Just read a great piece on Small Business Hub about SEO entitled Stopping The Google AdWords Morphine Drip: How We Saved $183 Last Week. These guys echo a sentiment that I’ve been expressing for a long time (and just posted about a few weeks ago)… Investment in SEO is virtually ALWAYS better than investment in Adwords/PPC.

Mike’s article boils it down beautifully. The search phrase that he cares about is “Internet Marketing Software”. Buying a click for this phrase costs about 7 bucks. Having managed to SEO their way to the #6 slot on that page, they got 25 visitors in a week. So, by investing in SEO, they’ve managed to get $700 in PPC value FOR FREE. I’d also imagine that searchers have a bit more inherent trust for organic search results than ads. So, if Mike’s visitors were buyers, I imagine they’d convert a bit better than their PPC brethren.

One of the things that Mike doesn’t talk about in the article (tho we chat a bit about in the comments) is the EFFECTIVENESS of what you’re presenting in the SERP (search engine result page, for you SEO noobs at home).

This isn’t uncommon. Having read a lot of Mike’s articles, I think he’s a rare SEO guy who actually thinks about it from more traditional angles. But most SEO people are very analytical people. They are looking for systems and formulas that allow them to exploit Google better than the next guy. There are degrees of evil here (referred to as “white hat”, “gray hat”, and “black hat” tactics), but they are all variations on a theme– getting Google to perceive your importance as very high in the keyword-spaces that are important to you.

So on to the point of this post– SEOs are so damn focused on getting in front of a ton of eyeballs that they often lose sight of the next critical step– putting something in front of them that inspires action. Pretend you hired an advertising firm to promote your new soft-drink. As you tip back your scotch and soda one evening (that’s what fatcat soft-drink executives drink, right?) you see a commercial on the TV for your product. You look on, horrified, as bizarre images move across the screen. The lighting is bad, the camera work is terrible, and it’s not even clear what product the commercial is about. The next morning, you call up your agency and demand an explanation. Their response: “Yeah, we saved a TON of money on production– but the good news is that we spent the savings on more ad buys! That commercial was seen by millions more people than if we’d blown all that money making a great commercial!”.

The (somewhat meandering point) I’m trying to make here is that you have a few hundred characters to make an impression and inspire action (the click), and you aren’t going to do that by seeding your listings with a jumble of keywords.

So let’s take a look at Mike’s listing.

Not too shabby, but it certainly isn’t inspired marketing copy. A lot of product people feel feel that marketeers are manipulators and that you should just present the facts. The fact is, you can be certain your competition isn’t thinking that way. And surely you’ll agree that you can present the same facts in different ways that result in some pretty different reactions. For example (my favorite– apologies to Robert Heinlein), would you rather have a nice, juicy steak or a muscle tissue sample from a castrated bull? If you’re still not buying it, I suggest you read the studies profiled in the book Made to Stick… You’ll be floored.

The realization that your SERP presentation is so critical is unfortunate. With most user experiences, testing is easy. With SERPs, testing is damn challenging. Changing your title and meta description is easy to do… But Google doesn’t re-index your site THAT often. And a bad change can have very real consequences to your traffic (and your revenue). Testing 5 good ideas could take weeks or months. I would love to hear any ideas on how you can test in the comments.

One idea that I have is creating a faux-Google experience. Create fake Google search pages with fake results that are presented when someone clicks on the search button (with maybe a few pages of results). Then get some test subjects in your target market in and ask them to search for your term and select their vendor based off what they see. Not only would you get to see which of your SERP ideas fly well, but you could also see which of your competition performs well. It’s about as expensive as a usability test, but I think the value would exceed the cost.

Of course, the herculean challenge here is that you don’t have free reign to create copy that sings. You have a tiny title, a little snippet (meta description) and no control over presentation style. And, most importantly, you have to be darn sure that the extra clickability that you create by optimizing your SERP content doesn’t cost you in the rankings game.

Brief note to let my dear readers know that we’ve set up a blog for RescueTime. Right not it’s not that active, but will eventually contain lots of interesting things that we can learn from our anonymous users. By asking them a few questions, we’ll be able to look at how productivity differs by gender, age, industry, and more.

For now, we’ll tide you over with a long-n-wordy case study on our permissions marketing campaign and a link to my appearance on Dave Mason’s syndicated radio show. Good fun!

