Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

This June’s Early Stage East, the premier venture conference for promising young startups and the investment community promises to deliver compelling content and opportunities. Companies representing the hottest sectors right now - cleantech, financial tech, and emerging media will present their value propositions to an audience investors - venture capitalists, angels and individuals who represent over $4b in capital.

Our featured guests and panelists will broaden our perspectives on the key topics of media and branding, two critical aspects to a company’s growth and ultimately, bottom line. Daymond John, founder of Fubu, co-star of the Shark Tank, and author, will be our keynote speaker. The other esteemed guests include: Jeff Pulver, founder of the 140 Conference and early stage investor, Josh Kopelman, Managing Partner of First Round Capital and recipient of the 2010 Venture Impact Award.  The original NYC fashion entrepreneur, Yuli Ziv will also be on hand to share tried and true viral marketing tactics.

Of course, this conference is not all work and no play!  The conference is being hosted at the historic Hotel Dupont during the famous annual Jazzfest.  After all, what better environment is there for connecting with your peers, broadening your horizons and listening to the companies of tomorrow?

Register now for special early bird rates, including accommodations.

It’s not embedding for some reason, but check out this hilarious video of HP’s “epic fail” attempt to include facial tracking software.

In terms of business lessons, it should be easy let you draw your own Aesop from this one…

Hat Tip to BusinessPundit

According to Danah Boyd, MySpace has become a digital ghetto, following the online equivalent of white flight to Facebook.  She doesn’t attribute this to any kind of active racism, but rather that offline racial and class divides are extending themselves onto the internet.  The “Stuff White People Like” blog has smartly parodied this phenomenon.

Although the internet was initially a color-blind and unwalled neighborhood, the hidden hand of racism had no problem moving into the digital age.  Kozmo.com, a casualty of the first internet bubble, ran a cool on-demand delivery service that redlined zip codes with a predominantly African-American population.  Google’s unsuccessful attempt at an online social network, Orkut, devolved into a haven for various hate groups in other countries.

The takeaway? Don’t invest in services that promise to make the world less divided.  It’s easiest to gain market share if you focus on dominating a tiny niche.  Competing services that try to be all things to all people will, if they survive, diverge and inheriting a different segment of the audience.

So this post is a kudos post for a great new software, www.Ad-Juster.com - Ad-juster is a discrepancy reporting & management tool for ad servers .A big problem with serving is ad servers often count ads difference. Jesse built a tool that tracks all the data and normalizes it so you can properly value an impression. It’s a simple thing but something that has been missing from the industry for a long time. Rubicon Project last I heard which does ad network optimization has a team (of 70?) in India that does this manually. It is a huge pain in the ass and great work Ad-Juster!

So we are on the brink of a revolution. A revolution in the world of ad optimization. For years, we have been getting away with poor optimization of advertising. Companies like advertising.com and rightmedia.com made fortunes on the back of optimization. Tacoda sold to AOL for its behavioral engine and MediaMath is the hottest company in NYC. On the publisher side, Yieldex, Rubion, Admeld & Pubmatic are all doing well. What we haven’t seen, however is true ad placement and user value optimization. I’d like to be able to know what ads in what placements at what frequency and with what targeting to show to which user at what time of day. So maybe at 2AM a dating ad in a skyscraper and a text link will perform better than banners? Also, I’d like to see how different advertising strategies and placements effects virality, time on time and repeat visits and for which demographics of users. All in all this data, would give me a true eCPM and value of every user and allow me to understand what every page view and user are worth rather than just what every banner is worth – data points that are invaluable to determining monetization strategy.

So I’ve literally grown up in the online advertising and tech industry and its’ been an interesting ride, going from lost boy to man, trying to navigate our little world. I’ve learned some very hard lessons along the way and had some success and some failures and the one thing that stands out is that the my life is finally catching up with my age. I have friends my own age now in the industry and many friends’ older but in the past its been a surreal experience, being the youngest guy in the room and not being able to relate to people. As this year progresses, I look forward to seeing what happens next and what turns my life takes.

Today, I’m going to share some black magic SEO tips & tricks. Note these are all easy to do, just require time.

1. Make sure you and your company have social profiles and twitter ids and wikipedia if possible. They all rank high.

2. Whenever sometimes relevant to your company happens, post it on Twitter & facebook (twitter SEO baby) because twitter responds quicker than google (which is why Google will likely buy Twitter)

3. Take your product and relate it to a top 5 news story and do a blog post. Relate the news story in your post because people will likely be searching for the news and you may get indexed accordingly.

4. Make sure your meta-data and tags are in place. Make sure you have an index page and a clear URL structure with permalinks and actual pages.

5. The pages should be titled related to what’s on it. Ie: birds.com/Bird Watching vs. birds.com/page1 or worse birds.com/XYZ call your database.asp (this isn’t being indexed at all).

