeck.
Marcus and his housemates are going to use the money to do a white
label product, so any company can communicate with its customers in the
product development cycle, and find out what’s working and not working
before it’s too late.
Today I delivered a web site to a small welding company in Phoenix, to whom I have served as a marketing consultant under a City-financed technical assistance program. They're the original mom and pop, and this was their first web presence. I thought I would
close out their file, since they now had a web site and marketing materials,
but they had a few remaining questions, and by the end of an hour with them, I was almost in tears.
They are really struggling, and their plight is not unlike those of thousands of small businesses that are certified as MBE(Minority Business Enterprise) SBE (Small Business Enterprise) and WBE (Woman Business Entreprise.
The owner of this business, certified as MBE/SBE has been a welder for fifteen years. He
has always done business on a handshake. His certifications allow him to satisfy certain contracting requirements large organizations have in order to get government contracts.
Recently, a large company that
he has been doing business with for a long time ran out of work and
stopped using him, which pretty much sunk his business. He ran out and got small repair jobs for subsistence. Now the big company is
back, and they have a job for which they want him to foot $5000
in advance for materials. It's a construction fence around a new county courthouse building.
He is the MBE SBE sub-subcontractor
on the job. Both companies up the food chain from him need the MBE set
aside dollars, which is why they use him--that and his experience and
willingness to be on call 24/7.
But they don't want to sign a
contract with him in which they have to pay a third up front, or pay
for the materials in advance, or in any way help him with the working
capital -- even though if he doesn't participate he could have the job
shut down. Last time he worked with a company as their token MBE,
they started the as a Time and Materials job and changed it on him in
mid-job, wiping out his profit. When he read the contract he had
signed, he realized the larger company hadn't signed their end, and
weren't bound.
This is often how subcontractors get treated, especially in a down economy. The larger companies have trouble getting financed, and they try to finance themselves on the back of sub- and sub-subcontractors.
I
explained to him that in a bad economy, he can't be the bank, and that
some clients he couldn't afford to work for. At the very least, he had to make
sure the contract was signed on both sides.
I also suggested that his female partner
who doesn't have the relationship with the client and who keeps the
books, should be the one to insist on money up front for materials and
a signed contracted before the nice guy shows up to do the job.
I suggested, to, that they call the General Contractor on the job, who
needs the SBE/MBE dollars even more, and explain the situation.
By
the end of the meeting, they had tears in their eyes talking about the
difficult economy and how the little guy is taken advantage of. No one had every told them it was all right to ask for money! I told
them they could call me all summer, and I urged the welder also to go back to
school and sharpen his pipe welding skills, since a lot of the stimulus
money is for that kind of work.
Long and short of it, I agreed
to take phone calls from them over the summer to help them get
comfortable with this change in their business. There's more than one side to this sage of entrepreneurship.
hits the streets this week. Because I answered four emails she sent out to a group of "advisors" by spilling my life story, Pam sent me an early copy. And because my dog Buppy eats every book sent to me by a friend, I thought I had better take it with me to the gym and find out how I'd enjoy it before he enjoys it.
Well, I got on the exercise bike and got off over an hour later, which was not my intention. But the book is great! Not only has Pam eaten her own dog food (to carry this dog metaphor further), but she writes in the open, entertaining style that has made her a champion blogger since Day One.
She's right on about the good, the bad and the ugly of being an entrepreneur. The good: I was able to read the book in the gym on mid-morning on Monday. The bad, no one's giving me a paycheck for doing that. The ugly: more and more corporate employees aren't going to have much choice.
Pam says she realized nothing in life was stable after her father called her to his office in 1994 and showed her that everyone else in his department was gone and he was the only one left. And that traces things back to the first days of the internet. As I am fond of saying to my friends (ad nauseum, to them) "the internet changes everything."
But, as she also points out, not everybody is cut out to be an entrepreneur. and even if you are, you can't do it alone. She recomments getting a "tribe," a group of mentors and advisors to help. She goes into great detail about how to acquire those people, and also says your old tribe won't do.
And that's true. In my experience with entrepreneurs, I know that people's close friends and families are the first to say "you're crazy" when someone says they want to go into business.
Pam herself went out and got herself Guy Kawasaki, among others. Not only did Guy write the book on startups, but he's also an early stage VC. And a serial entrepreneur. How did Pam, mother of two in Mesa Arizona, lure in a startup celebrity like Guy? She wrote to him!
Once you make the decision to go out for yourself, there are all kinds of decisions to be made for which you need these advisors. One of the emails I answered of Pam's while she was writing about this had to do with what kind of health insurance I had.
"Escape from Cubicle Nation" has tips on everything from how to shop for insurance to cash flow management. It's NOT a motivational book about living your deam (although it is) and it is NOT written for someone who is going to be financed immediately with venture capital (although it is). It's NOT discouraging, and it's NOT a sugar pill. It IS something you ought to read if you read Fast Company or have any thoughts about becoming an entrepreneur either by choice or by chance.
