Wes Cutshall

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 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 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.

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

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.

All of my current work-related bookmarks with an explanation of what they are:

1. http://adwords.google.com/ – Google AdWords – buy ads on Google.com
2. http://analytics.google.com/ – Google Analytics – track your website visitors/traffic
3. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ – Google Sitemaps / Webmaster Console – tell Google where your pages are and get information on how your pages show in Search
4. http://www.google.com/admanager/ – Google AdManager – used to be DoubleClick, now owned by Google, manage ad campaigns on your own websites
5. http://adsense.google.com/ – Google AdSense – make money by placing ads on your websites
6. https://adcenter.microsoft.com/ – Microsoft AdCenter – buy ads on Bing.com
7. http://aristotle.kitaramedia.com/ – Kitara Media – make money by placing ads on your websites
8. http://www.cpxinteractive.com/ – CPX Interactive - make money by placing ads on your website
9. https://pubaccess.advertising.com/ – Advertising.com / AOL – get paid by placing ads on your websites
10. http://www.simpleport.net/osc/ – SimplePort Quickbooks PayPal Importer – helps you import PayPal data into Quickbooks
11. http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ – 24/7 Press Release – provider of press release services
12. http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/ – Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop – get notified, etc, when your emails sent to Yahoo are marked as SPAM
13. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html – Yahoo Bulk Email Sender Registration - Register with Yahoo as a bulk email sender to improve deliverability
14. http://security.comcast.net/get-help/comcast-post-master-page.aspx – Comcast Post Master Help Page – FAQ and links to Comcast Feedback Loop
15. http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/ – DomainKeys Library and Tools – has some email address for testing DK implementation
16. http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=tagomatic.com/&hl=ru-ru – Google Safe Browsing Report – Check to see if your pages are in good standing with Google, specifically if you link out
17. http://www.supportdetails.com/ – Support Details – Page you can send customer to that grabs browser info and can be emailed to you for debugging
18. http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2/ – Open Flash Charts – OpenSource library for creating flash charts
19. http://www.istockphoto.com/ – iStockPhoto - stock images (crowdsourced)
20. http://www.jquery.com/ – jQuery - JavaScript library, many things that you wish were included in JS but were not
21. http://jqueryui.com/ – jQuery UI – jQuery User Interface library, many things you wish were included in jQuery but were not
22. http://www.favicon.cc/ – Fav Icon Generator – creates the favorites icon that shows in the address bar for a website
23. http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/ – Facebook URL Linter – Both forces Facebook to (re)load a given URL and shows you what data FB is noticing about that URL, good for refreshing FB cache of a page
24. http://www.dnsstuff.com/ – DNS Stuff – tools for checking that your DNS records, etc, are set up properly.
25. http://www.seomoz.org/users/pro – SEO Moz Pro – Toolkit (subscription service) for tracking the SEO or your websites

UPDATE: After writing this initial review it has come to my attention that FanPageHookup acquires Facebook likes through shady methods. I have spoken with many new fans who liked my website who had definitely not, knowingly, liked my FB page. I’m researching what the exact method FPH has used, but be warned that you will not be acquiring willing likes for your FB page. This could be bad in the long-run if many of your fans start marking your updates as spam just because they don’t understand why they are showing in their news stream.

Buy Facebook Fans – FanPageHookup.com

In doing research for a new product I purchased a fan package from FanPageHookup.com. Fan Page Hookup offers packages of different volumes of new Facebook fans for your Facebook page. If you need to bulk up your FB fan-base you can simply purchase new fans.

For my research I paid $271 for 2,000 US fans. After a few days of nothing happening the fans started to increase. At a rate of a few hundred a day the fans kept coming in the following days. Within about a week my FB page was plus 2,000 in fans (UPDATE: plus 4,000 fans in 3 weeks). I did a lot of browsing of the new fan profiles to see if they appeared to be legit. I think for the most part the pages are real FB users. I did find it surprising, though, that most of the profiles were 100% locked from public view. The profiles that were not locked did seem to have a lot of friends and seemed to be legit profiles. The only real negative I found was that the overwhelming demographic of the FB profiles liking the page were high school teenagers. This is probably due to whatever minimal compensation the website offers to it’s users for liking pages. As far as bulking up for sheer numbers, this causes no problem. If, however, you expect some sort of traffic increase or social marketing benefit in acquiring a few thousands fans, this website will not provide you this. I noticed no increase at all in traffic to the website for which I purchased 2K fans for.

I think overall the product is as described. If you want your fan count to jump up, you’ll get it. If this has any real benefit, you have to decide.

If you have an idea for an online business you often are faced with the option of designing your website for a broad market or a niche market. Do you want to sell Sporting Goods or exclusively Football Equipment? Just like in the real world, there are benefits of each option, but online has a different set of issues that will factor in your website’s success. Whether you are selling an actual product or simply building a website of information, you need to consider whether a broad market or niche market is the way to go.

In researching our competition I often find that they have decided to go for a broader market while still serving the same demographic that we do in our niche market. In most cases I find that they are less successful in marketing to a wider market than we have been marketing to a niche market. For example, Fido Finder which was built to market to “lost dog” owners has been more successful in than other “lost pet” website (and also more successful than any “lost dog” website). We get more animals registered per day than even the top “lost pet” websites. We learned early on that there is a benefit to marketing to a niche market when it comes to online marketing.

For most new websites your traffic will come in this order: online ads, word of mouth, and search engine results. Due to the Google algorithm, natural (free) Google search results will be one of the last ways that you get traffic to your new website. In the end, natural search results will be the king, but it takes time to get there, often many years. Up front you will be paying for most of your visitors and then enter a pattern of paying for something more like 15-20% of your visitors while getting the rest from word of mouth and natural search results. Your goal should be to end up with the majority of your traffic coming from word of mouth and natural search results. Niche marketing can get you there.

Online Advertising

Any new website has to advertise to get started, period. You’re not just going to be on the news after a week of having a website. Using Google Adwords as a model, the cost of your ads will be determined by the popularity of the keywords that you want to see your ad next to. If you decide to sell Sporting Goods you have to compete for space on Google’s search results with every other sporting goods website. Some of these websites will be willing to spend much more per click than you are willing to spend on your startup. If Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Authority, and Academy are all bidding $0.30+ a click you’ll have to bid up there with them in order to get a decent volume of visitors from your ad. Conversely, advertising for “football equipment” produces a different subset of advertisers. East Bay, a large catalog company, is the only big company competing for that keyword. You can now bid for the number two spot without losing money on each customer acquisition. In general, niche Pay-Per-Click (PPC) keyword marketing will be cheaper than broad keyword marketing. Since online ads will be your first source of traffic it’s much cheaper to start a successful niche website versus a broad market website.

Word of Mouth

Links from Facebook and other social websites have become a top source of visitors to all of our websites over the last 2 years. Having a Facebook presence (page) definitely helps, but word of mouth via social networking is a very good source of traffic without having a popular Facebook page. Having Facebook users, bloggers, and people on Twitter talking about your website all fit under Word of Mouth as far as online goes. Having a niche website actually increases your chances that users will start talking about your website with their friends, online and offline. Although your market might be smaller, the passion of your customers is usually higher. Everyone knows that one friend they have that is in 5 football fantasy leagues, but rarely do we know that we have a friend who plays 5 different sports. People who are passionate about one specific thing tend to discuss it more often, with a higher energy, than those who have a more rounded interest. Getting links from football-related Facebook groups is much more likely than getting links for a general sporting goods website from a general sports-related Facebook group, for example. Online forums fall under this category as well. Most online forums are built for a specific niche. Becoming a well-known website within those niche forums could garner a great deal of traffic. It’s just more likely that your startup will spread like wildfire through word of mouth around these niche markets than in a broad market.

Search Results

Once your website is established there is no doubt that search engine results are the king of traffic. The most important thing you can do for your new website is focus on becoming #1 for your keyword. It’s going to take 1-3 years for most websites to even have a chance, but you should do the work to get there. It’s a lot of work to get the #1 listing but if you get it it’s worth every penny. You’ll get 2-5x the traffic from being #1 versus #5 for the same search term. This means you’ll spend less money on online advertising as you’re getting so much free traffic. A high website ranking is based on your website score. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will greatly increase your chances of being in the #1 spot.

