Ideas are Worth Nothing
So you decided to pursue your ideas after long hours of sitting down and pondering asking yourself is this the right time, is this the correct thing to do? Then a little voice in the back of your head (called fear) who should I tell it to, I'm scared they might take it and run with my precious ideas which is going to make me millions of dollars.
All first time entrepreneurs goes threw these delusions. We are all scared of people stealing our ideas but the truth is that ideas are worth nothing. It all comes down to your experience in the market. You're going after and the execution behind that idea. Your experience determines your success of how well you're going to execute it.
Ideas are worth nothing, its the level of execution behind your ability to execute with the right timing, the right people and the right amount of revenue, but please don't let this scare you, follow your gut, and pursuit it with passion, go out and tell people about your idea. You need to get concrete feedback from others.
If you find that its already in the market and other business's to compete with don't be disappointed. That's great, which means you have a market you can go after. Remember you need competition to motivate yourself to be better and be able to innovate in your market.
So please do be a favor go out, network with others and tell them about your ideas and draw as much feedback as possible.
Guest blog post by Keven Dones of Labortopia
How To Rank Top In Google
No matter what topic, you should always be focused on where your pages will be placed.
When creating a page, the first thing to check is where it will rank once it hits the search engines. The following 6 steps will show you how:
1 - Make a list of all possible keywords
Brain storm lists of all possible keywords that may be relevant to your business. Try to figure out what possible searches someone would be typing into a search engine and would like to find your content at the other end. You're not trying any sort of linkbait here. What the goal is here is to picture someone saying "I was searching for XYZ and I came across the perfect site."
This is the time to get far out and come up with words and phrases that your competition may have not. It is true that the more out there you go the less search traffic there will be but, the less traffic, the less competition for these keywords. If your just starting out, there is a good chance that you don't command the authority to rank for the top keywords. In that case it's best to start with some search terms that are a bit out there, have less traffic, but you'll be able to totally own.
2 - Check PageRank (PR) using Google Toolbar
Once you install the toolbar in your FireFox browser, you may have to enable the PageRank feature. To do this you can simply:
Adjust Google Toolbar Options (blue wrench on the far right) -> Tools -> check off PageRank -> Save
Now that this is complete, you will start to see a small green bar up on the toolbar for each page you go to. If you mouse over this bar you will see the numeric PageRank (ie 5/10). Each page on your site will have a unique PageRank assigned to it. Normally internal pages have a lower PR than your front page. If your site (at least the first page) has less than a PR3 your going to need some link-building work before you can rank for many search terms.
There are many arguments out there that the Google Toolbar is no longer a useful tool for checking PageRank. My responses to that would be
1. Since we don't know exactly how the search engines work this is more of an art than a science
2. It's one of the best tools we currently have to figuring out page authority so I will keep using it until something better comes along
3- Check PageRank for your keywords
Now that you know the PR of your site, go back and figure out what you're up against. Take all of the keywords that you came up with in step #1 and search for each in Google (feel free to use Yahoo, Bing, etc. but most of your search traffic will come from Google, so I recommend you start there). Make a list of the PR for the top 3 results that come back from Google for each search term.
This will give you a clue of the competition out there for this keyword(s). Keep in mind that if you are a lower PageRank, it is possible to beat out a higher ranked site using onpage SEO tactics. Just make sure that you are realistic, if your site is a PR1 you should not be attempting to go after PR8 sites.
You need to pick a set of search terms that will have an opportunity at coming up in the top three page results. That means for 99% of people trying to go after a term such as New York Lawyer is pretty much out of the question. Instead you should be trying to get much more specific, for instance Staten Island Medical Malpractice Lawyer.
4 - Check the overall search traffic with the Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
After you've completed step #3 you have the short list of SEO terms to target. Using the "Keyword Tool" you'll be able to focus your efforts on the best choice. Out of all the terms that you can compete against, run them through the Keyword Tool. Sort the results by the "Global Monthly Search Volume" and that will give you a fair indication of how many searches there are each month for this term.
Now that you have these terms, and the amount of search traffic each of those terms have, it's up to you to make the choice of what term(s) to optimize for.
5 - Highly optimize your content
You will find a great checklist at Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist of what Google weights each of these on page elements, but here are a few places to start.
- URLs
- Title tags
- Page descriptions
- page content
- H1, H2 and H3 tags
- Image alt tags
Now don't go and stuff a lot of worthless keywords in each of these tags... Google does not like that and more importantly your users will not like it. Instead, just keep your terms in mind when building your content. For example, you make choose a title such as "Bob Smith - Staten Island Medical Malpractice Lawyer" instead of something less specific such as "Bob Smith - New York Law".
See what we did above? You're not stuffing keywords where they do not belong. Instead, be aware that the terms you use reflect what your page will be known for. Have a goal of the terms your optimizing for and keep that in mind while you're crafting new content.
6 - Get links from other pages with high page rank (see step #2).
This may be the most important step that has been left for last... without inbound links, nothing else you do matters. The number of quality inbound links your page has, the higher your PageRank will be. Also, since the results are cumulative, the more high quality inbound links the better.