The best teams I’ve ever worked on have had a peculiar vibe of “mutual awe”. When I saw what my colleagues could pull off, I was dazzled. When I pulled off something cool, THEY were dazzled.

At the same time, I think it’s tremendously valuable to be a hobbyist in the areas where your partners are experts. I’ll never be a programmer, but I’ll always dabble– it helps me know what CAN be done. I’ll never be a salesguy (though I’ve been one), but I read books on how to sell. I’ll never be a writer, but I like to read about the art/science of writing good copy.

One of the blog entries that has stuck with me for a while is Guy Kawasaki’s post on workplace assholes (it even comes with a handy self-exam! (Are YOU one? Uh-oh. Am *I* one?!).

The main reason that the post/test stuck with me was one of the characteristics of workplace assholedom is this belief:

“I could do your job better than you’re doing.”

I’ve already sung the praises of small teams, but I’ll add this to the heap. The smaller the team, the greater to potential for mutual respect and/or awe. The larger the team, the greater the likelihood that SOMEONE on the team is thinking (or even saying) that they could make better design/coding/sales/biz decisions than the person who is currently making them.

Ironically, the larger the team, the greater the likelihood that they might be right.

http://bokardo.com/archives/design-is-not-art-redux/

Great blog entry about design by one of my favorite bloggers.

Human beings are pretty hardwired for instant gratification. We’d all be healthier and happier if we went to the gym regularly, ate right, brushed our teeth, went to the dentist, avoided overexposure to the sun, etc. Instead, we sit in front of the TV because it’s easy and entertaining. We eat fattening food because it tastes damn good.

To search engine marketing equivalent to sitting on your ass in front of the television with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s is PPC (pay per click) search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong– I understand that wrangling Google Adwords can be hard work. There is a lot of skill and science there. But it isn’t necessarily the most healthy way you could work to market your company. In fact, with all of the attention and competition that you find in Adwords, it’s oftentimes a pretty lousy deal. And, for the businesses that don’t have a strong viral component, it’s a flow of visitors that will stop the instant you stop spending the ad dollars.

The smart Adwords folks will carefully craft a funnel that goes all the way to a “conversion” – whether it’s a sale, a user signup, or whatever. Say you’re selling a widget online for $50, with a 50% profit margin (walking away with a clean $25 per widget– not bad!). All you have to do is make sure you pay less that $25 per buyer and you’re making money with Adwords.

Unfortunately, here are other widget sellers out there. They might be sitting on a huge supply of widgets that they have to unload at a loss (meaning that they can bid more per click than you can). They might be backed by VCs, who are hollering at them to drive up sales (even if it’s at a loss). Maybe their profit margins are higher than yours, allowing them to comfortably bid higher. Maybe their funnel is more effective than yours. Or they might just not be bright enough to know how much profit they make on a per-widget basis (“We might lose money, but we’ll make it up on volume!”).

So what’s the best alternative to Adwords?

It’s good old fashioned organic traffic. Being “linkworthy”. Search engine optimization. Burying your customers in service to the point where they are fanatical about recommending you to their widget-buying friends. Building compelling content on your site/blog so that people will link to you (this is a subset of SEO nowadays, really).

It’s not as fun, not as easily measurable, and it’s not NEARLY as instant as pay-per-click marketing. It’s the lifestyle equivalent of eating your veggies and taking a brisk jog a couple of times a week. Sadly, most businesses don’t have the discipline to invest time and money in efforts that generate healthy organic traffic. It just doesn’t provide the short-term shot in the arm that CPC does.

Brian Halligan (of Small Business Hub) offers some pretty compelling arguments for investing in SEO:

1. If you rank high for organic results, it is (typically) long lasting. So, the time/money you spend helping yourself move up the ranks is relatively persistent while the PPC campaign is money spent over and over again.
2. Organic results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well educated crowds. I read a study that showed dramatic differences as you moved from high school eduction to associate degrees to bachelors to masters to phd’s. The more educated your prospect, the less likely they are to click on an advertisement. If you are selling to high school students, you should buy cpc ads. If you are selling to engineers or professors, you need to think more about seo because that’s where the volume is.
3. Organic clicks convert at least as well as paid clicks. Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark study of 3,217 marketers showed that organic clicks converted at an average of 4.2% v. 3.6% for paid.
4. Often times searchers visit your site more than once before self-selecting into a form, whitepaper, etc. We track this data carefully at HubSpot and notice that a decent portion of the leads we get are from people who have visited the site through multiple searches over multiple months. Organic search campaigns have more latency.
5. Marketing Sherpa reports that in the b2b environment, less than one-fourth of b2b buyers to look to paid listings in their first try at accessing information.
6. Many think of Google as a search company, but I think of them as a modern media conglomerate with an ultra-efficient mechanism for selling advertisements that work particularly well in the longtail. Like other media companies, Google benefits from efficient pricing of advertising. As more and more niche companies start to advertise on Google, their prices will become more efficient and their rates will become less and less attractive relative to other media outlets.

