Wes Cutshall

The Problem

For about two years now I’ve had a vision for a way to crowdsource website startup marketing. You start an incredible new web service and you ask for the crowd to help launch it. Wahooly had the same vision but has a horrible implementation, IMO. There is a lot of “friction” around giving up equity in your businesses in order to “buy” traction from the public. I don’t think Wahooly will succeed (they’ve been in Beta for almost two years?) due to this business model. Before I ever heard about Wahooly, though, I started a crowdsourced marketing website, MemberMob. It ended up not taking off the way I had expected it to. Clients were emailing me asking when we would start taking orders but the crowd wasn’t signing up to be our workforce. After having outside consultants take a look at the site, a problem was identified. The crowd that we were targeting, the general public, wasn’t interested in pushing random websites to their friends via social media in order to earn a few bucks. We had not predicted this problem. We thought everyone loved money. Back to the drawing board.

The Solution

After taking some time away from MemberMob I came up with a “pivot” for the crowdsourced marketing concept. The idea of crowdsourcing website launches is so strong in me that I had to find a solution. The idea is simple. Entrepreneurs need a way to socially market their new websites without paying tens of thousands of dollars just to see if the service will be popular. But who are we going to find that is willing to help them out by posting these new sites to social media? Other entrepreneurs! Other entrepreneurs, who themselves want to market their own websites. It’s basically a cyber back-scratching. The new website is Lookafox!

How It Works

Entrepreneur A starts posting Lookafox! links to their social media account. Over a few months they earn hundreds of credits through their link clickthroughs. When the time is right, Entrepreneur A creates a social media campaign on Lookafox! Entrepreneur B has just registered on Lookafox! and wants to build equity to go towards his social media campaign. He sees Entrepreneur A’s social media campaign and posts a custom tracking URL to his Twitter account. He now starts earning credits for his own social media campaign while providing traffic to Entrepreneur A’s website. And on and on.

Conclusion

Through Lookafox! we can all get traction for our web startups without spending a fortune. You help me, I help you, we help him, and we all win. And get rich?

Choosing a business name can be difficult. I speak with people all the time who are having trouble coming up with a name for their new venture. Here are a few ways you can come up with a business name.

Start a Naming Contest

You might not be creative enough to come up with a stellar business name, but thousands of people are waiting to help you. Naming Force hosts business name contests where the public helps name your business. Simply post a contest, and award, and they’re off and naming your new business. Naming Force ranks the name submissions so that you know which names are best.

Use a Random Name Generator

If you’re looking for a Web 2.0-style name a random name generator can be helpful. This Business Name Generator is perfect for generating modern name mash-ups.

Buy an Existing Brandable Domain Name

There are websites that specialize in selling existing, unused, domain names that are brandable names. Do you like Ardonia, Nymba, or Prosaria? They’re all for sale at ReadymadeNames.com.

The biggest website implementation mistake I see is still the Wall. People are just convinced that their offering is so enticing that people are going to be compelled to register just to find out if they’re truly interested in becoming a customer. This goes for free, freemium, and for-pay websites. I’m still shocked at the mistakes being made in this area. What’s the cause? Ego? Lack of creativity? There’s a solution.

In 2004 when I was doing research for my lost dog website idea I ran into a ton of websites behind a Wall. One in particular has stuck with me. The domain has since been sold (hint, hint, Walls suck) so I won’t link to it here. The website had a registration fee and a Wall. If you lost your dog you could pay to register and then you’d be able to search their found dogs list, etc. No public stats. No sample data. No idea if ANYONE was using the website (they weren’t). When I designed Fido Finder one of my ideas was to make it so obvious if/that it was used. And, I didn’t make people pay to register (that’s the mother Wall of them all, the Pay Wall).

Workarounds to the Wall

Groupon

Groupon.com is hidden behind a wall…if you visit their home page directly. The home page is a wizard walking you through picking your city and registering with your email address. You have no idea if they are offering anything you want. But, they have allowed for viral sharing. Their city pages are open to the public, if you know how to find them (Google). The Houston page shows current deals with details. The site also allows for direct linking to the individual deals themselves without having to be a registered member to view the deal. This allows for email sharing. Without this “window” on the side of their Wall, Groupon wouldn’t have the viral traffic that has made it a household name.

