background preloader

Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing

Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing
The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. #1 - Install Visitor Analytics Nothing can be improved that is not tracked. Google analytics, or any other package (see some alternatives here), needs to be placed on every page of your site and verified. #2 - Set Up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts Both Google & Bing have webmaster tools programs that monitor data about your site and message it back to you through online interfaces. That said, the numbers inside these tools are not always perfect, and often have serious flaws. #3 - Run a Crawl Simulation of Your Site #4 - Test Your Design with Browser Emulators #5 - Set Up RSS Feed Analytics #6 - Tag the Actions that Matter p.s.

What should a developer know before building a public web site? - Stack Overflow 7 Image Search Tools That Will Change Your Life by Maria Popova What martinis have to do with reverse art lookup and obscure German calendars from the 1990’s. Although Google has been playing with some fun image search toys in its lab and the official Google Image Search has recently significantly upped its game, some of its most hyped features — color search, instant scrolling, hover preview — are but mere shadows of sleeker, better versions that geekier, more sophisticated image search tools offer. Here are seven of our favorites. oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets you browse images and products from popular sites like Amazon, eBay, YouTube and Flickr in a highly intuitive way. Thanks, Amrit! CompFight is a Flickr search tool tremendously useful for all your comp stock image needs but also doubling as a visual inspiration ignition engine. CompFight was featured in the Experimental category of this year’s Communication Arts annual. We first featured Cooliris nearly three years ago, when it was still called PicLens.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011 - robgo.org The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011 November 9, 2010 Boston is a great place to start and build a company. It occurred to me however that Boston is a transient town. This is obviously released before 2011 in order to allow folks who are planning to arrive in Boston to get a head start. Large Tech Meetups: Web Innovators Group: Quarterly Demo-Style meetup in Cambridge draws over 1000 members of the startup community each time. Online Resources and Newsletters: Greenhorn Connect: Excellent hub of BOS tech events and resources. University Resources Smaller and High Quality Meetups PopSignal - My favorite regular tech gathering. Coworking Spaces Dog Patch Labs - Free workspace run by Polaris Ventures. Entrepreneurial Development Firms Bocoup - JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3.Thoughtbot – Web application development and design. Places to Hang Crema Cafe - Great coffee in Harvard Square. Journalists and News Scott Kirsner - Tech journalist of the Boston Globe. Investors:

eCommerce Advice - Top 10 eCommerce Startup Mistakes 1inShareinShare1 If you have any experience working in eCommerce, I’m going to bet you can list 10 mistakes you’ve made, or have seen others make while running their online store. Or maybe you’re currently setting up shop online, and need some advice on what pitfalls to avoid. Below are 10 eCommerce startup mistakes I’ve encountered while working with online businesses. Specifically, many of these blunders are made by companies who are taking a traditional business online for the first time. #1 – Blowing the budget on web development and neglecting marketing: In the brick and mortar world, you get free traffic just by setting up shop on the street corner. #2 – Getting Stuck in Endless Cycles of Design Revisions: In traditional marketing or store operations, you have to get it right the first time, because it’s too expensive to redo your store signage a week after you open. #3 – Forgetting people can’t touch your products: What does this mean? #5 – Using Print media for online media:

Best Places to Work 2014 TALENT. It's the single most important asset in any company. The ability to recruit, develop and retain talent can be the difference between success and failure, winning business and falling behind the competition. This year we set out to identify the best places to work in advertising, ad tech and media. We searched for companies that do an exemplary job of crafting cultures that attract, foster and reward the best minds in our industry. We looked at compensation, benefits packages and hiring practices, as well as work-life balance. The 40 companies on our list stood out—read on to find out why they're the best places to work in the industry. By Ad Age Staff New York-based Buck Consultants, which has nearly a century of experience in human-resource consulting, crafted two surveys. Photo by John Boehm for Ad Age #1. Headquarters: Chicago Employees: 480 He followed with an email saying he's equally happy to hire from community colleges as he is from Ivy League schools. Mr. It's working. #3.

Lessons Learned From Helping Over 150 Startups With Marketing Part 1: Fundamentals « insight.io blog Search & Social 101 How to build discipline and brainwash yourself with the Greatest Secret in the World At the beginning of 2010, I started reading a book called The Greatest Secret in the World which is basically a motivational book that teaches you to brainwash yourself The book was originally written in the 1960s as a motivational tool for salespeople, and was titled The Greatest Salesman in the World. It was republished later as The Greatest Secret in the World, due to its wide appeal beyond the world of sales. Despite the title, the book bears no resemblance to The Secret; you won’t be conjuring up your dreams by invocation of the “Law of Attraction” or any such nonsense. My primary motivation in reading the book was to develop discipline, so I resolved to do it as recommended; I read each scroll 3 times a day, once when I woke up, once at lunch, and once before bed. Now, for full disclosure, I should point out that I tried to do this back in 2007 and failed after a few months. So would I read this book again? I know what you’re thinking: “Well, duh.

8 things I wish I knew before starting a business (Editor’s note: Don Rainey is a general partner at Grotech Ventures. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) In the world of startups, success or failure can be hard to consistently predict. One thing that’s sure, however, is that anyone who starts a business is changed by the process. The continual challenges of meeting the opportunities and issues that arise make it fun and always interesting. Having started a few businesses in my life, I view some of the lessons of the experience as intuitive and others much less so. They all changed my worldview, though. Here are the eight things I wish I knew when I started my first business. 1. 2. 3. 4. It’s hard to do consistently. 5. 6. 7. 8. VB's working with marketing expert Scott Brinker to understand the new digital marketing organization.

Facebook Inc. (FB) To Brand Pages: For Organic Reach, Pay Now Or Go Home In an announcement which is bound to have a significant impact on the organic reach of Fan pages, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has officially announced its decision to cut down on the ‘promotional content’ across the site from January 2015. The social networking giant made it clear to brand owners and marketers that promotional posts will soon be edged out of their fans’ news feed. Facebook is getting difficult to comprehend. Let us talk in detail about what they said over the last weekend and what impact it might have on our News feeds in the days to come. Backdrop In good old days of yore, any business owner, celebrity, sport star or website owner could reach out to a wider audience by creating engaging and interesting content. Facebook users were shocked and dismayed, but could Facebook care lesser? Slowly and gradually, the organic reach of Facebook pages started declining. The catch here: Cash-rich companies could enhance their organic reach by pumping in $$$. Why do we like pages?

Related: