HN user
Infinity x 0
The sad part is he is making an effort here to rank for "Make Money Online", so he can again make money online. Not sure how confident he is in actually doing that, but seems like a somewhat recursive cycle..
I don't buy the "don't have all your eggs in one basket" mantra here. I get that idea if you rely on SEO and you have risky tactics, but in RetailMeNot's case, they have the best user experience and also, up to date coupons and for that reason are the best result most of the time in the vertical.
If this was a publicly traded company that bought links and had a site with a shoddy user experience, I'd get the argument that there's significant risk.
In the history of Google there are very few, if any case studies of sites that A) did the right thing B) were the best result that ended up losing significant traffic. Most of it is "yeah, we were doing this wrong, but it's still not fair..". In Rap Genius' case, they clearly did something wrong.
The only exception to this rule is if Google moves in on the vertical and steals traffic, which is possible with coupons - but there's a significant difference between completely destroying a vertical and impeding on it somewhat. Google has moved in on the airline tickets vertical but the businesses there are still doing just fine (Expedia, Priceline), as shown by their considerable growth in the last year+. It seems likely that if Google moved in on this vertical, it would be a similar impact.
In this article, there's little to describe what RetailMeNot does wrong. Yes, they are somewhat of a parasite, but in many ways they do these businesses a service by lowering purchase friction by creating an elegant experience for users. If their UX was substandard, it's possible customers would get lost and never complete their purchase - this happens time and time again, which is why CRO professionals can get hundreds of thousands of dollars to optimize a conversion funnel. In many ways, RetailMeNot is a piece of that elegant conversion funnel, so they are rewarded as an extremely profitable affiliate for that reason.
Disclaimer: I haven't taken the time to evaluate their link profile so there's a possibility that they are doing something risky there, but from an on-page perspective, they are the best result.
Facebook, like Google, has the goal of getting users to use their service more - as they are an advertising platform. Google Glass means people will search more - when they're away from the computer. Google investing in better internet means people will have quicker connections, which means they'll again means they'll be searching more.
Here, by increasing the likelihood people are engaged/interested in Facebook status events, Facebook will drive users back to their core platform, whether it's their core app or the desktop version - where they will, indeed, get more impressions for their advertisers. I doubt they are dumb enough, though, to actually do this through the home screen of our phones.
SEOmoz's Fresh Web Explorer is a great substitute for Google Alerts, and it was launched partially for this reason. It's not instantaneous, but it allows you many of the same functions as Alerts, with a much bigger spread.
Tool: http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org Post with More Depth On Usage: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-fresh-web-explorer
This. This method is super proven to help consumer happiness.
The only thing I find disheartening here is his discussion of how he lost funding because he told his friend they were struggling and had no idea what they were doing. This implies to me that they were not being transparent with the investor, and in essence were on the verge of "stealing" the investor's money because of it, because his aim was essentially to sell the investor on a thriving business that was in fact not there.
An investor should get a real and full analysis of the business, with accurate numbers, so it should not have come as a surprise or a fallout if someone said they "were struggling", because simply, their numbers and growth should have shown otherwise if they were actually worthy of investment, and no conversation should have been able to sway that.
You should never fear a transparent conversation with others getting back to important parties as long as you really have nothing to hide.
Why didn't Color read PG's essay on startup ideas?
What's up with the fake "positive" comments at the bottom of this thread? Makes you think this was manipulated up (every user has -3 karma). Always sad to see and it feels like this has been happening more frequently.
Also, given the quality of the article in proportion to the speed at which this article was upvoted, I'm not totally sure it wasn't manipulated in some fashion. Decent advice but not worthy of being #1.
Want to find anyone's e-mail? There's an app for that: http://linksy.me/find-email. Pretty useful.
Something missing here: SEO considerations. It matters less as the days pass, but there is still value to getting an important keyword or two in the domain name (or to be the important keyword, better still).
This is especially true if your business is planning to generate lots of business through organic. Especially false if it doesn't.
Comments like "cancel your gym membership" make me think of something like "use a PC from 1995" as an equivalent idea. I like the idea of minimalism but in general downgrading your ability to function (such as using less productive tools/working out in an environment that is less efficient/less likely to promote productivity) is not the right way to go about it. I understand the POV as stated, but it could be mis-applied and cause many people to get lazy and float along/use less sophisticated tools.
I've read/heard that it's best to flip your experience with education unless you want to be viewed as someone entry-level. When education is the best thing you've done, sure, list that first. But when you've created things like an actual business, you want to highlight that first and foremost.
Like the inefficiencies of a call to action being hid at the bottom of a page, you want to highlight your best value proposition (most likely to be the most recent thing you've done) closest to the top.