Groupon home page attempts to get you to climb the Wall

You can find city pages, though, if you Google for them, or are linked to them.

Fab

Fab.com has an interesting workaround for insisting that their products be behind a Wall. For example, Fab advertises its products on Facebook. If you click an ad you’re taken to a landing page that shows the page content in the background with a “register/login” overlay. You can see a dimmed content page behind the registration box. You can tell that this content is what you wanted to look at when you clicked the ad. It’s just enticing enough that you might consider registering in order to see more about this product. It’s an interesting compromise. Fab’s business model is built on the concept of emailing you daily product offerings. Their goal is to get access to your inbox to sell more products. For their concept to work you have to give up your email address. It worked, at least for me. Fab developed a glass Wall that I could see through. I could tell what was on the other side, and I wanted to be able to access it. So I gave up my email address. And now they email me every day and often I click their product links. Hautelook.com has a similar interface. You can view the current “events” from behind the tinted window. But if you want full access you have to register.

It’s behind a Wall, but I can see what it is!

Ideeli

Ideeli.com, another fashion deals website goes about skirting the Wall in a different manner. Ideeli first takes a shot at getting you to register on their home page. If you’re curious enough and click anywhere on the page (away from the registration box) you’re taken past the Wall, it seems. You now are viewing the product catalog. If you click through to a specific product you can now “add to cart”. When you try to add to your cart you are informed that you must be a registered user. Ahah! And this is not the same as a retail site asking you to create an account for checkout, you will be registering to receive daily/weekly deal emails. This interface is a good alternative to completely hiding behind the Wall.

Ideeli home page, click on the woman and you go to the catalog

It will appear as if you bypassed the Wall. You can see the products!

Click on a product and click “Add to Cart” and your shopping is abruptly stopped.

Klout

Klout.com is a website that measures your Internet reputation. Currently the only people that care about someone’s Internet reputation are those of us who have a Google alert set up with our own name. Nobody really looks someone ELSE up on Klout, do they? If you happened upon your own Klout profile, which is often generated based on public Twitter (etc) data before you ever visit, you would see something like the image below. You can see that Klout has information about you, and your friends / followers. If you were curious enough, you would be able to register to find out what else Klout knows about you. Klout wants you to register and connect to all of your social media accounts. Giving you a sample of the data they have about you is enticing enough for most to sign up. If you’ve made it far enough to find your Klout page you’ll probably register to see what’s behind the Wall.

This is the Klout Wall. But you can see through it. Register to see more.

Instagram

Instagram.com, by being a smart phone app, has a built-in Wall. You have to download the app in order to see what it really will offer you. The good thing about Instagram is that it’s built upon sharing. You can get an idea what the app offers simply by viewing other people’s photos that they have posted on Facebook and Twitter. Instagram wants you to register and follow these people within their app, sort of like following on Twitter. Most people have been introduced to what Instagram has to offer just by being a member of the Internet’s social media sites. Without this sharing push Instagram is just another behind the Wall photo filter app.

Conclusion

Putting a site behind the wall is most often a mistake. Getting traction for a site like this is expensive. Often the product offering isn’t good enough to support a Wall. Don’t assume that you’re website will be different from thousands of other failed sites behind a Wall. But if you need a Wall, consider some of these workarounds. Have a window and allow for social sharing to more than just your home page.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I’m going to go more in-depth as I recently learned that I wasn’t fully handling bounced emails. The problem I run into is that there is no manual for properly running a website. You can read all you want about HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find good books and articles on how to run a website successfully. Do’s and dont’s. How to avoid problems. You have to learn piece-by-piece as you make mistakes.

Why Bounces are Important

As I’ve talked about before, it’s important to handle bounced emails because ISP’s and email providers use this information against you. If you send emails to invalid, expired, or spamtrap email addresses, you will be punished. Your emails will not be delivered with the regularity that you expect.

Two Types of Bounced Emails

I just learned, after more than 2 years of thinking I was properly handling bounced emails sent from my websites, that I was not handling the majority of bounced emails. This means that my websites are emailing mistyped, expired, and fake email addresses daily, without my knowledge. Technically, there are bounced emails and there are rejected emails.

#1 – Bounced Emails

I thought I was so smart when I first set up bounced email handing. I don’t recall where I read about how to do this in PHP, but what I read was that I first of all needed to add a return-path header to outgoing emails. This return-path header will contain a way for your site to discern who the intended recipient was. On my sites I formatted the return-path header as such, “user=domain.com@mywebsite.com”. I then have to set all emails coming to my website, that are addressed to a nonexistent address, to be sent to a new email inbox. Then, this inbox has to be “piped” to a specific PHP page. The PHP page reads all emails it receives, checking for this return-path header. It parses the header, converts it to properly formatted email address, and adds the email to a do-no-email table in the database. This is great, and needed, but bounced emails going to return-path addresses make up only a part of invalid or bounced email attempts. I guess, I don’t know for sure, but I assume that this type of bounce happens when an address is recently deleted, only. Addresses that simply never existed, or have been gone for some time, appear to not bounce in this way. Thanks SMTP geeks.

#2 – Rejected Emails

It would be too easy for the above to be the end-all way to handle bounces. In doing some research for why some ISP’s hate emails from FidoFinder.com, I was browsing through my SMTP email log for a specific day. I saw some 550 errors where I was attempting to email invalid email addresses. I wanted to verify that these addresses had been added to the do-not-email database table after this bounce, and none of them had. I then wrote a test page to email these same addresses. I added a line to my bounce PHP code to email me a copy of any email it received. I never got a bounce emails. After a short discussion with Rackspace in the support ticket I had open for getting a copy of that SMTP log file, something the tech said revealed to me that many times the server rejects the attempted email, and that this does not produce an email to the return-path address. Instead, the MTA, in this case Qmail, sends the sender a message telling him about the bounce. Everyone has received a similar email before. The problem was I had my outgoing website address set to simply delete all incoming mail, as it was a do-not-reply address that people were not supposed to send emails to. In order to read these reject messages I had to remove the setting to pipe all emails to NULL and now pipe these emails to my bounce script. I added some code to look for “Remote host said”, a common text in email rejection notices, and consider all emails with this line to be reject bounces. I then search for the return-path header, which is included as the part of the original email, and add this address to the do-not-email database table. Now we’re adding rejected addresses to the do-not-email table.

Conclusion

In the first day I had 10-15 rejected emails where I normally have 1 bounced email. This means I was barely just scratching the surface of handling bounced emails previously. Possibly the repeated attempt to send emails to nonexistent emails has been affecting Fido Finder’s delivery rate for years. That was the idea when I set up the first bounce rules. So hopefully cutting down the emailing of these rejected addresses will have a positive effect.

Google Analytics Conversion Tracking

I just wasted 45 minutes finding this link. I have no idea why it does not show up (well) in Google. The documentation for Google Analytics eCommerce Conversion Tracking is here. It didn’t used to be this hard to find. And I swear you used to be able to find it on the Analytics settings page, somewhere.

If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then you’re missing out on something awesome. StumbleUpon is a website discovery engine. You tell it what you’re interests are and it shows you sites you should like. You then “stumble” through a collection of websites by clicking a “stumble” button, over and over, viewing different websites – often for hours. Add all the standard voting and sharing options you would expect and you have StumbleUpon. A social, viral, website discovery engine. Getting a website to be popular in StumbleUpon has been compared to the Digg effect. If you run websites, you absolutely want to be stumbled.

What is StumbleUpon Advertising (Paid Discovery)?

Just like getting to the top of Digg, it’s not easy to get a high volume of stumbles. If you’re launching a new website, or simply need to boost traffic to an existing website, StumbleUpon offers a creative form of advertising called Paid Discovery. Paid Discovery simply means that StumbleUpon shows “sponsored” sites in some of the stumble slots, based on user’s “interests.” StumbleUpon sets aside 5% of stumbles to use for Paid Discovery.

When you set up a Paid Discovery campaign you choose (optionally) the interests and demographics you want to target for your stumbles. As your campaign runs, StumbleUpon users will be presented with your full website as they stumble. Most users will not notice that your website is a sponsored site even though StumbleUpon does mark each paid stumble as “sponsored.” If you have a website that “people just have to see” then StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is for you. Especially if you are launching a new concept that users aren’t yet Googling for.

