Not evil like undercooked Brussels sprouts nor evil like a politician with a tax revenue windfall. Evil like some jerk at a cocktail party handing out business cards for “free investment portfolio reviews.” Ok, maybe “annoying” is a better term, but even annoying behavior sufficiently repeated can turn you into the shirtless guy on cops explaining why he torched his neighbor’s truck at 2am on Sunday morning.

Of course (following me here?) I am talking about people who post the most amazingly inappropriate content into Social Voting Sites. It doesn’t really matter what people put into Social Bookmarking Sites and god knows that Pure Networks like Facebook/MySpace are full of the most astounding krep. (Side note: who would have thought so many attractive young women from MySpace would want to be MY friends?)

For example, “Aphrodisiacs for Valentine’s Day” from a health supplements store. (No, no link, they don’t deserve it.) It’s a 150 word re-purposed post, a month before V-Day, and, worst of all, it’s on a site (Digg) where the Digg-erati will bury it in a hot second once they see it.

So, to summarize: waste of time because it won’t get seen, it violates the community creed, and it is ill-timed. Not evil, but maybe mini-evil.

Why not post it on The Rambling Irishman?

Who?

Exactly.

It’s a niche pligg site. Based on our traffic experiments we think they get between 1,000 and 3,000 people per day. It takes two votes to get to the first page, 10 to get to the top and stay there for five days.

Good math, really: five votes to get to a place where 10K people see your content. If you bought that traffic from Stumble it’d cost you $500.

Keep in mind that your Valentines Day content has absolutely no chance on Digg and they’re the same random crowd as on The Rambling Irishman. (There are more of them, but they are no more demographically sorted.)

So why don’t you use your network to put something in a niche and get it to the front page? It takes no more time. Maybe it is more cool socially to be on digg, but I personally think an increasing bottom line is cool.

Oh, and even better, your post is NOT EVIL on these smaller sites because they need the content and the traffic and the attention.

Three days ago I wrote a post, Promote My Site Above The Noise, and tossed out the phrase “For example: if you type “promote my site” you will not find us for 27 pages or something crazy like that.” Liar liar, pants on fire.

If you run that same search now we are 7th on the first page.

How in the world did we do that?

Let’s chat.

There are three big boxes I use to keep my thinking about social networking:

Pure Networks - MySpace/Facebook

Social Voting - Digg/Pligg/Reddit

Social Bookmarking - Delicio/Scuttle

(Ok, there is another box I keep upstairs and call Crazy Aunt Betty and I keep stuff like Twitter in it. Ignore that box until the bubble bursts. Then we can take out the mummies of VC cash and have a good laugh.)

I’m going to ignore Pure Networks like MySpace/Facebook because, well, they are not worth the time for us, unless we violate their TOS. Which we won’t do. But they are fine for some people - just not much intersection between our customer base and theirs.

So let’s talk about what we did… We promoted our site, gently, onto Social Voting and Social Bookmarking sites. What do I mean by gently? We put some of our best (IMHO) posts out for people to read and link to/from. (More later on that.)

What we did NOT do was any real traditional SEO stuff around optimizing our website, link purchasing, creating viral content, etc.

It’s not that we don’t know how to do that stuff (we do, natch) but because we really wanted to prove a point (to ourselves and you) about how social networks, honestly approached, give you the right kind of traffic and SERP results.

I was reading John Chow last night (yes, I also read the headlines in People while I’m in the grocery line, sue me. I love that guy’s chutzpa: I make money telling people I make money! Awesome.) and he mentioned (cha-ching! $400!) a site called SEOMeter. For $20 they will monitor your google robot crawl rate for a year and ’splain what that means.

Let’s ignore the way this guy is buying traffic (which I think is neat) and the value of his service (which I am still thinking on) and look at one specific thing: he has ads on his site.

Ads on a pay-to-play site.

Hmmm.

I used to subscribe to the WSJ online (was one of the first few hundred to signup, actually) and they had ads out the wazoo. But somehow I thought that was reasonable since it was a newspaper.

But I was really startled over SEOmeter’s ads and I’m not sure why. Why did it seem different to me than, say, sitemeter? Yes, I know, sitemeter has a paid service (which we use on some of our stuff) but they do not show me ads when I login to those accounts.

Perhaps I am banner-ad blind and the ads at SEOmeter are well done enough that I can actually see them? Or do I suspect that I’ll still see them when I’m logged into my account? Is that reasonable? (Was there a “bag o question marks” at Woot? Was there?)

I am hoping this guy signs up a lot of people because I think the ‘net would actually work better if there were more of what I call “small payment” services available. I’m not going down the micro-payment hole, I think we all know that has never even come close to working. I’m just talking about a focused service that doesn’t cost the earth.

