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HitTail is the latest tool I use for keyword research. On the outer 'layer', it promises to bring keyword research to the next level and seriously, little did I believe in that.

I decided to take HitTail for a 21 days free trial for a spin and I was blasted away.

Keyword research was basicall Read More

Long Tail SEO Infographic SEO has been getting a lot of attention over the past 12 months, from what not to do now, to what to do now, knowing what to do, but knowing how long it will work. But the effectiveness of long tail keywords won't change. Read More

Keyword Suggestion Tool HitTail Makes Things Easy If you want your blog to grow quickly, then getting traffic from search engines is good way to do that. The search game has changed so much over the past 12 months. Read More

I've communicated with hundreds of startup founders over the past three years, and I've begun to notice a pattern. There are three points during the creating of a startup where the founders are most likely to close up shop. I call these the "danger points" and this post looks at how to avoid them Read More

One piece of your marketing that you need to nail down is your "hook." This is not your Unique Selling Proposition, and it's not your elevator pitch. It's the headline of your home page. That single sentence that grabs the reader in and makes her know she's in the right place.

Once you find your hook, post it in the comments with a link to your site. Consider this permission to do a little marketing for your startup or product Read More

StartupLens.com performs 7-minute screencast reviews of startup websites, publishing new reviews twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday. Watch past reviews or submit your site. Reviews performed by serial web entrepreneur Rob Walling (SoftwareByRob.com). Read More

More than two years ago my business partner and I discussed launching a hosted version of our invoicing software. We developed a task list and estimated the effort at around 160 hours. But given the heavy competition in the hosted invoicing software market and the level of effort of the task, it was continually placed on the back burner. Until we figured out how to get to the same endpoint with 1 Read More

TechCrunch traffic is not profitable for startups. It's completely un-targeted (unless your niche market is other startups) and you have no relationship with that audience. On the flip side, the highest quality traffic is typically from an email list that you've been communicating with for some length of time. Your conversion rate for these leads will be astronomically higher than your standard w Read More

Every customer who cancels due to a lack of features (or any other fixable reason) translates to time and effort you spent sending them to your website and converting them into a customer. Think about it this way: if your conversion rate is 1%, losing a single customer is like 100 people never coming to your website. Strike that traffic from your logs. I'm a bit weepy just thinking about it. Read More

Find a startup or microISV founder and ask the following: what are the top 3 approaches you use to find customers? You'll get some pretty good answers. Then ask about the next step in the process: once you have traffic coming to your site, how will you turn prospects into customers? Most startup founders think about driving traffic to their website. Almost no one thinks about improving conversion Read More