In SEO you optimize your website for a specific keyword or set of keywords. When people search for XYX you want your site to show up. This means you have to have this keyword all over your website as well as have this keyword in or around all the links that link to your website. If you decide to build a Football Equipment website all the links to your website will have “football” in them, and often “equipment”, “gear”, or some other keyword accompanying “football.” This will make your website rank very well for “football equipment” if you get enough links and perform all the right on-page optimization techniques. If instead you build a Sporting Goods website and want to rank well for “football equipment”, “basketball shoes”, “baseball bats”, “soccer balls”, etc, you have a lot more work to do, and are frankly less likely to be successful at ranking for all, or any, of those keywords. A website that is strictly SEO’d for “baseball bats” will usually rank higher than the baseball bat section of your sporting goods website. In some markets it’s much more likely for a person to actually search for the niche keywords than the general category.

Online it’s much more important to have a website that can do well with SEO techniques than a website that mimics a real world store. If your website concept does not SEO well you will always be paying high dollar for advertising and have a hard time ever getting “free” visitors. The most valid site for a keyword will always show up at the top of the list. For example, although we all know Amazon is the king of online books, etc, Barnes & Noble actually shows up first in the natural search results when you search for “books” in Google. This is because all of their website content and links to their website focus around the keyword “books”. They get all that free traffic for ranking well for “books” while Amazon has to rely on other methods (word of mouth/advertising/brand recognition).

Unless you have a large marketing budget it’s going to be hard to get your broad market website to get the same amount of traffic as the #1 site for a subcategory of products you sell. For example, although my company could have created a Lost Pets website, it is more successful to develop a Lost Dogs (FidoFinder.com) and Lost Cats (TabbyTracker.com) website separately because of the factor of search engine traffic. Each website does better in registering a high volume of dogs and cats, respectively, than any other Lost Pets website does. The same goes for our website Naming Force. Although other websites offer product naming among their slew of crowdsourcing options (logo design, copywriting, website design, etc) we get more naming projects than any of our competitors do. When you search for “crowdsource naming” we come up first. Our website also appears before our competitors for other keywords such as “business names”, etc. We focus strictly on naming businesses, and Google knows that.

This is a good except from Wikipedia about niche marketing online:

“An often used technique for affiliate marketers is Internet-based niche segments of larger markets, referred to as niches, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream. This technique is then repeated across several other niche websites until a desired income level is achieved. A bigger niche is harder to market to as the expense of online advertisements increases according to the popularity of the keywords used (on Adwords, for example).”

Conclusion

Online niche marketing is the fastest method of growth for a new business. Getting a business off the ground is more important than the overall potential to serve a business has. Just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you should market yourself as being able to. If you never make a profit it doesn’t matter how versatile your website or business was. Online, niche marketing is the way to go for rapid, affordable, marketing of a business. If you decide to expand on your initial product offering, the way Amazon has, that’s fine, but starting out by being known for selling one thing, or one group of things, is much a cheaper option and gains traction much quicker. This will increase your success rate ten-fold.

Thanks to Stumbleupon, I discovered this service about a week ago. ClickTale utilizes JavaScript cursor position (X/Y coordinate) tracking to generate both website user interaction “videos” and interaction maps for your website. Where Analytics can tell you a navigation path (page A, then page B, then page C), ClickTale can show you exactly what a user did on a page in between the clicks. You can replay a user’s visit to your website. You see the content of your website with a cursor moving over the site just as the user navigated the website. You can see mouse movement, clicks, page scrolling, and in some cases the characters that were typed into form fields (this only works on some recordings, so I assume it’s browser or OS-dependent, the majority of recordingss showed “?” instead of the exact character) in real time. This service can be very useful for solving website interaction issues, some that you don’t even know you have.

If your conversion rate is low you can see exactly where users quit using your registration or order form. If only JavaScript could also record audio it would be just like being there (“Ahh, too expensive.” <exit>). I tested ClickTale on Naming Force and found it very intriguing to watch people using the website. I focused on users who visited the New Assignment page. You can narrow down the recordings to view users who viewed a certain page, among other parameters. The recordings start as the users entered the website, so you get to see how they navigated to the page in question, as well as what they did on that page.

