SEO Werkt!

There’s lots going on behind the scenes here at TechCrunch — not only are we hiring top writers and putting together a kick-ass lineup for Disrupt in New York next month, we’re also getting a chief operating officer (among other moves soon to be announced).

Ned Desmond, a veteran media executive from Time Inc and more recently an entrepreneur, will be joining us as COO on May 7th. He’s going to be leading all of our non-editorial operations out of our San Francisco headquarters. He’ll also serve as the general manager of the AOL Tech properties. which include Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq.

As Heather Harde’s replacement, Desmond is filling big shoes along with the rest of us. But also like so many of us at the new TechCrunch, he’s coming in with years of experience — that began with writing, actually

He was a foreign bureau chief with Time Magazine during the 90s, and had a stint as a senior correspondent for Fortune. But he got caught up in the dot.com craze like so many others in Silicon Valley, heading up business development for then-popular search engine Infoseek before getting sucked back into the media world.

Ned began last decade as the president and editor of Business 2.0, then leveled up to be the president of Time Interactive. That job included running its digital new business development and ad operations, as well as product, design and technology support. Among other accomplishments, he led successful relaunches for People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, My Recipes, Life and Health. He got back into the startup world in 2009, co-founding an outdoor sports site called Go Sportn, Inc., which has become a category leader in fishing and hunting verticals.

Between his experience in startup and media operations, and his focus on creating great content, he’s going to be able to do a lot to build up TechCrunch and the other AOL Tech sites. Please give him a warm welcome.

Ad tech startup Moat has attracted $12 million in a second round of funding aimed to help brands better measure the effectiveness of their online ads, the company announced today.

Moat thus far has been used by more than 15,000 businesses for its display ad search, which lets you where brands place recent ads on the web. For example, above you can see a search for Barack Obama to see where the President’s re-election team is placing ads. Next up, the company will harness all the data it is collecting online to launch a “patent-pending analytics platform to enable brand advertisers and publishers to move beyond the “click” as the primary success metric for online ad campaigns.”

The new funding round was led Mayfield Fund, with participation from prior investors including SV Angel, Founders Fund, Lerer Ventures, Vast Ventures, Founder Collective, and First Round Capital. Mayfield partner Tim Chang will join Moat’s board.

“Mayfield is thrilled to be partnering with the Moat team to build the leading brand intelligence and analytics SaaS company for the advertising industry,” said Chang, in a statement. “Unlike typical adtech startups that are ad networks, arbitrage plays or tech layer abstractions, Moat is uniquely positioned as a SaaS category leader in the space, and has the broader potential to evolve the whole industry beyond the obsolete and incomplete metric of ‘clicks’ — this is a much bigger prize at stake here that we’re playing for.”

New York-based Moat previously raised $4.5 million, bringing the firm’s total funding to $16.5 million. The new funds will got toward expanding its team and the scope of its technology.

Check out Moat being discussed as a way to find and analyze ad placement on PBS Newshour below (at 4:38):

Filed under: deals, media

How we package our products and services often communicates more than we think.

Sometimes — a fresh look at packaging can introduce you to a new buyer, make you more attractive to prospects you’ve known for awhile or reinforce a buying decision for your current customers.

I was in Walgreens the other day and a end cap display caught my attention.  They were little boxes of pills but rather than being named/described as some generic brand — they were packaged according to why you might use them.

• “Help, I have the sniffles.”
• “Help, I have an achy body.”
• “Help, I can’t sleep.”
• “Help, I have a headache.”

I thought it was a brilliant strategy.  Rather than get into a brand war with the category leader, why not just re-define how the category is packaged and go right at the consumer’s need.  I’ll be curious to see how this new line sells.

We had a bit of the same problem at McLellan Marketing Group.  Everyone assumed that we could only work with large clients with really big annual budgets.  While we love those kinds of clients — we also love working with entrepreneurs and small businesses.

But how do we communicate that to the marketplace?   We repackaged ourselves.

We knew that this group of potential buyers had very unique concerns about working with an agency:

• I won’t know how much it’s going to cost
• I don’t have a big enough budget
• I don’t know what I’d be buying

And we repackaged ourselves to eliminate those worries.  We literally created packages — with a pre-determined monthly fee.  Think of these packages as the garanimals of marketing.

The buyers can pick and choose from the menus and with our help, create a custom package that fits their business’ needs.

(You can download a PDF of the MMG packages for easier reading by clicking here)

But they have 100% control over the cost (because they decide which monthly fee they want to pay) and they can see all they get for their small budget and they know exactly what they’re going to get.

This packaging strategy has brought us a whole different category of clients — who are enjoying agency expertise at a price they can afford (and control!).

How could you re-package yourself or a particular product or service to either overcome buying hesitation, to introduce yourself to a whole new audience or to do an end run around the category leader?

You might also like

1. 
   
   Marketing insights question: What do you really sell?
2. 
   
   Are you built to sell?
3. 
   
   Product packaging — is it part of your brand or disposable?

Booyah, the maker of real-world social and mobile games, announced its newest game today, Pet Town. It is another step in the company’s reinvention of itself.

San Francisco-based Booyah was founded in 2008 with early money for mobile games from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It saw its My Town franchise soar into the stratosphere in popularity, only to see it stall. Under a new chief executive, the company is now releasing a new slate of games that it says have put the company back on the growth path.

The Pet Town game is now available in the Apple App Store and it is part of the company’s goal of being the category leader in real-world entertainment.

In the game, players create the ultimate destination for an array of pets and make their dreams come true. It comes city-building gameplay with influences from simulation and role-playing game classics like Animal Crossing. The game asks, “What if pets were real, with dreams just like ours, and there were no zoos?” It lets you build a personalized community filled with lots of pets. You can help your pets make friends, open a business, and go on vacations in the real world.

“It’s exciting to see our creative teams deliver such a unique and innovative take on this popular style of play,” said Jason Willig, chief executive of Booyah. He replaced founding CEO Keith Lee back in October. In the last five months, the company has released three new products.

In future updates, the pets will cross the boundaries of their world and show up in real-world locations. The company did a soft launch in Canada to get critical feedback on the game.

Booyah also released a major update to My Town 2, which was released in October as a location-based app akin to Monopoly, only set in the real world. MyTown 2 has been played by more than 3.5 million people, and the new update allows for features such as social gifting and citizen interactions as well as Facebook Connect support. The game is the No. 1 city-building game on the App Store. MyTown 2 players have created more than 2.4 million unique real world businesses in 130,000 cities across 43 countries. In a typical month, there are 75 million user sessions and 1.2 billion real-world business interactions.

Besides Kleiner Perkins, Booyah’s investors include Accel Partners and DAG Ventures. Booyah has raised about $29.5 million to date and has about 50 employees.

The company’s recent hits have been played by 10 million people. Early Bird, released in late August, has been installed 6.3 million times. Willig said that the fourth quarter was probably the best financial quarter in the company’s history, with several million dollars in bookings. The company has opened a second development studio in Seattle and it now has four development teams working on an aggressive slate for the first quarter.

Filed under: games, mobile

Posted by neilpatel

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Because I grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs I learned early that working for yourself was a great way to make money and improve your lifestyle. However, even though I had this early drive to build businesses, I didn’t always know the right way to go about building or marketing them. In fact, through trial and error I eventually discovered what it takes to build and market a successful business, and the following five lessons are what I think to be the most important.

Being the category leader is not the only way to be successful

Everyone seems to think that if you’re not number one then you won’t have a successful business. I know I fell into this trap early in my career. Whether I was working as a marketing consultant or SEO, I tried to be number one, but it didn’t take me long to discover that being the best and being the category leader is not the same thing.

In some cases, you are number one when you dominate in revenue, number of users or market position. In other words, it’s pretty clear you are number one. For example, according to StatCounter, when it comes to browser, it’s pretty obvious who rules:

But if you are in a less-developed market, number one is often perception, which you can control with marketing. Listen, a company with a product that’s inferior to competition, yet gets a lot of media buzz, will seem like the category leader.

The clothing company American Apparel is a great example. Constantly in the media, whether for good things or bad things, American Apparel seemed unstoppable. In the case of AA, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one of their ads or hearing about them in the news. What did they do to make that happen?

• Controversial policies – American Apparel doesn’t outsource and often includes employees posing for their soft-porn ads, both great topics for the media to report on.
• Adopt a social cause and make noise about it – American Apparel is behind two social causes, Legalize LA and Legalize Gay, both causes that bring them attention.
• Break the mold for good – The majority of employees at AA are immigrants who are paid more than twice the minimum wage and offered low-cost, full-family healthcare. (It’s unfortunate that 1,500 were illegal, but the CEO claims they used fake papers.)
• Defend your values tooth and nail. The CEO of American Apparel is unapologetic about his unorthodox polices, values and views, which adds further fuel to the fire.

