photo credit: manfrys
‘SEO’ (Search Engine Optimization) is a term widely used to mean “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (organic) search results” (Wikipedia).
As a startup, you have your website ready with excellent content but how will you get it across to the ultimate users? Your website is in a space where there is a lot of search traffic, but how will you make it to the top of search engine rankings and generate traffic (ultimately leads)? There is a lot of confusion by founders of startups around SEO and how it works for a startup.
What we believe – SEO is extremely important for small businesses because normal users (those who don’t live and breath technology) only type a few of their favorite websites directly into the URL bar and for everything else go to search engines, most likely Google. In the 90s, people talked a lot about “home pages” and “site flow” – which matters if you are getting most of your traffic from people typing in your URL directly. However, for most startups, this isn’t the case (at least for the first few years of existence). Instead, the flow you should be thinking about it users going to Google, typing in a key phrase and landing on one of your internal pages.
Search engines are ‘matchmakers’ between users “demanding” information and websites “supplying” it. SEO helps tracing the gaps in the supply of information and providing traffic to your startup website.
The following article and slideshow provide great tips for Startups on SEO:
http://www.slideshare.net/willobrien/try-will-o-brien-startup-corner-seo-and-social-media
http://socalcto.blogspot.com/2009/11/seo-for-startups.html
As a startup founder, don’t overvalue better results with SEO than is deserved. There is a great value in SEO for startups. The beauty of SEO is as a long-term strategy for building inexpensive traffic.
In the same conversation about SEO for startups, the founder either tells me:
• There's a ton of search in my space
• I'm not sure how much search there is in my space
photo credit: cloudzilla
Entrepreneurs agree that shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den are changing business culture – for the better. “Entrepreneurial” reality TV shows have become popular because they reflect all the problems, issues and situations a startup or small business owner may face.
Reality-Business TV offers an insight into the highs and lows of starting a business and there are quite a few lessons startups can learn;
Don’t overvalue (or undervalue) your business – sales and profit are different
Study Competition – Know about your competition as much as you know about customers
Diversify – New markets, new distribution channels or new verticals; explore all possible avenues
Perfect Your Elevator Pitch and Presentation Skills – it will help communicating with investors, clients, employees etc
Forget your ego – an over-inflated business ego will ignore the ‘cost’ and ‘risk’ realities
Further information on what a startup can learn from business reality shows is provided in the article below:
http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-lending-credit-services/13641763-1.html
Whether you are a start-up seeking investment (think Shark Tank) or an established business in need of a re-launch to abate failure - these shows deliver what could be considered a 50 minute master class in how to succeed in business.
photo credit: Tracy O
In many articles that provide tips to building successful startups, a lot has been written about three key factors: The caliber of a startup team, quality of a startup’s product and size of a startup’s market. Many entrepreneurs believe that the only thing that matters when it comes to startup success is getting a right team/product/market fit. But an important point most startups forget is the cost of customer acquisition. In fact a lot of startups solve the product/market fit problem, but fail because they don’t find a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.
It is also important to ask yourself the question: can my business realistically expect to acquire customers for considerably less than the amount that I can monetize them?
The service/product your startup is providing may be extremely interesting and compelling. However, if your business doesn’t pay attention on how much will it cost to acquire customers, your startup success dream, perhaps, will just remain a dream.
The article mentioned below gives a detailed explanation on how to calculate the cost of acquiring customers and comparing it with the lifetime value of a customer (LVC) to find out if your startup can really succeed:
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/
The article is a great resource for startups.
Today is the last day of 2009. That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s. 2009 was not a very good year for startups considering the recession and economic downturn. It was also a rough year on the Venture Capital front. But, there are promising signs that VCs are preparing to ramp up their investment by injecting much needed cash flow into startups in 2010. So that’s good news on the VC investment front but startups also need to make and keep certain resolutions to be successful in the coming year. Here are a few important ones:
1. Simplicity and Stability – reduce unnecessary components and be consistently excellent.
2. Set realistic deadlines and meet them
3. Value your team and their commitment – have a collective vision
4. Be receptive and open to the market – ready to absorb and change accordingly
5. Release Early - Release Often – a balance between perfection and speed
6. Internet Marketing will be indispensable in 2010. A Website design or Website redesign will help your startup keep pace in the competitive market
Happy New Year from the Bhopu Team!
A new idea is often the basis for starting up a business. Many entrepreneurs spot a gap in the market and start businesses that provide a product or service that fills it. Though having an idea is important but entrepreneurs get so involved in their ideas that they lose focus and objectivity. Here is where researching your business idea becomes important.
It is important to research the viability of your idea before launching a startup. Thorough assessment and market research at an early stage will help you to establish whether there is a market for your product or service.
The research plan should clearly spell out the objectives of your research. Research can be conducted by gathering information from the web, periodicals, federal and state agencies, industry associations, and so on. You can categorize the research by following the 4C’s – Company, Customer, Competitor and Collaborators.
A detailed article on the same is written by Karen E. Spaeder in Entrepreneur.com:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/businessideas/evaluatingyouridea/article70518.html
Shenker, president of the ONswitch LLC, a full-service marketing firm in Westchester, New York. "Rather than taking the time to thoroughly plan and research, they sometimes plow ahead with execution, only to spend valuable dollars on unfocused or untargeted activities."
A common mistake many startups make is that they don’t conduct strict research to check the feasibility of their ideas. Research is of vital importance to startups if they want to be successful.
I believe that since you’ve actually come up with a thought of launching a Startup, you do have a magnificent idea and have done all the research around it! And why shouldn’t you? After all, your dream will materialize through your Startup venture. It definitely deserves all the attention and effort.
