The Key To Succesful Startup PR: Build Trust Before You Need It
Brian Solis wrote a profound article on TechCrunch called PR Secrets for Startups. He lists many good tips all startups should know about public relations, including Understand You’re Not the Only Story in Town, Don’t Launch on Mondays and Measure Success, Not Traffic.
Many of his advice are very important for startups, where ever they are coming from. Solis writes about the role of the founder in attending and creating conversations and making contacts all the time.
As Solis points out, blogging is one natural way for a founder to get into the conversation. He should comment on other blogs and write articles that link back to his own or company blog. He should of course make contacts with journalists and bloggers at conferences and other networking events. Most importantly, and I can’t stress this enough, contacts should be made and the reputation built before they are needed.
One good example of Finnish startups that are active commentators on blogs and have a good blog of their own are they guys of Scred. I see their comments often at places like TechCrunch and Arctic Startup. But I believe that they could be even more active in their own blog. Other Finnish startups should definitely do the same.
Smart Aggregation, Not Search or RSS, Is Key In Getting Valuable Traffic
Fred Wilson has shared where the traffic to his blog, A VC, comes from. He made an important notion on how the majority of users have come to his site through search engines, but their dominance has declined in the past year. He notes that an almost good a source has been from sites he calls smart aggregators. By these he means sites that aggregate either algorithmically (Techmeme) or through user behavior (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon) the most important new articles. The importance of these aggregators will surely continue to grow especially in topics like technology.
As Fred mentions himself, the traffic from RSS-readers has not increased for him, because they just are too hard for the average user to use. I have to admit that I personally fall into the same category. It’s not that I don’t see the value of RSS-readers, it’s just better (easier, faster) for me to get a pre-prioritized list of the most important news and post through Techmeme or even Friendfeed.
For most publishers and bloggers getting traffic from these smart aggregators is more valuable than getting traffic from search engines using some random keywords. Fred Wilson correctly divides search engine results between “search bookmarks”, which should be counted as direct traffic, and real search. The importance of Search Engine Optimization is not diminishing: see my earlier post about the declining importance of URL’s in navigation as opposed to search.
Twitter Ready for Main-Stream Competition?
Twitter is a great service. The microblogging platform is already the fastest media when it comes to technology and Silicon Valley related news. Twitter is proving to be more and more useful all the time.
It’s a shame Jaiku wasn’t able to keep its front runner position after being bought by Google. Jaiku is the very reason why Twitter hasn’t gotten picked up here in Finland at all, but Worldwide Twitter has close to 900k users (according to TwitDir) and has evolved to become the better service. Read more…
Blogosphere Roundup: ChicagoCrime, Million Dollar Homepage, DEMO Companies
Due to hosting problems I haven’t had the possibility to post in a while. Here’s a short recap on some of the more interesting things that have emerged in the blogosphere during the past two weeks.
Top 5 Startup Blogs
Here is my very subjective view on the current top 5 best blogs about startups in no particular order:
- FoundRead, which is part of technology blog network GigaOm, gives good tips and lessons for startups.
- Mashable features news especially on social networking and has great lists such as SOCIAL NETWORKING GOD: 350+ Social Networking Sites.
- blog.pmarca.com by Marc Andreessen, former co-founder of Netscape, now the co-founder of free social networking platform Ning, offers good advice for startups, that are definitely based on very extensive experience.
- How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley VC and author, has good advice for startups from an investor’s perspective.
- And no list about startup blogs can be complete without Techcrunch. It was started 2005 by Michael Arrington and now boasts 2.5M unique visitors per month. Techcrunch has usually well informed news about new web products and services. It has become the archetype of startup blogs both in good and bad.
Making Money Blogging Tips - mostly useless or dishonest
Making money blogging is the modern way to get yourself an easy income by doing basically nothing. At least that’s something I’ve come across lately when I’ve been surfing the blogosphere looking for tips and information on blogging: how to produce good content, traffic and link building, blogging communities and also tips how to make money blogging.
Money making tips usually fall into to different categories
- Useless: “Get your self a blog from Blogger or Wordpress and get Google Adsense running, and your instantly making huge piles of money.”
- Outright dishonest: I’m not talking about linkbaiting or getting as many backlinks as possible here. I’m talking about tips that may not be illegal but at least immoral.
These tips appeal to your laziness or to the fact that most people are not up to producing quality content by giving you a “secret” easy way out. Read more…
Starting a Blog: Tools
All startup companies need one and if you are thinking about setting up a blog or want to develop any site further, here are some of the tools I’ve been using while starting this blog and have found useful so far.
Blogging platform
I looked into a few blogging solutions and Wordpress seemed the best one for me. I wanted a simple install that can be hosted anywhere, but I also wanted flexibility and possibility to modify the look and features endlessly without superior technical knowledge. So far I’ve been happy with Wordpress and I’m going to post my thoughts on it in a longer post sortly.
What does Google see? Read more…
Blogging is a Business Model
This piece about TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington made me realize that blogging can really be considered a separate business model aside “traditional” news or content publishing. You have low costs due to the fact that you can use off the shelf freeware in comparison to more robust content management systems that traditional publishers use. It is very easy to setup a blog and the only real cost comes from the time taken to write your content and nurture your audience by replying to their comments.
What really sets blogging apart as a business model is the commenting on posts. This is real, direct, interaction between the publisher and the audience. Also you do you marketing by commenting on other people’s blogs and by entering into conversation between blogs.
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