While attending business school at Ohio State, networking with entrepreneurs and groups didn’t involve many outside of campus. Resources were limited and there were not any great online options. I have recently came across a site that I think has a great opportunity to help bridge that gap. StudentBusinesses.com is a selective resource that helps student [...]

I often get asked if I would be willing to run SEO activities for startup companies or if I know any SEO experts. I unfortunately don’t have the time to help as much as I would like. But I have have come across an SEO professional that I feel is worth suggesting and recommending to [...]

In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments. I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor [...]

A common adjustment businesses make in a recession, (I’m not saying we are in a recession, although many indications point in that direction), is to cut their advertising budget. That is often found to be the wrong reaction, as cutting your advertising budget wont lead to more sales. Since cutting the ad budget is still practiced [...]

Google has begun the PageRank update. I have seen updates on multiple site that I work on. Some of the potential changes per the Search Engine Roundtable blog: Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently. Multiple links [...]

With the launch of the new iPhone App Store, a new platform has been created to reach millions of tech savvy users. With new platforms, comes new marketing channels. While the cost of entry is higher to build an app for the iPhone, that also limits the number of competitors. You have three options when building [...]

Adobe Flash is a pain to the SEO community. Flash has never been indexed well by the search engines which reduces the amount of copy/images to work with. The best work around was to produce an HTML version of the Flash page so search engines could index all the awesome unique content that you [...]

Recently I have received many questions about the Adwords Quality Score. I have wanted to write an article that explains the most important aspects of the quality score and which segments you have the most control over so I can use it as a resource with startups I work with. First, lets discuss the segments that [...]

One of the most powerful marketing effects your startup could produce is the viral expansion loop. The theory is simple, the execution is not. A viral expansion loop is exponential growth produced by users and the system was engineered to produce the viral loop (some happen on accident). Fast Company did an article on Ning [...]

And this is coming from a startup marketing manager. I have worked on quite a few startup products through the years and I keep witnessing the same trend. The startups that actually solve an issue or provide a unique service, don’t really need my help. I might give the initial push, but the product itself [...]