Oh, and he is giving away slots to the first 100 people who post a comment and ask. You might want to wander on over there.

This venture is, by one count, my eighth startup and, as I’m not rich yet, one might wonder why I’m still banging my head against this particular sharp object. My wife doesn’t - she knew what I was like when she married me. (Not that she’s stopped trying to, er, improve some of my habits!)

I used to play golf once or twice a week before I got married, had kids, and bought a house with a big yard. And then my wife got a good job, and my parents got older. And then her parents got older and moved back to the area. And my kids got involved in sports and scouts and performances.

So golf went out the window - haven’t played seriously in five years, haven’t even hit a ball in two years. But I am doing another startup. Hmmm.

Why did I stick with golf, having almost no natural ability? Well, every 18 you hit one sweet drive, it speeds through the air, fading right where you wanted it. And it wasn’t a mistake because you *meant* to do that, you practiced it, you concentrated, and you executed. Wow, what a feeling.

The more I played the more of those moments I got - addictive moments.

Even better, when you really shank a ball, you know it as soon as you hit it. If you pay close attention you often know why you did it as well. As a someone who believes in constant improvement, that is pretty cool too.

Best of all: you learn to recognize the situation before you hit the ball into the innocent foursome standing at the next teebox. Which means you can back off and reapply your focus before failure. It’s the last step before not really making many mistakes at all.

Startups are the same thing.

When you are a small company you get to own the hit - the marketing direction, the design, the work product. And when it’s a sweet hit, it’s because of you, not a large team with overhead. And the mistakes are yours too. And you can stop before you make the mistakes and replan for success. And you can insert your own planning method and not use one from corporate.

It’s not to say that startups aren’t a team effort - they necessarily are - but you can choose your team. Either by hiring A players or only joining a startup full of top talent.

I hope you don’t think that is a strained analogy, but it works in my head.

I want to say one other thing about how I learned from Golf about how to do startups better: making time for my family. When I gradually dropped golf, I was pretty relaxed about it - my wife, children, and home were just more important than the game and the satisfaction I got from it was sterile compared to having a kid with a skinned knee comforted by his daddy. And as I became a better husband/father I brought new skills into the workplace.

So why did I leave Mega Corp to do a startup if home and family are the most important things in my life? Because startups, really, are worse than golf in terms of the addiction/frustration/satisfaction cycle. I’d been wanting to do something cool and exciting and fulfilling for 5 years. So I spent a year looking around and made this current situation happen.

And I think I’m a better dad/husband because of it, even if I’m working more hours - albiet a lot of them after everyone else is asleep. I am more engaged in work with less anxiety and frustration - which means I’m more relaxed when my oldest leaves the hammers and saws in the tree fort duing a week of rain. (Not completely relaxed, but not explosive, anyway.) Which means I am learning more husband/father skills - all of which I can use at work. And because I’m happier at work I am smarter there - and I bring some of that home too.

I was able to give up golf easily, but spent 5 years missing startups and a year making it happen on my terms. No doubt at all: startups are more addicting than golf.

We’ve all had to go to K-Mart: tired linoleum, cranky staff, slow lines, mixed selection of goods, and an overall sense of neglect. Is your online store promoting itself as K-Mart? When was the last time you updated your look-and-feel?

Does your contact-us form promise a response in 48 hours? Is it mostly pre-canned versions of “see the FAQ section?” Is that good enough today? (Uh, no is the answer, if you were wondering.)

Is your e-commerce site doing things the Amazon.com or Yahoo! Stores way? If not, then why? Are people supposed to figure out your way of doing things before they buy? If so, are your surprised by your increasing shopping cart abandonment rate?

Look, this is America, where we stand in front of the microwave and yell at the popcorn to hurry up.

Do you sell a lot of goods that never sell? You know what I mean, affiliate items that just get NO traffic from search engines (even though you rank) and that people never look at. If so, why do you have it on your site?

You are probably NOT K-Mart management, making executive cash in a downturn. You probably run a Yahoo! Store or an Ebay Store. Focus on what sells, make it easy to sell, keep it fresh but comforting.

You really want to be an Oreo and a glass of milk to a customer and not a fancy three course Ethiopian eat-with-your-hand meal.

Run, run, run for your lives:

Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore–it’s about critical mass. It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.

To be fair, they do note that you should be a world-class supercalifragilistic VC-CEO before you do this, else, you know, get some revenue, dude.

Wait, there is more:

That’s what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can’t help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money.

Because AOL is a great example to follow.

Uh. Crap. I’d really hoped to pay off my mortgage and fully fund the kid’s college fund before the crash hit this time.

….