My Experience with StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a great way to try to get your website to go viral. This is the exciting part about Paid Discovery. If users, while viewing your paid stumble, “like” your site, you can earn free stumbles. If your website is popular enough you can even earn thousands of free visitors in one day. In a recent campaign Timeline Collage received 1,600+ free stumbles in a day while only paying for two hundred. Enough of the paid users “liked” Timeline Collage that we got over a thousand free views of our website. This happened twice over a 5-day test period. I have not been able to find an explanation on StumbleUpon of exactly what it takes to get free stumbles. When I contacted the Paid Discovery twitter account they replied to my query with a generic link that doesn’t go into much detail about the formula for getting free stumbles. In my experience the social interactions on StumbleUpon, in relation to your site, can result in large amounts of free stumbles when using Paid Discovery. As expected, the more viral your concept is the more likely it is to receive free traffic on StumbleUpon. Conversely, the less viral your concept the “more” you’re going to pay to get traffic from StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

There are a few options and features within Paid Discovery that I’m not covering here, such as the option to choose a “serving priority” that can affect your stumble price from $0.05 per stumble up to $0.25 per stumble. If you’re even slightly interested in Paid Discovery I suggest you sign up for an account and start a campaign to see what your options are. I expect over time StumbleUpon will be tweaking Paid Discovery to make it even more useful to those of use who are always launching websites.

Sometimes Klout creates profiles for Twitter accounts that it has discovered. It’s possible that you’ll find that Klout has created a profile for a Twitter account that you own, possibly one of your websites. After claiming your Klout account here are the important steps to follow to clean up your account.

Profile Settings

Using the top-right navigation menu (where your profile name/picture is) to go to Settings. Verify that your Brand Name is as you want it to be. Check to be sure the correct profile picture is being used. And make sure the correct profile text is being used. Klout will use the profile text from Twitter, or you can enter your own text.

Connected Networks

Add your other social networks. Be sure to connect to your Facebook fan page and any other profiles that you have for this account/websites. Normally the profile page is asking you to do this when you first sign in. If not, you can do this under Account > Settings > Connected Networks.

Remove Topics

Under Topics, remove any unrelated topics from your account. My FidoFinder.com account had topics of about 10 different cities. Although it was nice that I had already received +K’s, I actually want to be an influencer of other topics than people’s favorite cities.

Add Topics

Now add your targeted Topics. This is where you decide what you want to be know for. For Fido Finder I chose Dogs and Shelters and Rescues.

Remove Influencers

Under Influencers remove any of the your Influencers that you don’t feel are valid. For me this meant removing every single one that was auto-generated by Klout. I had no idea who these people were.

Add Yourself as an Influencer

Add your personal account as an Infuencer.

+K Yourself

Give your personal account at least one +K for one of your Topics. If you do not have valid topics set up on your personal account, save your +K’s for when you do.

I just signed up for Klout and was poking around on my personal profile. I noticed that some of my websites already had Klout profiles that I had not created. At first I thought that fans had taken it upon themselves to create accounts for the websites, but after reading the FAQ I found that Klout will create accounts, at will, from existing Twitter accounts that it discovers. I don’t know if there are any criteria for this, but it’s clearly stated that they do this. So I realized that this is most likely what happened. The question I had was, “How do I now claim this Klout account as mine?” since I own the websites. The FAQ does not cover this topic at all. So here is what I discovered.

To claim a Kout account that was automatically created for a Twitter account that you own:

1. While signed in as your personal Klout account click the account that you want to claim. You either noticed it in your Influencers list or search for it using the search box. Copy the URL of the profile.
2. Then you must sign into Twitter.com as that account. I have an account for every website that I tweet from, but I’m never logged in as these accounts. After signing into Twitter as the desired account, visit the Klout profile that you copied.
3. Klout will provide you with a “Connect with Facebook” or “Sign in with Twitter” option. You want to sign in with Twitter.
4. You will now sign in to Klout using the Twitter username and password of the account which you want to “claim.”
5. Once you have done this you have essentially connected the two accounts. You can now use Klout as this account (when signed in to Twitter as this account) and clean up any data that you want.
6. Here is a list of things to do once you claim your account.

This is a review of the SEO monitoring service SEO Moz Pro.

Introduction – SEO Moz Pro

If you have no idea what SEO is read my SEO Primer article. Every website owner needs to understand what SEO is and how it’s affecting your position in the search engine and your free traffic. SEO Moz Pro simply helps you to monitor your SEO performance, and the performance of your competitors. It’s not necessarily an SEO consultant, but it does help you identify areas of improvement and help you to monitor how your SEO work is affecting both SERP position and natural search traffic.

Reports

SEO Moz Pro is made up of a bunch of reports, much like Google Analytics (GA) is. SEO Moz Pro has 6 useful tools for anyone doing SEO. These tools are Traffic Data, Crawl Diagnostics, Keyword Rankings, Competitive Domain Analysis, On-Page Optimization, and Social.

Traffic Data

The Traffic Data report monitors performance and changes of your natural search result traffic. SEO Moz Pro can sync with your GA account in order to provide you with reports specific to SEO. You can view your organic search visit data, much like you would in GA, but you can also view “branded search traffic.” For example, let’s say we’re monitoring MemberMob.com (crowdsourced marketing) and we see that we have an increase in natural search visitors for the previous week. We can look further and see how much of this traffic is from branded searches, “MemberMob”, versus keyword searches, like “Crowdsourced Marketing.” This report shows you a graph of natural search keywords delivering traffic and also provides a data table of these keywords, much like in GA.

Crawl Diagnostics

The Crawl Diagnostics report provides you with essential information on any errors found while crawling your website. This report is much like the Google Webmaster reports but with a different viewpoint. This report is broken into Errors, Warnings, and Notices. Notices are things like 301 redirects and things that you might just want to be aware of, but aren’t necessarily “bad.” Warnings are things like Long URL, Overly-Dynamic URL, Missing Meta Tags, etc. Errors are problems like Duplicate Page Content, Missing Title Elements, and Server Errors. This report, although necessary to revisit over time, is mostly useful the first time SEO Moz crawls your website. One you’ve decided if the Errors, Warnings, and Notices are something that need to be fixed or ignored there is little value in this report on a week-to-week basis. Obviously if you have major changes to your website on a weekly or monthly basis the value of this tool increases.

Keyword Rankings

The Keyword Rankings report is a pretty standard SEO report that shows your SERP position for each of your keywords across whichever search engines you wish you monitor (Google and Bing, duh). The report shows your position as well as the delta since the last search. A nice feature of this report is that it also shows your search traffic visits and delta next to each keyword. This way you can relate any traffic increases or decreases to your keyword position changes. In the past I would simply check my keywords in Google via search link bookmarks I had saved, but this is proving to be less reliable over time. With Google getting more “local” and with the introduction of tools like Google+ each user’s SERPs are less and less like their neighbors. The Keyword Rankings reports gives you a report that is not geo-localized and not affected by any outside factors.

Competitor Domain Analysis

The Competitive Domain Analysis report is probably the most informative report in SEO Moz as it shows exactly how to rank against your competitors. Of course the data is only as good as what variables you provide it. If you do not have any clear competitors this report becomes less informative. Through this report you can see both an overall ranking of your domain, SEO-wise, versus your competitors as well as the individual characteristics that make up the domain ranking, or “domain authority.” This report tracks many factors some of which are External Followed Links, Total External Links, No Follow vs Follow Link Ratio, etc. This can give you an idea of why you might be performing better or worse than your competitors in the SERPs. Having the highest number of total links but the lowest number of “followed” links might lead you to realize that your competitors are better at getting high-valued links than you are.

On-Page Optimization

The On-Page Optimization report is where you can find some actual action items for improving your SEO. This report shows where you’ve “made the grade” on implementing your on-page SEO and where you’ve failed, based on the keywords that you’ve included for your campaign. You not only get a grade for each keyword, you also can see each characteristic that makes up the grade. Even better, SEO Moz will tell you what it takes to “fix” any item that didn’t go towards a grade of “A.”

Social

The Social report provides you with information on your Twitter and Facebook interactions. You can stay updated on your follower/fan increases and decreases, traffic from your social profiles, and even your Facebook shares and Twitter retweets.

Conclusion

At the time of this blog post the price of the SEO Moz Pro subscription is $99/month. I know for my business this price is worth every penny to be on top of my SEO efforts. I might not find something every month to improve on but I definitely have to be on top of my website SEO work to make sure I’m staying ahead of my competitors.

I’ve created a business name generator. The site creates random business names that can be used for Web 2.0-type business names. The generator is for creating a name when all of the good names are already taken.

http://www.businessnamegenerators.com/