One of the most shocking things I saw was that most of the users scrolled all the way down the home page, when the home page was the site entry point. With so much talk about Above the Fold I was a bit surprised that the content was engaging enough that most of the users scrolled down the whole home page before using any of the navigation items. Pleasant surprise. As far as conversions on the New Assignment page, I haven’t yet found anything that has lead me to modify the form. Many users visit the page briefly without scrolling, which shows that they simply are checking the site out without much interest in submitting an assignment (yet). Very few users started to fill out the form only to exit the page. Of the users that started to fill out the form and then exited, most of them (less than a handful with my small one-week sample size) seemed to do so after viewing the (very affordable) prices. This has brought up the question of whether the package options should be moved to the top of the page, but in regards to conversions, I don’t see how this would matter one way or the other. The only interface change that has been made at this point due to watching ClickTale videos happened to be on a somewhat unimportant page. But, it revealed some interesting UI issues. Naming Force has a Random Name Generator for users to use. It consists of a large white box with a button underneath. You click the button, repeatedly, to generate random names that appear inside the white box. I watched one user visit this page and click 20-30 times inside the white box, in various spots, never clicking the bright orange button underneath, only to (I assume, frustratingly) leave the page. So, I added “click button below” inside the white box, as somehow it wasn’t obvious to at least one person. Hopefully I’ll find enhancements I can make to some of the more important pages based on these interaction videos.

One of the other features of ClickTale is the Heatmaps. Heatmaps take all the data collected, mouse move, click, scroll, etc and chart them on an overlay of your website. This gives you an idea of where people are concentrating their focus on your pages. Mouse move and click are pretty straight forward, you can see a heatmap of the most concentrated areas (see image below). Scroll reach is another heatmap that might need some explanation. This heatmap maps the percentage of users who scrolled down where the part of the page was in the browser window. This is where the Above the Fold theory can be tested for your site without watching hundreds of videos.

Mouse Move and Scroll Reach Heatmaps

Overall the ability to record user mouse movement and play it back is pretty incredible. The only problem I see with ClickTale is that the prices are a bit unrealistic for the majority of us smaller website owners. In order to view details for pages that are not my top URL on Naming Force, for example, I had to sign up for the subscription that is $290 / month. I don’t see myself continuing this service past a month, which is a real shame for ClickTale. I’d happily pay $30-$50 a month, but I can’t find $290 worth of modifications to make each month to make the subscription worth sticking with. I feel like this service’s business model should be to get users to sign up for an insignificant amount and allow them to “forget” that they have the subscription, or technically just to not care enough to cancel it and allow it to recharge them for years. Users won’t want to cancel a $50/month subscription, just in case they want to look through the collected data in the future, and ClickTale could make a lot more through long-term subscriptions, IMO.

As the owner for NamingForce.com (a website that allows entrepreneurs to get business name ideas) I often read descriptions of startup website concepts. From time to time, as Naming Force was getting started, I would receive an email suggesting that Naming Force should allow for more space to enter a product/website description. It was my response that if they couldn’t explain their service in 150 characters their was a problem with how they were explaining their product/service to the public. Although I eventually broke down and increased the text box length for website descriptions, I still believe that if you cannot explain your concept in under 150 characters, you have a problem. It’s important to be able to explain, usually in one sentence – or just a few words, what your website does.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with numerous members of the press about Fido Finder. I’ve found it important to be able to quickly explain the concept of the website at the very beginning of an interview in order for the media to understand the concept and subsequently ask the right questions. Although in it’s complete definition, Fido Finder is “a website that allows people to search and register lost and found dogs and receive email updates about newly added dogs that match” this isn’t an easily understandable explanation, and from a marketing standpoint it’s not very “sticky.”  What works much better is “a lost and found dog classifieds system.” Now, Fido Finder does much more than offer a static classifieds system, but that’s where the rest of the conversation fills in the blanks. In it’s simplest form the website is a newer version of a lost/found dog classified ad. Everyone understands this concept, and it’s a “sticky” explanation that can be understood and explained friend-to-friend, very easily.

If you’re working on a startup, or have already released your website, make sure that you have a short, canned, explanation of what your website does. Be sure to use this same explanation any time you first introduce the concept to people. Continually tweak the definition as time goes by, as industry terms and the public’s understand of them often changes through the course of a startup’s life. Although “cloud”, “crowd”, “social”, and “smart” are terms that potential customers know now, they didn’t start that way.