6. Tag all your images and have replacement text for images that are blocked. Do not use flash on your site if possible (unless you use www.StrikeInteractives.com’s flash SEO system)

7. make sure every piece of content has its own page and gets indexed.

8. tag each page on your site separately with relevant tags and descriptive text.

9. Do not ever clone your site thinking you will get twice the SEO. Both will be blacklisted.

10. Finally build links. Link building is the most important. Especially from high quality sites and blogs that have high traffic and page rank. The best way to do this is to first be active on social networks and l inking back to you and to be active commenting on other peoples’ blogs and active on forums. I recommend building 10,000 unique links from as many of the top 100,000 sites as possible and forums active in your vertical. Why forums? Because in addition to building links, many of them have good SEO and the link itself could be indexed as well as having interested users in your topic to begin with. One caution, don’t drop the same text everywhere. Make sure it is unique, don’t spam, be careful and creative. You can outsource this overseas to use craigslist and manage it likely for around $1-2 per link. It’ll be worth it.

So a friend of mine took a job running innovation and digital at a large food company and asked me to help him redesign their website. I did a 1 hour quick and dirty lesson on online direct response techniques. How did it do it? I took out a newspaper.

What!? You ask, a newspaper? Yes, a newspaper.

Long ago, our friendly publishers learned the art of eliciting fear and getting people to buy papers. By looking at how papers are laid out and headlines are written and pages structured, we can learn a lot. We can also learn a few things that don’t really work anymore.

1. Newspaper expect the person to read just the headline, photo/caption, first and last paragraph so everything is repeated in there. AKA: the equivalent size of most blog posts. Lesson: people have short attention spans, clearly state your value proposition and catch interest early and restate it when you close.

2. Subject line, photo, text is the order of the paper. Normally your eyes will read the headline, look at the picture to support it and then read so your visuals and headline are more important than your content. (sometimes you look to the picture first if its laid out to the right or left of the story. If the headline is above the photo, you tend to look at the headline first). Lesson: Your visuals and headline are 80% of your content. The rest is supporting filler.

3. All news stories have quotes. Lots of them. Even if they don’t make any sense. People like hearing things that come from 3rd party sources to confirm validity, even if its bullshit. Also quotes from people with positions of power or at well known companies are more valuable since its more believable. Lesson: testimonials are very important, especially if they come from people that have credibility (or name recognition) in the consumers eyes.

4. Front page stories are always continued on the inside. This is to get you to flip through the paper, not to read the rest of the story but to look at the ads. Lesson: if you have long content break it into multiple parts so the user has more page views. Secondly, the shorter each piece is the greater chance it’ll be read and the user will want more vs. asking when will it end.

5. Your headline tells the story. If a headline reads: “Ford on deathknell” or “Car company about to crash” or “government bailout for ford”, each headline tells a different story even though it says the same thing. How so?

In the first one, Ford is the subject and deathknell supports it so the goal of the story is to show ford is dying. The goal is to spark fear that ford is dying – to get you to ask yourself a specific question about ford.

In the second one, ‘car company’ is the subject but the keyword is crash. Their goal is to get you wondering which car company and why. Notice no mention of Ford. The goal is to get you interested in who/why – to get you to ask an open question.

In the 3rd one the subject is the government bailout, ford is an afterthought because government bailout is written first. The goal here is to get you thinking about the government, not about ford.

Lesson: the order, subject and description tell the story more than the actual story. Apply this to your tag lines and keyword text as well as your text that shows up on the search engines and on your site. Understand the purpose of what you’re saying not just the point.

Today, we’ll talk a bit about good advertising. First off, there is no such thing! ☺. Advertising is only good if it achieves the goal of the brand, not just for production value. If an agency wins an award, very nice, show me the money! So I have a special place in my heart for direct marketers who push towards a sale. I also have a place in my heart for brands that really ‘get’ advertising. Apple does an amazing job showcasing their brand and pushing the user to buy an iphone without a direct close in the ad but it so clearly projects the iphone value proposition that you want to buy one. The key to successful advertising is first engaging the consumer and second showing a clear value proposition and third a clear path to purchase.

With the iphone, they have quirky clear ads, show off the phones benefits, not features - this is a very important distinction, most companies show off features (such as megapixels) vs. benefits (clear, fast and memorable photos) – and then there is only one path to purchase, ATT which everyone already knows.

If you look at a direct response late night tv ad you can learn a lot. First, you have someone talking in a very clear voice, no music, no jingles, not many people involved, simple and clear and human, the person states the value proposition, usually followed by testimonials of ‘real’ people (testimonials work wonders esp. if video) and then a path to purchase, usually repeated 3 times (the url or phone number).

