We got our results back from the GRA/TAG competition this past week. While we made it to the semi-finals, we didn’t make it into the final four. Overall, the process was a great experience and we learned a lot about ourselves (and we were forced to write a business plan.)
One thing I learned about myself is that I really hate suits. I’m glad I wasn’t born 20 years earlier where wearing it at work was the norm. Maybe that means I would have been a hippie - I dunno.
Anyway, now that other distractions are over, we are moving forward with web and business development. We got a lot done w/o any significant funding and I think we’ll be able to continue our momentum by getting a lot more done in the next two months without any significant funding.
At that point, things should look pretty awesome.
Wei on May 12th 2008 in Business Competitions
Our experience with Stumbling for traffic was met with moderate failure.
Our initial stumble and efforts to get a group to stumble the website into the rotation was met with a spike in traffic. However, the way stumbling works is pretty similar to how drunks stumble into various things. Even though they stumble into your door, sometimes you wonder if you really want them there.
The web browsers that stumbled to the website was untargeted. We received on average close to 100% bounce rate as well as a session time of 1-3 seconds. Whoop-dee-do.
Subsequent stumbling of the website have failed to spark additional traffic even though technically we should be seeing more as a result - I’m not really sure how their algorithms work but it definitely does not seem to be working correctly.
Overall - I would recommend focusing your efforts elsewhere for qualified traffic as stumblers aren’t up to par. The service seems to be great for bots or marketers who are looking to promote something. Usually if I’m browsing something on the web, I’m surfing with a purpose. Even for people with way too much time on their hands, I fail to see why they would stumble from site to site just to be disappointed.
On a separate note, as a webmaster who installed the StumbleUpon toolbar, I have noticed I would occasionally tap on the Stumble button by accident - which leads to confusion, anger, and then me clicking the back button. I would hate to think users who I worked hard to get are coming to my website by accident, and then leaving before ever trying to figure out what’s actually on the page.
Bottom line - would not recommend.
Wei on May 10th 2008 in Marketing
Social bookmarking sites are known to generate short bursts of traffic. Whether these referrals are qualified or not, the debate is still up in the air. For my third test, I will try to get our website seen by the crowd at StumbleUpon. Once we get some data, I will report back on the results.
Wei on May 4th 2008 in Marketing
Most of the companies I’ve consulted for had sick budgets that allowed them to buy traffic. While these techniques are great for them to build an audience and establish a barrier to entry, they don’t do so well for bootstrap startups and/or startups that do not have extensive experience with interactive marketing.
Since KillerStartups was a major fail, and this past week was green week, I’ve decided to run our second test on building organic traffic. (See what I did there?)
In the world of SEO, in addition white hat, black hat techniques; good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, and tons of other duals, there’s the school of broad and generic terms vs. specific and long tail terms. While the phrase used cars is the most generic and most popular search term in the automotive industry, chances are a new site no matter how great will not be able to get the top spots for that phrase without some leg work.
Since that phrase will ultimately be one of the primary traffic drivers for organic search - we are setting that as the long term goal. For the short term, we are focusing on building long tail terms and allowing search stragglers to find us that way.
To do this test, I went to Compete.com to see how users are searching in the automotive space and adopted some pretty broad search rules to be applied to our pages. Users on the web for the most part are either searching for used cars or they’re searching for specific models close to their area (e.g. nissan pathfinder 98057) To adapt to the search patterns, we changed our URLs, title tags, meta keyword and description tags to match these broad search patterns.
The upgrades were done this past week so I will check back with this in about 2-3 weeks after the engines come back to see if our website gets indexed more. Right now, we have about 1430 pages indexed on Google which is good but not great. More to come…
Wei on April 30th 2008 in Marketing, Startup Resources
I don’t spend too much time on YouTube but last night I did spend about 3 hours on omnisio.com watching a bunch of Startup School videos. In fact, I would highly recommend watching all the speakers from Startup School 08 as they all provide great advice on a variety of topics.
The only catch? Even though these videos are shown on a cool new player, sometimes the player gets stuck in the middle of a video for no reason at all. I really hope they fix that soon.
Wei on April 23rd 2008 in Videos