So do yourself a favor. Head over to SEOMOZ (my personal favorite SEO resource) and spend a few hours reading their free stuff.

(and be sure to eat your veggies)

There has been some interesting discussion of late about the relationship between youth and successful entrepreneurship. It started with a from-the-hip post by Fred Wilson (which he later elaborated on).

After looking at the chart posted on Valleywag, it got me wondering about how old a fella has to be before he ought to get out of the business of startups.

After reading Fred’s musings and the (damn insightful) blog entry by Clay Shirky, I feel (at the ripe ol’ age of 35) less anxious about the whole thing. Of course, I might just be feeling young because I took the last couple of days off to pal around with my 70 year old father.

Clay states:

I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that music comes from stores. I know that you have to try on pants before you buy them. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that the library is the most important building on a college campus. I know that if you need to take a trip, you visit a travel agent.

In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first — I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur.

“A Lot of Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing”

One thing that struck me about the “unlearnings” that Clay brings up is that they are pretty idea-centric. That is to say, these are the sort of learnings that could keep you, as an entrepreneur, from hitting upon the “big idea”. As I’ve mentioned before (liberally quoting from folks who are smarter than I am), ideas aren’t necessarily in short supply. While I’m sure many startups fail for lack of a good idea, I’d wager the majority fail from poor execution. Methodologies, strategies, and staffing levels that work at Fortune 500 companies simply don’t fly in a small company. The careful modeling, planning, and PowerPoint wrangling that you learn in business school really isn’t a great way to invest your time when your business model might need to change dramatically in a month or two. And I’d wager that the more experienced you are (and the more confident you are in your hard-won wisdom), the less likely you’re going to be able to adapt to working in a small business environment.

I want to explore this a bit more, but (given that I’m buried under a pile of email) it’ll have to wait for another blog post.

In the startup world, people oftentimes use the term “runway” to describe the amount of time we have before we run out of money and need to be profitable. I just read a quote which I think is a lot more appropriate (and creates a greater sense of urgency).

“An entrepreneur who’s just left his day job is like a guy who jumped off a cliff and must assemble his airplane on the way down from a bag of parts.

That airplane is revenue and profit. You need to build that airplane before you hit the ground.

The bottom line is: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!!! Do not waste a minute of it surfing the web, IM’ing, blogging, hanging out at Starbucks, networking with interesting but useless people, or ANYTHING that does not contribute to building that airplane. After the airplane is built and you’re flying, then you can relax a bit and do more of the stuff you enjoy.”

Love that.

(apologies for the lack of gender neutrality in this entry– idea girls exist too…)

I had a colleague the other day refer to me as an “idea guy”. I’m sure they meant it as a compliment, but I winced when I heard it. As a guy who tends to lurk in entrepreneurial circles, I often run into self-identified “idea guys” (usually, they are in “stealth mode”, which I generally find similarly ridiculous)– and virtually every time I do, I tend to walk away shaking my head. Here are 5 quick reasons why your startup doesn’t need an “idea guy”:

1. Everyone is an idea guy. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not the case. I’ve met plenty of folks who aren’t interested (or aren’t good at) the strategy and tactics of software/product development. There are plenty of engineers out there who just want interested technology to fiddle with and couldn’t care less what the grand plan is. There are plenty of designers who just want a good set of design specs so they can make pretty pictures or highly usable prototypes. There are plenty of salesfolks who don’t give a darn what they are selling. So what makes an idea guy an idea guy? Usually it’s the simple fact that they don’t have any other skills to bring to the startup.

2. By virtue of the fact that they consider themselves an idea guy, it quite likely means that they are convinced that their ideas are better than yours (or anyone elses). Of course they are! They are an idea guy! The big problem with this is that startup ideas need to change… Very few startups stick with the exact same idea. How excited is an idea guy going to be about shifting to a new idea that he didn’t generate? Not very exited, as it turns out.