Of course some argue that the AA CEO is a sleaze ball who undermines all of his good. Others argue that his behavior is part of the brand’s DNA.

Are they market leaders? Not when it comes to market capitalization. That title belongs to Burberry Group at $552.2 billion. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched the news. In 2008, the Guardian named American Apparel label of the year and in 2009 Time magazine named the CEO one of its finalist for most influential people in the world.

My point is American Apparel went from a small clothing manufacturer in 2003 to a successful business in less than a decade because they were constantly in the press. You can usually compete with the big dogs if you figure out how to get a lot of press and buzz.

Focus on the opportunity, not the market leader

Another myth about market leaders has to do with market growth or saturation. For example, early this November comScore came out with data on US smart phone market. Here’s the data as a graph provided by Asymco:

What should jump out at you immediately is the all the blue on the top of the graph. That stands for all the opportunity out there for getting smart phones into the hands of people who don’t use smart phones. In other words, it doesn’t matter who the market leader is. The game is far from over for newcomers.

Good marketing means you look at what your competitor is doing, especially if he is the market leader, but you also look around them…you look for the opportunity that others are ignoring and, if it is there, taking advantage of it without having to take on the big guys.

Thinking like a customer is essential

It’s important to remember, however, that just because you are getting so much attention doesn’t mean you will be successful. Marketing rule number one is to solve your customer’s problems.

You’ve probably heard this many times before, but it bears repeating…you must make a product that meets an obvious need. Over time I’ve developed a method when it comes to business and product development. It’s called the SIMPLE method:

• Simple – A successful product will take the guesswork out of how it satisfies a customer’s problems. Febreeze, for example, is simple…spray and kill odors. You get it immediately.
• Interesting – Furthermore, a successfully marketing product puts distance between it and other commodities by explaining what makes it different. All products are a commodity. The iPhone…it’s a commodity, namely a smart phone. But not just any smart phone. It’s got apps, Face Time and now Siri.
• Meaningful – But just because you figured out a problem to solve doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. The problem has to be meaningful. Look at Square, for example. It allows small businesses to easily collect payments via credit cards. Most of these small businesses will tell you they were losing money because they couldn’t take credit cards.
• Productive – Like being simple, a product that customers will like helps them do something they currently do…but faster, easier or even cheaper. In other words, the product doesn’t complicate the customer’s life, but offers a convenience.
• Long-lasting – A successful product will have longevity. It will provide a meaningful solution to a customer’s problem that will be more than just a fad. And it will go through multiple generations.
• Entertaining – This last point is important because it explains the popularity of sites like Facebook or video games, which everybody can argue are not productive ways to spend your time. However, they provide excitement and enjoyment, which is meaningful to you.

I wish I’d thought of this method before I even started in business, but maybe I can help you avoid the mistakes I made and get successful in less time than I did by sharing it with you.

Free advertising can be your best promotional tool.

If you don’t have a lot of cash and you are trying to market your company online, don’t worry, as companies have been able to succeed without spending much money on marketing. This fact becomes apparent when you see that social media advertising spend will only be $4.4 billion or 7% of online ad spend by 2016. The reason is that to set up a social profile doesn’t cost anything and ongoing costs are low.

When I was trying to grow one of my first businesses, Advice Monkey, I paid over $5,000 to three different companies to market it. Unfortunately I got zero results, so I decided I was going to learn how to do it myself. Here is a list of six marketing ideas I used that didn’t require a huge budget:

• Blog – By now it should be obvious that blogging is a great idea for generating traffic and attention. But I still run into entrepreneurs who dismiss it for one reason or another.
• SEO – A few companies that have leveraged SEO fairly well are About.com, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon, and Zappos. And an example of a smaller company that has done this is Bargaineering, which was acquired by Bankrate for 2.8 million.
• Guest poster – An easy way to get your company out there is to write guest blog posts on other blogs. From TechCrunch to Huffington Post, there are thousands of popular blogs on the Internet. And the one thing all of these blogs want is more content.
• Speak at conferences – You don’t have to spend a lot of money travelling to regional conferences, but occasionally splurge and got to a national conference. You’ll get more exposure.
• Talk shit – People tend to pay attention when someone talks trash. For example, I once wrote a blog post on Like.com and how they were messing up with their marketing efforts. Shortly after that the CEO called and offered me consulting work.
• Do interviews – I cannot tell you how many times I simply emailed someone and asked if they would like to interview me. Blogs and media sources are always looking for content…and interviews are an easy way to get it.

