This is a guest post by Donnie Cooper of Inboundable.com thinks we should do for our company’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).Some of the advice in this post is specific to us and some applies to any other business with a website as well. Create awesome content Post blogs with super easy steps to follow of how to’s when you get customer questions. Everyone is professional. It’s boring, and no one talks about it. Be yourself. Now that you are yourself, rewrite your site’s content completely. Speak at local events about how people can use what you do, & create an online course with the videos. When you attend social events like lessconf, make friends and follow up to build & keep the friendships strong. In short, easy to understand items- list your services in your navigation. Everything else put under “About Us”. Match every page on your site with a keyword you’d like to rank for (select “exact” on the left, not the defualt “broad”. Get attention Do a little free work if you have to, but help a big local company and create a case study of it. Post that on your home page with a testimonial from the owner (and some staff), and write a guest post for their blog talking about some cool new thing they’re doing for their customers and mention briefly how your company helped with it. Build wordpress plugins that will help your customers and promote the fact that you know wordpress so well, that you build plugins. Come up with useful ideas for a client you want to work with. Write a blog post about “how xyz company can get more customers”. For an example, come up with a great SEO plan for a boston restaurant and talk about how they need a better design (which they do), and how they can beat everyone else in google maps. Spend 10 minutes every week asking yourself which websites could send you leads if they linked to you, and how can you be creative enough to make them want to link to you. If you do nothing else, do this one item. Do a great job at making friends on twitter, and communicate with them and others. Tags and such Make sure you do all the best practices for optimizing your code Don’t spend more then a week doing this. Almost everyones’ SEO sucks becuase they spend 80% of their efforts on things like tags when they should spend 5% or less. Most importantly Pay attention to the blogs of startup companies as much or more then you do seo blogs. Great startups get marketing done, full time seo’s spend too much time studying. Take little steps at a time, think in 10 minute size activities. spend more time marketing yourself than you do learning. Don’t wait, start now. “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow, Get 80% solution and start executing” – Jack Welde CEO of Smartling.
Month: April 2013
Notes from LessConf 2013 – Inspiring, Fun, Friendly
First comes the story we all asked each other when we met…”How did you hear about LessConf?” Most answers were, oh I was here before or my friend told me about it. Mine is just a bit different and it happened on February 17, 2013 when I stumbled upon a blog post called “Top North American Conferences for Entrepreneurs” on the Clarity.fm blog http://blog.clarity.fm/top-north-american-conferences-for-entrepreneurs/ If you visit the site you will see that there is a long list there but while scrolling through the list I got to the section titled “Have Your Mind Blown (Inspiration)” and what I saw next was love at first sight with LessConf. LessConf (April 11-13, 2013; Panama City Beach, Florida) Pack a diaper because you are going to pee yourself many times. LessConf is the place to go to laugh, listen to amazing speakers and leave smiling. More importantly, it’s the place to be if you want to challenge conventional thinking. The LessConf website only confirmed the love with its most awesome descriptions and weird design of floating bubbles. What is LessConf? LessConf is not like other events you’ve heard about. Sure there’s speakers, after parties, people with laptops, it has been called “Summer camp for startups”, “the best time of my life,” and even “the world’s worst conference”. Fast Forward to April 11, 2013 when I landed at the Panama City airport all alone, nervous and excited at the same time. Thoughts were going through my head…”what if they don’t like me?”, “what if this isn’t for me since I’m not a programmer or coder?”, “what if…” and then I snapped out of it while sending an email to the group as I didn’t see anyone with a LessConf sign like we were instructed. That’s when I met my first SuperFriends of the weekend, Nathan & Kim @FirstNate whose cool product PromoFLy already has me hooked now, you too should have a look www.getpromofly.com. Other soon to be SuperFriends were slowly gathering around us until we got to about 20 people that then squeezed into vans sponsored by GitHub and headed to our destination at the Bay Point Wyndham Resort where we signed our life away in about four separate waivers and received LessConf T-shirts and other items from our gracious sponsors. What followed next during dinner that night had some people running as live animals from ZooWorld came out of their cages. There was a crocodile, a parrot, a snake, a lemur, a hedgehog and even a baby kangaroo that became a twitter celebrity that night. Of course the Charfigy.com bull tried stealing the kangaroo’s fame at the afterparty when it started dancing to AndyD’s music. More entertainment that night was provided by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus (thanks Steph & Keith) who were ever so patient and supportive in teaching others how to juggle. Personal accomplishment was when I went from not being able to juggle one to juggling with three. After a long first night and low on sleep we were ready for the un-named speakers scheduled to inspire us on April 12. 2013, and inspire they did! The Martin Theatre in downtown Panama City was the venue of choice (and a great one at that). The first speaker to take the stage was Jack Welde – CEO of Smartling.com He a technology early-adopter, serial entrepreneur, and combat-decorated Air Force pilot. Some of Jack’s quotes & advice: “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow” “Get 80% solution and start executing” Have a Back Up Plan OODA Loop – “Observe -> Orient -> Decide ->Act” Commander’s Intent: key element to help a plan maintain relevancy and applicability in a chaotic, dynamic, environment.”Small changes can have a big impact” Broad View (Don’t micromanage) High Level Goals Mid Level Objectives “Communication is negotiation””Aviate, navigate, communicate” OverCommunicate “Sound cool on the radio” keep calm like Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger who landed in the Hudson river… see video Sound cool to the rest of the world even if business is in trouble “If they are shooting at you, you’re doing something right” “Invest in training” “Learn how to learn” “Take care of your people” Our next speaker was AJ Leon of PursuitOfEverything.com AJ used to be an unremarkably average financial executive in Manhattan until he decided to stop living the life he was supposed to live, and start living the life he was destined to live. Now, he spends most of his time changing the world. He is a writer, designer, entrepreneur, humanitarian and world traveler. Some of AJ’s quotes and advice “Musings from a Life Reinvented”: “Your life is always just one brief moment of audacity away from remarkable” Starting from scratch -you don’t have to choose, you can create “Define your moments or they will define you” “This is not your practice life, this is all there is” “Most people are waiting for a glitch” I was trapped “The more money you make, the harder it is to walk away” A lottery or inheritance to go on that trip they’ve been dreaming of a big bonus to use and start their own business or… a cup of Starbucks coffee to burn the sh*t out of them so they can sue for money “I was making an extraordinary amount of money but I hated my life, I despised my work” “I hated myself for trading my life for more money” “You can, and should rebel against a system that tries to tell you what your life should be like” “We all dream of escaping the office, but we don’t change what we do after getting out.” “Everything from tomorrow on is unwritten, be the protagonist and write your own novel” ” We got rid of almost everything we owned except what fit into a backpack” “Taught ourselves how to travel the world on the cheap, bartered by creating websites or services etc” “You can choose options that are given to you or you can reject all options and set out to create from scratch” Up to bat came Ryan Ohara who works over at Dyn Inc. in Business Development He is