Let’s dissect:
- clear voice of the product
- clear value proposition
o sometimes ‘throw-ins’ to encourage immediate purchase or discounts
- testimonials
- repetition of the call to action

The next time you create an ad, try to incorporate these things, its not always possible but it works

In an online ad what do you do ?
- state your benefit: “Lowest mortgage rates in nyc” – use a clear action button on the ad and rotate a testimonial in the creative (I don’t understand why people don’t do this) and then on your landing page – use an image projecting your product or target customer, testimonials, with video and photos if possible and multiple of them and a clear place of action

Then after the sale ask if the user wants to share their purchase with their friends through email, facebook or twitter and offer them a discount to offer their friends (years ago studies prove that direct recommendations often lead to sales and that if you market a product to a persons friend its more likely to lead to a sale than marketing to someone random in his demographic.

So my last post was a tribute to Darren Herman for making it into the NY Times. I’d like to spend a minute talking about data. Data is extremely valuable and getting more valuable as we speak. When a user shops at say 1800 flowers and buys something, that user is worth a lot of money to say a restaurant to immediately use for ad targeting. On some sites, the data will become more valuable than the actual advertising. Say for example, you have a site dedicated to people who use a specific type of diabetes medicine and you have registered users, now maybe you only have 500,000 impressions a month but you have 80,000 unique visitors. Those 80,000 cookies are worth a fortune because now the big pharma company can target ads to those users throughout the entire internet and potentially reach them many millions of times. In the future, we will see specialty sites being built just to collect data to sell. Hmm….

“What do you do?” is a question I am often asked. In the past I relished the fact that i could answer something like ‘everything and nothing’ or something vague like ‘I build digital media companies’. But then I started learning more about positioning people and perception. I know I talk alot about perception but sometimes it takes a reset to really realize how it applies to yourself.

So what did I do? I asked myself that question and what’s my answer now? I am the Chairman of an advertising company (Apparition Ads) and I produce conferences. Simple. If anyone digs further i can talk about how I love advising entrepreneurs and get great pleasure out of helping people enhance their business (or life) and all sorts of other things but start simple and develop from there.

I was recently asked why I started Shiny Door.  My response:

I was in a tough spot.  The startup I had been with did not make it.  I looked around for a position but I could not find a good fit.  I really wanted a job that I would love and that would make a difference in the world.  Through networking, the idea of teach a social networking class came about.  As I thought more about it and talked to others about it, I realized I could turn that idea into a business plan.

I love people.  I love figuring out web applications.  I understand the struggles of small/medium businesses and nonprofits.  I have found value from networking in general and online social networking in particular.  The pieces all seemed to fit together.

I love to talk social media but I recognize my specialty is relationship building.  I teach folks the importance of integrating online and offline networking.

I never could have launched Shiny Door without my network.  My network not only helped me find my initial clients but also helped me with my website, my logo, my curriculum, my business model, etc.  Thanks to my network (and a lot of hard work), I was able to launch Shiny Door within three weeks of inception and become profitable within eight weeks of inception.

As the only person developing Shiny Door, I very much needed (and do still need) feedback from my friends and colleagues.  My network provides the guidance and support that all startups require.

I have more receipts from coffee shops than any other place.  I don’t even drink coffee! The sustainability of Shiny Door is reliant upon me having a strong network.  To have a strong network, I must meet with online colleagues offline and interact with as many contacts as possible online.  I believe in quality over quantity.  Colleagues who know me and trust me are more likely to recommend me and/or provide guidance to me.

Shiny Door is the best social networking success story I could possible tell folks.  Because its my story.  What’s your story?

Someone suggested that i could spike traffic here by doing integrated blog marketing. You know, twittering that i’m typing, then facebooking my post and digging it. Ah so many angles its scary. Alas I don’t care to - the goal of this blog is to be my diary so I remember what the heck i do every day. I have no memory. I don’t care about traffic. I want to record my thoughts and hopefully someone else out there will learn a bit from it. Simple.

So this post is about a fictional company I wasn’t asked to investigate. Someone I don’t know approached me to pretend to look into this company that supposedly sells this cool product but doesn’t generate much revenue but burns a lot of cash. This non existent person was not an investor and wasn’t considering making a future investment to save the company.

So I did my non-digging by sending out 10 emails to my network and getting feedback from people that weren’t C-level executives or investors in the space. The feedback was that no one really knows anything about the product but it sounds good.

So what does this mean? It means they don’t know how to position or sell their product. In fact this non-entity has a name that doesn’t represent the product, the wrong sales pitch and is selling the product as a single product when it should be brought into parts. The underlying technology may even be worth something but the company is running out of cash and may end up being shut down.

So what can we learn from this situation? Don’t staff up and hire a huge staff until you have revenues. In fact, don’t even attempt to do that until you have proved the concept behind your company and have a fail safe sales pitch and product positioning. If people don’t know what you do or want your product, no amount of money will save you.

Will this non existent company raise another round? Maybe, probably not but maybe. If they do, the odds are they will give up control and most of the company. All because they put staffing up above proving the market.