Check out this article if you want fifteen other big marketing ideas for your small budget.

Social media can absolutely drive sales

I pretty much jumped head first into social media when sites like Blogger, Twitter and Facebook came on the scene. However, it took me quite a while to figure out how to use them correctly so I could drive traffic and sales to my website.

Did you that for every hour we spend on online, we spend about fifteen minutes of that hour on social media sites? This is according to Neilson:

And did you know that about half of that time we are looking at products and services? The lesson is that if you want to build a sales relationship online, social media is your best bet.

A good example of monetizing social media is Joie De Vivre, a California company that operates luxury hotels. Every Tuesday the company tweets exclusive deals to their nearly 13,000 followers who have only a few hours to act on deeply discounted deals. Joie De Vivre typically books over 1,000 room nights with these types of deals, rooms that might remain empty.

Even large companies like Virgin use social media effectively. Richard Branson says that their approach to social media is with a healthy sense of fun and attractive offers. For example, the fourth highest sales day for Virgin America came when they tweeted, “$5 donated to KIPP Schools for every flight booked today.”

Conclusion

Some of these lessons may seem obvious, others not so. I know it took me a several years to figure them all out, but once I did, building successful business got easier and easier. This is not to say that if you follow these lessons above you will be guaranteed a successful business. You will improve your chances, however.

What not-so-obvious marketing lessons have you learned during your years in business?

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Groupon shares soared in early trading this morning to $28, a 40 percent increase over its $20 price announced last night, as the company made its initial public offering.

The $28 opening price puts Groupon’s market value at $17.8 billion.

The Chicago-based daily-deals site, which is the category leader in group buying, listed its shares on the NASDAQ Exchange under the ticket symbol GRPN.

The company was expected to raise approximately $700 million dollars from the sale of 35 million shares. The opening price of Groupon shares was $20, announced yesterday after markets closed. The company is selling just 4.7 percent of its shares today, one of the lowest share percentages of the decade.

In Groupon some see echoes of the late-90′s dot-com boom, where young Internet companies with little or no revenue rushed through to the IPO process, only to go bust in the months that followed. While listing themselves as publicly traded companies minted a new generation of millionaires, the practice left bamboozled investors holding the bag.

Groupon has faced intense scrutiny over its accounting practices, which many believe distort the company’s profitability. Groupon had to revise its first S-1 filing from June. Questions arose about why the company was measuring its revenue with a term called ACSOI, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income. This uncommon unit of measurement ignored “certain non-cash expenses and discretionary online marketing expenses that are incurred primarily to acquire new subscribers,” according to the filing, and took advertising costs off the book. During the first six months of 2011 the company spent $432 million on marketing and customer acquisition.

Sales have slowed for Groupon’s core local deals product, and attempts to innovate its model have largely failed. The Groupon Now! app, which serves location-based deals, earned the company just $2.6 million in gross sales in its first six months.

In January Groupon raised $95o million in private capital after turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google the previous month.

While Groupon’s investors are among the most prominent names in venture capital and private equity including Goldman Sachs, Yuri Milner, and Greylock Partners, unusual financial practices abound.

Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky and his family have already cashed out more than $382 million from the company before the IPO, leading many to wonder whether he believes in the long-term health of the company. By contrast, Groupon co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew Mason has received $10 million in founder liquidity, prior to the IPO.

Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat

“We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success.

With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future.

When Foursquare launched, there were already a variety of location-based services on the iPhone, such as Loopt. Since then, Foursquare has survived the onslaught of location service launches from juggernauts such as Facebook Places and Google Latitude, while also fending off rivals such as Gowalla.

Foursquare’s biggest strength in these battles was its singular focus on real-world experiences, while its larger and better-funded competitors had to cater to a wide set of use cases, such as Facebook’s vast developers ecosystem.

“We have a very narrow focus on building features that help people experience the real world,” Crowley said. “How we were able to survive the Facebook onslaught — that was a big motivating factor for the entire company.”