3. Ideas are relatively valueless… because smart people say so. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Paul Graham has to say (though I think the argument about the “sellability” of ideas is pretty weak). Don’t believe Paul? How about Guy Kawasaki? One one my favorite quotes from Guy when he was asked how an entrepreneur could keep their idea from being stolen. His response was “”You could discuss it with no investors, show it to no customers and never hire employees….” (see it in context).

As a test, approach a dozen venture capitalists. Explain that your primary skillset is “idea generation”. Do your best to defend this and give copious examples of your genius. Go home and wait for the phone to ring.

4. Ideas aren’t defensible. Google “First Mover advantage” and you can find all sorts of people debunking that particular myth. Google moved into an established market and clobbered it. Ipods certainly weren’t the first MP3 player. Dodgeball lost out to Twitter. Friendster was sucker-punched by Facebook and MySpace. The first movers spend tremendous amounts of money educating the market and making all sorts of stupid mistakes and the second movers come in when the market is primed and make it look easy.

5. In startup businesses, idea guys run out of things to do pretty quickly. There’s no room in a startup organization for someone to sit around and spew out ideas. Startups need builders, whether you’re building software, hardware, visual interfaces, teams, bank accounts, or audiences. If you’re a founder, you probably need to be good at more than one of these things.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, I feel like every day I run into founder and consultants who think having a million dollar idea is enough to bring to the table. Most of the time, I think this is because they haven’t the faintest clue how hard it is to turn a great idea into a great product or service.

Just read a great article on BBC by way of Slashdot about Web 2.0 (tip o’ the hat to Brian Fioca, who IM’ed me the link) It liberally quotes usability-zealot Jakob Nielsen who, as you can imagine, is not all that enamored with the Web 2.0 movement.

As usual, someone more famous than me summarizes some of my thoughts better than I’m capable of.

What I find strange about Web 2.0 is that we web geeks are losing sight of the fact that the vast majority of people use the internet as a tool. They want information. They want pictures. They want music. They want to buy stuff. They want to search for jobs.

But do they really want to socialize online, just for the sake of socializing?

Certainly teenagers do. I suppose I would too if I had a job that was 8am-3pm, had virtually no responsibilities, and had 16 weeks of vacation time.

There’s a great new study out that says:

• 15% of Americans don’t have an internet connection
• 10% view the Internet as a “hassle” (probably because ever site is trying to get them to join their community)
• About 50% of the population “doesn’t use the internet very much. I’d presume that when they DO use it, they use it as a utility.

To me, the most exciting startups are those that solve problems. That provide a transactional product or service. That, in the words of Nielsen, allow users to “get in, get it, get out”.

I tend to be suspicious of businesses that are trying to create an online “community”. You can certainly build a successful business by doing so. But I think online communities are extremely challenging to build, and they tend to turn off the much-more-massive audience that Nielsen talks about. Amazon would be a LOT less easy to use if they were constantly bombarding me with community features.

Look at LinkedIn. They’ve been around since 2002. They’ve gotten over 28 million in VC and they have a tremendously viral service (WAY before it was cool to be viral!). They are the poster child for social networking for grownups. Yet they’ve only managed to collect 9 million accounts in 5 years (and I’d wager than only a fraction of those are active given that it’s nigh impossible to delete a LinkedIn account).

To this day, I still hear people ask, “So what can you DO on LinkedIn?” I’m hard-pressed to give an answer.

At the end of the day, there seems to be a pretty finite number of adults for whom social networking is at all relevant. And there’s a huge pile of sites that are vying for the attention of these busy users. I’d wager that the only ones who are going to succeed (on a grand scale) are also going to allow the other 90% of the internet audience to “get in, get it, and get out”.

Jobster alumnus Mark Maunder has put his travel blogging startup on hold for a month or two to pursue his muse… Which, in this case is (drumroll please) inline blog comments! It would be irresponsible of me not to mention Mark’s wife and biz partner, Kerry– who is quite likely the only reason that this thing has gotten off the launch pad…. Kerry is a seasoned QA manager and has almost certainly kept this thing from being a bug-ridden pile o’ PERL code.

It’s in “soft-launch” phase and they are working out a few kinks, but I think it’s a pretty exciting idea. So try it out here, head over to Linebuzz.com and bury Mark and Kerry in feedback and bug reports.