What is a high quality link?
A high quality link is a link from another authoritative page with the less outbound links, the less the better. For instance, normally if your site is the only external link on a PR4 page, that is better than being one of 1000 links on a page (a directory for instance) even if it's a PR5.
Just off the record, I would not pass up the PR5 link but I am just saying that I would pick the PR4 if I had to choice.
How do I get inbound links?
Most of the time you'll hear "Create remarkable content" and that will get you inbound links. It will usually involve publishing a blog, writing interesting articles, and getting people to link to you because of it. This is what inbound marketing is based on, and it's honestly one of the best ways for building long term value.
Contacting site owners directly is another method of getting inbound links. This will have a lower chance of success in most cases but it is usually worth trying. To increases your odds of success, try to be sure the link will be mutually beneficial to both you and the other site owner. This will usually mean that your site will have to offer information or a product that is useful to the users of the site linking to you. Don't just email random site owners but start with a small number of highly targeted emails.
Other methods are to simply buy your inbound links. Many directories, blogs and other small sites are willing to sell text links to your site. Just make sure that they do not include a nofollow tag. I believe this a gray area in search engine policies... Google has openly stated it is against their terms to buy links. At the same time preferential treatment is given to sites listed in pay-for-inclusion directories such as Yahoo! Directory. This is a gray area so use it at your own risk.
Keep in mind that as you do this, your PageRank will be increasing. This does not show up on the toolbar right away... updates to the public PR only take place about 4-5 times a year. This does mean that as your PR increases, you should go back to setup #2 and re-evaluate your list. Now that your site has become more creditable, your going to be able to go for the more popular search terms, so constantly be reviewing where you stand.
This is just a crash course in how to rank top in Google. Keep in mind that this subject is always changing and evolving so you will also have to.
Have these methods worked for you? If not, what have you done that has worked? Please let me know in the comments section.
Update #1
@petewailes has suggested the following link for additional research on what factors most effect your ranking. Thanks a lot Pete.
Startup School 2009 with Mark Zuckerberg
Great video with amazing entrepreneurs... a must watch for anyone working on or in a startup.
(Sorry about the poor audio quality)
Are You Building A Sustainable Business? Increasing Your Clients’ Revenue Is The Quickest Way To Win More Clients
What is a sustainable business?
What I mean by this is not about the "green" side of business but about the value that you provide for your customers. A sustainable business in this context is defined as a business where users (clients) receive more value back than they put in to it. Sounds simple? Well it's surprising how many people ignore this simple rule of thumb.
Take for example a simple distributor to retailer relationship. The distributor goes to it's vendors and negotiates the lowest price possible because of it's large size. Also most large distributors have a distribution network which allow them to get a product to it's destination quickly and cheaply. For all this the distributor takes a small piece of the profit.
Is this a sustainable business? Yes indeed it is... for every $1 a retailer spends with a distributors they will be able to create let's say $1.50 of revenue. This way the more a retail purchases from the distributor they will then themselves see a greater return.
If you are able to do the same for your clients you will have one of the easiest sales possible. Walking into a potential client offering to create $1.50 of revenue for every $1.00 your paid will be the fastest way to win a new client.
Is your business sustainable?
Not all products and services can be this easily correlated from money spent to money received. Let's say for example your a consultant that designs web sites for small businesses. It is difficult to prove direct correlation between your new site design and an increase in that client's bottom line.
How can I make my business more sustainable?
Let's take the example from above... The most important part of showing your client where you can add value. One way to do this is by using analysis of the metrics around their lead generation. Performing an A/B Test of the site before and after the redesign you can prove to your client where you can add value. In this case I would recommend that you setup a test to specifically show your client the rate of conversions before and after of the site design.
Knowing that you will be giving your clients these metrics will have you thinking how to provide the most value possible thought your work. This is always good for both you and your clients.
This will help provide you with amazing endorsements for your business. It may come in the form of something for example of when a past client tells a friend "XYZ Design Company helped me increase the conversions on my site by 45%". Endorsements like this are guaranteed to get people's to pay attention.
Showing that you can provide real tangible value is by far the quickest way to increase your own bottom line.
What do you think about this? I would really like to hear your feedback in the comments section below.
3 Reasons That Site Owners Are Not Using A/B Testing
1 - Unsure of what to test
You've decided to run an A/B test but now what? What are you are testing? With an infinitive number of possibilities to test it's not always easy to know what elements of the page to begin with.
I would also recommend that you start testing your call to action to find out what will increase conversions.
2 - Unsure of how to test
There is a decently steep learning curve when it comes to the Google Website Optimizer. Also there is a lack of simple and inexpensive tools in the market to help introduce users to A/B testing. I would like to see more tools available to help users who are just beginning to A/B test, please leave comments with recommendations.
3 - Not enough traffic
If you do not have the traffic volume it makes it difficult to collect enough data to preform proper analysis. For the long term I would always recommend inbound marketing to increase your traffic but for the short term cheap paid traffic with StumbleUpon Ads can help get the traffic and data that you need to run an A/B test.
What do you think?