In spite of banner user adoption, Crowley said he can identify with newcomers who are still struggling to understand why they should use a check-in service at all. Crowley said when he first downloaded Twitter, it was 18 months before he really understood why the product was worth using, because he hadn’t discovered that “thing” which made it special.

He sees Foursquare the same way. One of its biggest hurdles is that people have to think about using Foursquare, and then make the effort to take out their phones and check in at locations. With Apple’s recent iOS 5 mobile operating system update, iPhone and iPad users have a much lower barrier to entry, which Crowley thinks will “juice” the experience.

Crowley also said that serving the needs of merchants alongside users has been instrumental in creating the Foursquare experience. And as any regular Foursquare user knows, beyond the bragging rights you get as “mayor,” an increasing number of businesses offer discounts or other physical rewards, such as t-shirts or branded bottle openers, for users who check in at their location.

“Merchants have been around for the ride from the beginning,” said Crowley, adding that for every three user features his team launches, there’s one new feature created for merchants. Crowley also said there’s a whole subset of people who no longer use Foursquare for the game dynamics and check-ins, but to stay on top of deals and special offers from favorite local businesses.

In spite of the change of direction, Foursquare is not abandoning game mechanics entirely. As the company continues to improve its recommendation engine and build out features for the next three years of growth, there will likely be time to revisit the checking-in game that made Foursquare such a hit.

“I’m a big believer in game mechanics to push people to do new things in real life,” says Crowley.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

About six weeks ago, I announced I was working closely with Austin-based Appconomy, a mobile apps startup. The relationship was unique for me because it was structured to be an ongoing relationship. Most of my client relationships are project-based, so in my view, this one was different and special. It still is, despite a month of significant changes.

Let me explain.

I joined to help draw attention to a promising piece of beta software called Grouped{in},  a  social network designed for mobile platforms. Grouped{in} hit very close to my heart on a single feature: it allowed you to socially interact with friends, colleagues or customers privately.

I’m big on the idea of being social in private. The places where I had previously hoped to do that either grew to a point where intimacy and confidentiality became nearly impossible. In the case of market-leader Facebook, we had a category leader who has been audaciously contemptuous of user privacy and data ownership rights.

Now beating Facebook is a daunting task. I wasn’t overly confident that little Appconomy could do that. But I felt that the privacy issue alone would equip us to poke the elephant in the eye and by so doing, give users a fresh option and Facebook a very sore eye.

Then one day, we all woke up and there was Google+.

Candidly, G+ as people call it, is the most promising social network I have ever seen. It is structured on circles of people you know. It warns you to be prudent in where you share information from your circles.  It is easy to use and inclusive of long-and-short text, audio, video, chat and video chat. It is free and will probably remain so.

The privacy elements are not bulletproof. I am not yet clear on who owns G+ data. But I do know this: I trust Google with my stuff far more than I do Facebook.

On the other side of it, Google is in a far better position to compete against Facebook, than is tiny Appconomy. And then it has an additional asset: G+ is fun. Lots of fun and more addictive than sling-shotting angry birds.

Brian Magierski, Appconomy co-founder agreed with me about G+. In fact, he got there first and invited me to join in, as he did with the remainder of the Appconomy team.

It took us at Appconomy a short time to decide to opt out of competing with Google+.

From my perspective, it’s absolutely the right strategic move and I applaud the calm logic the used to arrive at it.  On a personal level, I greatly enjoyed getting compensated to tell people why Facebook should not be trusted and that reasonable alternatives will make the Internet a safer, happier place.

Grouped{in} will not be actively marketed into the end-user social networking space, but will indeed live on, and if things go according to plan, it may end up being enjoyed by many million users.

Grouped{in} was the first test of a talented and growing development team. They passed very well. Now they will shift to Appconomy’s core focus: develop a worldwide, world-class mobile applications platform–thus the name Appconomy [for the 'applications economy.'].

Our focus will be China more than the US. It is too early for me to share details, but deals have been made. Partnerships were secured. Formidable roadblocks often placed before American companies in China have been removed.

Appconomy will soon be providing a mobile apps platform for western developers hoping to get into the lucrative and burgeoning China mobile apps market.

I have never seen a company adjust course so quickly and so unanimously. Prior to this decision, we were caught at a crossroad between the social network product and the development platform. Now, we are all looking in the same direction and sharing a single vision and it looks very promising–at least from where I sit.

The Web Economy is huge and interesting and I am pretty certain I’m riding with a winning team.