It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not, devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent -http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer...
I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.
This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.
In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.
If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.
Great to see that. There's plenty of "you should learn how to code" posts, Codecademy, Treehouse etc, but there are very few case studies of people who seemingly A) used these tools and/or B) actually ended up being able to wing it learning to code mid-to-late-stage in their career. Not sure if this post really qualifies as either of those, as well. If there's more examples of this that I'm missing, please let me know.
They definitely lose money - their ad model is based on engagement, so if tweets aren't seen/can't be acted on, money is lost.
Did Page dye his hair? A bit off topic but it's a bit shocking that a 39-year-old would have hair that gray. I guess even running a wildly successful company is stressful.
Something fundamentally missing from both versions - trust signals. Why does a user want to trust this software? You go to http://www.seomoz.org/, you see Zillow, Home Depot, Yelp and etc "love their software". Same with 37signals - WB and Kellogg's are using Basecamp? http://37signals.com/ Why isn't my company?
It is not explicity apparent that anyone loves this software, especially nobody they know or have heard of, so why should they use it? It doesn't have to be who uses it, but could also be "featured on" if you (Patio11) got coverage and co-linked to the service there as well, which I bet is more prominent. Of course, families don't care about Techcrunch - relevant news is needed.
I just e-mailed this to them, but how they get regular sales leads is through the Universities. The universities want to get their students jobs, and if you have a real value-add service that will do that, they should have no problem posting your link and being aware of you in their offices. Your startup should be the first thing mentioned by their Career Development offices and resume courses when students ask "how do I get a job?". It won't be easy to get in front of all of them, but I bet you can get the ball rolling really fast with this exceptional product.
Other sites also impacted not listed on SEOmoz:
http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/hdr-photography... http://freelancefolder.com/5-tricks-that-make-you-more-attra... http://www.webpronews.com/google-panda-update-2011-05
I found these through a fresher data source than SEOmoz. There may be more impacted (and might show what the security flaw is to someone more sophisticated than me).
If anyone is interested in the other places their links were placed, you can see SEOMoz's backlink data - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=seonix.org.
Don't mean to hijack the thread but it's interesting how these "HN TC launch articles" have died down to such a large degree on HN. Not as many companies launching, TC not covering Y Combinator, TC just being bad, or some combination of all three?
To me the closest example of an "overnight success" is where someone bursts on the scene as a celebrity because of their discovered personality. For example, people on reality shows become "niche" successful because they are discovered, rarely because they toiled away at that skill. However, their "success" still comes from years upon years of refined, unique experience to create the look+personality that created a star. If they had been discovered in the prepubescent period, it is almost a certainty nobody would have cared.
It's the same idea, just with different variables.
Great idea to write about/give a strategy for this, I've never seen this addressed before. What's unique about these sites is how rarely they actually do anything - they tend to be viral jokes, but they don't function towards any sort of business goal besides a nice add to the design portfolio. Part of that is cause that's simply required to get these to go viral - any sort of business mention causes it to crash and burn. But minimalism and a rough themeatic connection can serve to help, but we really haven't seen it consistently done other than for the purposes of a very cool thing to add to the resume, which can indirectly make a few people some coin.
It's not easy getting links. More importantly, if you have a great product where everyone else has great products, the marginal benefit of having the best product with the most amount of authoritative links is huge, because the # of clicks that come from the top result over #2 is monumental. So even if you get thousands upon thousands of links, like those that rank for "cheap flights", it's the site that gets thousands and thousands +1 that will win the day, and make millions more on a long enough timeline.
I think there's something to be said for telling people hurtful truths that can be quickly remedied. If broached appropriately and with a right-minded heart, I think a comment about your haircut would have been taken just fine - because of the temporarily and ability to instantly or quickly be solved, it's not as offensive, and actually, it ends up being quite helpful. Like having body odor in one moment or a huge stain on our shirt.
However, if that solution takes time to be alleviated, such as being grossly overweight, ugly or simply stupid, these kinds of "honest truths" will cause true harm because they will cause strong self-esteem hits that will linger over time. I for one would be happy and want with these kind of "temporary hurtful truths" told to me. I would like to say I would be the same for the long-term ones, but I'm sure I would be truly hurt just the same.
This:
"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.
"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.
Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.
I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah. If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.
Condé Nast isn't built to do this."
Lost within the story is the amazing, powerful way they delivered the message of how they came to be. Subtle, unique storytelling that is quite unlike anything I've seen before in the way it was presented. Clearly, there's a whole heaping of talented people in there - and not just an amazing product.
As far as Easter Eggs go, also: https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=recursion