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
Entrepreneurship sure is getting easier these days. Years ago, it seemed like my only option to network with local entrepreneurs were schoolmates or Chamber of Commerce events. Yeah, I was young and honestly a bit turned off by the official sounding of “chamber of commerce” so I never went to those.
Well, luckily these days, tons of options are now available for like-minded people meet. In addition to local meetup groups, a new networking thing just popped up called Startup Drinks.
You go. You network. You help each other out.
Sounds easy enough… now who’s going to make a complex app to track all of this? 
Wei on April 19th 2008 in Networking, Startup Resources
There are an ungodly amount of resources out there that says when doing a startup, you should raise money from either friends, family or fools. For the 10 years I’ve been trying to execute that statement, I was only able to do it twice. Unfortunately the amounts I raised were too low to help reduce any risks and ultimately the startup didn’t really go anywhere.
No, this post does not have the silver bullet to the FFF problem. However, if you do have FFF’s that like your idea but are on the fence, we did find two services that may help you push em over the edge.
The first service we found is Virgin Money. Virgin Money draws up legal contracts that adds a business/legal element to loans between friends and family. For about $200, your fools can get some assurance that they will get money back based on the terms of the loan. Yes, with this service, you can’t just make up random empty promises - on the bright side, you also can’t make up ridiculous rates of return in certain states that forbids it.
The second service we just saw is another startup promoting social savings. Smarty Pig promotes savings and allows your friends and family to help you reach your goal. I would elaborate further but they already have an awesome video intro on their home page that explains the service; (something we should probably do for our web site.)
While we are unable to help you find new rich friends, hopefully the two services above will crack your existing rich and risky friends who like your current business idea. On the flip side, if you know anyone who has more money than sense and like cars, feel free to refer them our way! We could use the help!
AlphaLab in Pittsburgh has now joined yCombinator and TechStars as a startup launch program. (We really need one of these in Atlanta!) AlphaLab’s deal is slightly better than TechStars since you receive $25,000 for only 3% equity in the company. TechStars takes 5% equity in your company for $15,000 and yCombinator gives you $15,000 for about 6% if you have 2 founders.
From a pure money standpoint AlphaLab has the best deal. Similar to the other programs, your startup will also receive services, advisers and office space in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Having had a high school friend launch a successful web business from Pittsburgh, it does seem like the city is suitable for these kinds of incubators. However, the program does expect you to stay in Pitt past the six month build period - which isn’t very accommodating for startups who have already established themselves elsewhere. Overall, the location is probably the biggest drawback unless you’re a college student.
The deadline for the Summer/Fall program is March 31st. Program starts on June 2nd.
I got a tip from
Andrew Hyde, most recently famous for
VC Wear - clothes for VC’s about another business competition that’s currently accepting applicants.
TechStars.org is a different kind of business competition that doesn’t focus as much on the prize money as much as education and networking. On the surface, the deal is:
- a summer in Boulder, CO
- 40 educational dinners/seminars
- $5,000 per founder (up to $15,000) in seed money
- a hip incubator work area
…in exchange for 5% of your company.
Below the surface, there are priceless networking opportunities and coaching that exists to help you succeed - all of which seem like a great deal if you can spend a summer in Colorado.
There’s only about 22 days left for 2008’s program if you’re interesting in applying for this opportunity. If your loved ones won’t mind you taking a 3 month journey to find yourself, this program is worth checking out.