What are the reasons most people are currently not A/B testing?
How can we help get more people to run A/B tests on their site?
Starting is easy, finishing is hard
This is a great poster from Wallblank that was inspired by Jason Calacanis. Jason said the following:
This is my best piece of advice for any entrepreneur... the first 80% is easy, the next 15% is hard and last five percent is painful.
Having an idea is simple but seeing it through to fruition is a massive challenge. This saying is a must to remember by all entrepreneurs.
"Starting is easy,
Finishing is hard."
Google in talks to buy Yelp – A perfect match
Google is in talks to purchase Yelp for "Half Billion Dollars Or More", Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports.
- Google is the king of search but the local search market is still up for grabs
- Google has the adverting network that could increase revenues way beyond what Yelp is currently capatiable of
- Acquiring Yelp would give Google the push that it needs to get in the face of many more mobile users
- Yelp + Google Maps would quickly add the content that Google has been slow to acquire. This would give users even more reasons to user Google Maps
- Yelp has a passionate community of users who are linked with their brand. This would dovetail perfectly with Google's application platform and stop the competition from acquiring these users
With Google Chrome OS Your Web Applications Will Be The New Desktop Applications
The other day I had the privilege of writing code almost nonstop (with a couple small food breaks) for about 12 hours. During this long sprint I left Pandora open the entire day on one of my side monitors. I noticed something interesting after my 12 hours (I am a PandoraOne client) of continuously using Pandora... I provided just one single pageview to the site after spending half of a day on it.
Pandora of course has already seen this coming and is optimized for it. The ad impressions on their free version are displayed based on time on the site and not page view.
More products also act like this including Gmail and Google Reader. Even the product I am currently working on (BuzzStat.com) is feeling more and more like an desktop application and less like a web site as we develop it further.
This is becoming more common in this new land of the AJAX built web but I believe in the next 3 years we will see an explosion of web apps that feel more like desktop apps. Right now the web is already moving in that direction but we will soon see this accelerate if Google has it's way.
Why is this?
The launch of the Google Chrome OS may be the single largest push to make your desktop and the web become one. With that change there will be no more concept of "desktop applications". The web applications under development today will now be the new desktop applications of tomorrow.
What you need to do is be prepared when this change happens. The web application your developing today needs to start looking and feeling more like a desktop application. This is the way it will be treated and this is what users will soon come to expect.
This is the direction the web will soon go so it's better to be ahead of the curve.
Twitter Test: It’s easy to increase your number of followers but does it provide any value?
It seems that nonstop on Twitter people will follow you with the hope that you will auto-follow them back. Their goal is to just increase the raw number of followers they have. These new followers may or may not have anything in common with them... even worse they may not even be real users (many are just bots).
With all of the focus around the number of followers on Twitter I deiced to attempt an experiment to find out 2 pieces of information. The first goal was to figure out how simple is it to increase your number of Twitter followers using this "spammy" method. The second goal was to figure out if there is any value in increasing your followers in this way.
I conducted this test over a 20 hour period from the time when I began adding followers to when I took the final count. I started the test by finding a Twitter account with a massive number of followers that was clearly not providing any value back to it's followers. The account I found (I will leave the name out for now) had over 50k followers, was following about the same number of people, and had a total of 3 tweets. This was clearly not an account that had 50k followers because of those 3 interesting tweets.
I started by adding followers who were all ready following this account. In total I followed 930 people in about 1 hour. As I did this the number of people following me increased... quickly. By the end of my 20 hour testing period I had received 506 new followers. This gives me a 54.408% return on the amount of new followed received VS new followers added.
Followers added - 930
Followed back - 506
% followed back - 54.408%
The Bad
Ok, so this was much higher than I expected to receive in return but here is bad news... when I started looking at the new people following me it turns most were just spam accounts. The ones that were real people had very little in common with me and did not actually care to follow me. I tried to engage with these new followers the way I normally would with anyone else but received very little response.
To make matters worse over the next few days the number of these new people following me took a tumble. I did not track how many of them dropped off but I would guess it was over 50% of the total followers added (506).
Final Thoughts
Is it easy to increase your number of followers?
Yes, very easy. If your goal was to simply add followers then focus on that and you'll have 50-100k followers in no time.
Was there is any value in adding these new followers?
Very very little... it would have been none but I did find a couple great new people during this test (this is 2 or 3 out of 500+ new followers).
The bottom line is that if your trying to grow a community, build your brand, or meet interesting new people then this is absolutely not the way to go about doing it. Creating interesting content still wins....
Google Reader adds Magic Sort and RSS fans everywhere rejoice
For any Google Reader fans who have not yet tried the magic sort I recommend you check this out as soon as possible. Google has recently added a Magic sort feature to Google Reader and it's for a lack of better terms.... magical.
Think Digg + Google Reader in one... when viewing any feeds or groups of feeds you can now sort by magic. This will allow the most popular stories to come to the top.
Staying up on your most active feeds can be an arduous process but this new feature makes it much easier. Using Magic sort will enable you stay current on the most interesting posts without having to read each feed one-by-one.
Try it today and you won't be disappointed.
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