Ok, the next bit of this post is brought to you by Johnny Walker Blue.

Motto: A whole bottle, not a hangover in sight.

….

I’ve been reading a lot about twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, MySpace (why are all those pretty girls wanting to be my Friend?), et. at. and trying to understand the reasons behind the bubble.

I think I’ve decided that there is no reason, it’s just a bubble.

So tonight I dumped all my stocks and have bought more Fidelity 2040 funds and have banked 35% of my portfolio in cash.

Based on past performance, now is the time to buy google, eBay, and other high fliers.

Here’s a picture for you - customers can find your site using the names of the things you sell or talk about. Wait a minute, isn’t Google supposed to do that for you? TANSTAAFL. (There is Absolutely No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - Robert Heinlein) You have to promote your site to make it easy for your customers to find you. Obvious, yes, but have you really THOUGHT about it?

[This is the first article in a series - I’ll keep updating this to have the right links.]

Before we can even think about what to think about, we need to have some common terminology, so bear with me. If you know all this stuff, skip to the last paragraph. Married men may mutter: yes dear.

Let me introduce an important term:

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

All this means is what a user sees when they type in “Promote My Site” in at the Google prompt. Or the Yahoo prompt. (Yahoo still has 30% market share in search - are you sure you should ignore them?)

There are a number of things going on in the results: advertisements, etc, etc. But I’m going to concentrate on the “real” search results, or what are called “organic.” These are the results that google/yahoo return when they crank through about a zillion factors. And these are the results that people click on around 80% of the time.

I am not going to talk about the nitty gritty of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There are a lot of smart people out there who have lots of content. This series is about thinking about organic results.

Ok, so we get SERP and organic results. Let’s also assume that we understand that it’s better to be farther up towards the top of the SERP’s for important customer phrases.

“Important Customer Phrases” - roll that around for a while. What does that mean?

For example: if you type “promote my site” you will not find us for 27 pages or something crazy like that. But if you type “promote my site social networks” we are the number one result. That is not an accident. Sure, the first phrase is the most general, and people focus on that, but the second phrase is a more important customer phrase.

What makes “promote my site social network” more important than “promote my site”? Good question, glad you asked: which is going to deliver a reader more likely to buy our product? Exactly.

So there is the first point to think on: you need to promote your site above the noise by identifying the most actually valuable place to rank high in the Organic SERPs.

Let’s say you had a Yahoo Store that sold tires. Good luck ranking for “tires.” Plus, really, aren’t 99% of the people typing that in looking for something local? How about “tires internet” - still a lot of action there. But you get a good phrase like “tires internet overnight” and suddenly you have the ability to rank in the SERPs there. And you can iterate: “tires internet tomorrow” or “tires tomorrow” and so on.

I just got through re-reading some of Dharmesh’s Top 10 articles in On Startups.

My favorites are:

Why Startups Have Fewer Dilbertian, Pointy-Haired Bosses (As someone who fears becoming the PHB this was pretty reassuring.)

and

Why A Real Market Of A Few Is Better Than A Mythical Market of Millions (I have always had trouble articulating why a calculable crowd of money bagged customers is better than 43M impecunious facebookers. So I was please to read it so well written.)

I wish I could write 10 articles a year that good.

Dharmesh, this link love is for you.

One of the reasons it is cool to work in a startup is that you can often push your most tedious, ugliest, boringest, grottiest work up to your boss. Because all the actual working stiffs are high value IP workers, it does not make sense for them to, say, check the input data files. So on and so on up the ladder until the COO (me) ends up with a spreadsheet with 2,734 lines that need hand checking.

It’s the internet era equivalent of digging a ditch. With a chopstick. Not even a pair of chopsticks, just the one.

Before you send me an email and tell me to automate the process, let me assure you that I did not leave my IQ in the toilet bowl at New Years. These 2,734 lines are what is left AFTER I automated what could be automated. The problem is that determining “right” requires a Mark V1 Human Eyeball on each single line. Every. Single. Line.

Bummer.

I figure this is approximately 10 hours solid work, but I don’t have any project deadlines this week and everyone else does, so I’m probably the best person to do the work.

Posting may be light this week. And bitter.

Before everyone left work for the new years I gave them a pre-signed expense receipt approval with two lines on it labeled TAXI.

(Yes, we use paper expense reports - it looks more like real money to write $$ on paper. Which is why people use Excel to model revenue.

I told my folks that if they were going out they should take a taxi to/from. And please to wear a seat belt in the taxi.

We have also relaxed the absolute receipt policy for taxi’s this evening. If they can’t get a receipt they have been instructed to just drool some booze on the paper or something.

I hope everyone is careful this evening.

Happy new year.