But don’t forget that no matter how ‘unique’ your idea is, there is always enough competition in the market to pull your startup down. How will you deal with this competition ultimately determines your future in the industry. Customer Service, Convenience, Experience, Economic rates – all of them are offered by mostly all the businesses today!
That’s why the best way to drive people to buy from you is offering something that they can only get from you and no one else. The Marketers call it USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Ask yourself “What is different or better about the products or service my startup has to offer?”
The article below outlines a few steps a startup can take to identify a ‘Killer USP’ and stay ahead of competition:
http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9485/1/unique-selling-proposition-transform-sales.htm
In other words, you need to spend some time looking at your competition. Because it’s impossible to know what makes you unique when you don’t know what anyone else is offering.
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs find it difficult to find a USP for their business because they’re so involved in it that they forget the real world realm. Define your features and benefits, define your target audience, know your competition and write your USP.
How does Israel—with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile all around—produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and China combined? Israel has transformed the challenges it has faced into assets that form the key of its ‘culture of innovation’. Adversity of all kinds, have forced Israelis to be resourceful, to do more with less, to innovate and be global from day one. There are quite a few parallels we can draw between Israel and startups; passion, resourcefulness and persistence being the most important ones.
- Passion – something you should feel as an entrepreneur, for the startup life, for your company, for your vision – is all-encompassing
- Resourcefulness – know how to get information and results you want
- Persistence – keep fighting till the end
Israel is an apt synonym for the global impact a startup business can make despite having “enemies” with massive resources. Senor and Singer from Start-Up Nation have written a book on lessons a business/startups can learn from Israel.
Throughout Nation, Israelis are a frank-speaking people who are willing to explore the world, to learn from those experiences, and to be persistent with implementing ideas in business. Managers at Intel Israel, for example, are credited for changing Intel’s strategic decision to no longer seek increased processor clock speed and instead create new processing paths.
Read the book summary and this itself will give you some good idea of what lies beneath (in the book)
Going by the numbers, it’s easy to say 2009 was the year social networking went mainstream. After all, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third most populated, behind China and India. And because of this trend, businesses began to adopt social media in 2009 and are likely to get more involved in the New Year.
To keep in pace, most of the startups also jump on this lovely, brightly-colored social media bandwagon. So are startups doing the right thing by blindly following the ‘social media movement’? A lot of experienced consultants would say it all comes down to the approach you take, which is very true.
As a startup, being overly invested in social media can be detrimental to your growth. Also, you have a few resources to spend namely tech resources and number of hours in a day. Startups should look at social media in a different light – instead of jumping in and asking “how can it help us” ask “do we need this right now”. Larger companies have bigger resources, so as a startup you can’t compare or copy what they do.
Social media is here to stay – and at certain times, when used in certain ways, it can be very effective. But startups should learn how to prioritize and have a look at the ‘Terms of Use’ of Social media. The following article gives more insight on the subject:
Start-ups also have a ton of options. They really are entering with a clean slate most of the time and, often, a huge number of resources. They have investors, boards, friends, family, old colleagues, old networks, etc., all pushing for them and offering a helping hand. So when it comes to deciding where they want to invest their energy and call in those favors, it can get tricky.
What is Technology Transfer? Generally speaking, it’s the process of transmitting research, technology or scientific findings from research labs to commercial users i.e. ‘Technology Commercialization’. Many companies, universities and government organizations have an “Office of Tech Transfer” dedicated to identifying research which has potential commercial interest and strategies on how to exploit it.
The process of commercially exploiting research varies widely. Tech transfer models and techniques can involve licensing, joint ventures or partnerships. The classic model was to develop a license to transfer new technology or research to an existing company. But a very few existing companies will take the risk of commercializing ‘premature’ technology findings. This is where startups come in and facilitate tech transfer.
Startups have an opportunity to bring technology from the research labs to the commercial end users and companies. They can either work on the technology and build it in-house completely or further research on a technology provided by the researchers. A new model of tech transfer is being evolved and startups have a major role to play!
Brian Darmody talks more about this topic in an interview with venturehype. Have a look: http://venturehype.com/startups-creation-and-tech-transfer/
Most university technology, however, isn’t mature enough to interest large companies (biotechnology is one notable exception to this rule). Therefore, universities have been developing new models of technology partnering and commercialization in the last 20 years.
When you’re starting up, you usually have a great idea or rather to say that you have a great idea and that is why you are starting up. This great idea of today will be the “killer product” for tomorrow and will turn out be an absolute blockbuster, or at least that is what you believe. Here is where the “Stealth” mentality comes in. You obviously want to protect your idea from the competitors and you think that being secretive is the key to success for your start up.
All is well except for the price that you will have to pay in the longer run for being locked up in your basement, talking to yourself for that ground breaking product you are working on. Products and services are made successful by adoption and adoption only happens after testing and feedback and iterations. Startups suffering the “stealth syndrome” lose out on great industry connections, PR opportunities, feedback from potential customers, and affluent investors.
What eventually makes a difference between success and failure of your startup isn’t your idea but your capability to create and dominate the market.
Truer words were never spoken before; ‘stealth’ startups need to open to reality. Vivek Wadhwa of UC Berkeley explains why: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/19/stealth-startupsget-over-yourselves-nobody-cares-about-your-secrets/
Learning what a customer needs is an iterative process. You try something, get feedback. Both you and your customer learn more and you try again. You keep doing this until you have something which is so compelling that the customer will pay money to have it—that’s when you know you have a killer product. But you can’t get feedback if you’re in stealth. You only have yourself to talk to.
Hope this information was informative and useful
