Panel slides on Building a Valuable Online Community

Panel topics include:

• Community building case studies from the panel – Mashable, Etsy, Mediabistro.com, Forrst.
• The essentials of online communities – why do certain communities thrive while most fail?
• How is online community building different from offline community building?
• Scaling a community to new cities and new countries.
• What are the critical product design and technology considerations for building an online community?
• How important is the founder in a community? How to make the community thrive independently of the founder’s participation
• Making a community into a business – how to profit from community without alienating members.
• Community building safety tips – what to avoid
• And much more…

Hosts:

• Graham Lawlor (@generationg), Founder of Ultra Light Startups
• David Carlos, Founder of David Carlos Managed Information Architects

Panelists (alphabetic order):

Kyle Bragger

Chris Maguire

Brett Petersel

Laurel Touby

Pitch contest winners – Sonar, Pixable, and oGolf

Panel slides – Mobile App Startups

Panel topics include:

• Which companies and sectors within mobile app startups are the most profitable
• Revenue models for mobile apps – what works and what doesn’t
• Premium apps, mobile advertising, m-commerce, mobile content sales, in-app sales, etc
• Marketing mobile applications.  Dynamics of app store marketing and non app-store marketing
• Designing and building minimal viable mobile apps
• Selecting a mobile app development agency. Recruiting mobile talent.
• And much more…

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Nihal Mehta (@nihalmehta) Co-Founder and CEO at buzzd, General Partner at ENIAC Ventures
• Dan Melinger (@bionicdan) Co-Founder and CEO at Socialight, Founder/Organizer of Mobile Monday NY
• Greg Raiz (@graiz) Founder and CEO at Raizlabs
• Matthew Snyder (@matsnyder2001) Founder and CEO at ADO Strategies

Nihal Mehta

Dan Melinger

Greg Raiz

Matthew Snyder

Greg Galant

Adam Pennenberg

Jonah Peretti

Michael Yavonditte

• What does it mean for media to be viral?
• Why does certain content “go viral” while other content does not?
• Can virality be deliberately “engineered” into a website or does it only happen by chance?
• What are the essential principles of user behavior, media, and technology for making content viral?
• How is virality measured? What metrics are worth tracking?
• Examples of startups successfully “engineered” to go viral
• Which social networks, API’s and services are most useful in engineering virality?
• And much more…

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media
• Adam Pennenberg, Professor of Journalism at NYU, Author of Viral Loop
• Jonah Peretti, Co-Founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post
• Michael Yavonditte, Founder & CEO of Hashable and Tracked.com

Jim Bruni

Brian Cohen

Stacy Green

TJ Walker

• How to get influential bloggers, reporters and journalists to cover your startup
• Determining which blogs, magazines, newspapers and TV shows to target for your PR efforts
• Developing relationships with journalists
• Best practices on pitching your story
• Handling interviews – how to prepare, what to say, what to avoid
• Maximizing the business value of your press
• And much more…

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups

Keynote:

• David Dunne, Founder and CEO of Velocidi
  Previously COO of Edelman Digital

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Jim Bruni, Owner of Bruni PR
  Previously Towers Perrin, Burson Marsteller, and RuderFinn PR
• Brian Cohen, Founder and President at iFluence PR
  Vice Chairman of New York Angels
• Stacy Green, Communications Director at Mashable
  Previously with New York Times
• TJ Walker, CEO of Media Training Worldwide
  Best-selling author and news commentator

Pitches for The Email Mafia – November 2010

Slides from panel on The Email Mafia.

I’ve been in touch recently with an entrepreneurship and small business show on a prominent cable TV network.  They heard about the growing phenomenon of the “ultra light” startup and would like to profile one or more Ultra Light Startups member companies in a 5-minute segment on their show.  I’m soliciting nominations for ULS members to pass along to the show’s producers.

The producers have expressed three criteria that are important in their selection process…

1. They they prefer “visual” companies – ie companies that ideally have some physical object that they can touch and pass around and talk about on the show.  Purely web-based businesses are not ruled out, but the more visual the site/product the better.  If your company has something physical to show, that is great.
2. Since they are specifically profiling “ultra light” companies, nominations must be profitable without having received any external capital (ie VC or angel funding).  You will have to reveal the amount of capital you started your company with and its source (ideally this is just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, directly from the founders savings).
3. Your business must be profitable and you will have to provide some metrics about how successful your business is now.  They understand that private companies don’t need to report income/profits/revenues/etc and you may be justifiably reticent to do so.  But some concrete metrics about your company (eg number of customers/sales, aggregate sales numbers, number of website visits/visitors, growth rates, awards won, etc) are important.

Also, if you have prior on-camera experience, that is great too.

If you’d like to nominate your firm (or someone you know) send an email to info@ultralightstartups.com by 5pm tomorrow (Thursday, Oct 21).  Include a 2-sentence description of your company and answers to the three questions above.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I look forward to seeing you on TV!

The Email Mafia

Thursday, November 4

Video Guide

• 0:00 Interviews (Chris McCann, Peter Shankman)
• 9:30 Introductions
• 15:30 Pitches
• 1:09:00 Interviews (Cynthia Franklin, Matt Wilson, Jason Baptiste, Fredrik Maroe, Joseph Rosenberg)
• 1:28:30 Panel – The Email Mafia

Peter Shankman

Greg Cangialosi

Chris McCann

Jason Baptiste

Topics include:

• Who are these email-based media startups and why are they so profitable?
• How did panelist Peter Shankman launch HARO and sell it for (reported) $20 million in two years with no external capital?
• Why email is such an effective distribution platform for bootstrapped startups?
• What types of content are most effective in email and how to create it?
• Secrets to growing your list fast
• Maintaining reader engagement – open rates, click rates, social sharing, evangelism
• Revenue models for email startups – what is most effective?
• Technology platforms for email (composition, distribution, analytics, etc)
• And much more…

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Jason Baptiste, Founder of PadPressed Co-author of OnStartups.com
• Greg Cangialosi, CEO and Founder of Blue Sky Factory
  
• Chris McCann, CEO and Co-founder of Startup Digest
• Peter Shankman, Founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

Slides from panel on The Email Mafia.

[toc]

Event Summary

The Online Advertising Ecosystem

• What is an ad network? What is an ad exchange? Why do they exist? Who uses them?
• Types of ad networks – Representative, blind, targeted
• Ad exchanges, ad servers, demand-side platforms, publisher-side platforms, data providers
• Technologies/media – Display/banner, text, video, mobile, email, SMS, rich media, flash, etc.

For Publishers – Selling Inventory on Ad Networks and Exchanges

• How to profitably use ad networks and exchanges to sell your ad inventory
• Estimating revenues and comparing across various ad networks
• Ad networks vs. exchanges vs. direct sales – how to determine the most effective way to monetize
• Differentiating between/among ad networks – how to know which to use

For Advertisers – Buying Inventory through Ad Networks and Exchanges

• How to utilize ad networks and exchanges to efficiently get your message out and convert traffic
• Affordable and cost effective buying strategies for online businesses
• How to find the right ad network/exchange for your brand, message, and technology
• Case studies of innovative/successful use of targeted ad networks/exchanges by advertisers

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups and CEO of BrightMap

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Dean Harris, CMO of Kayak.com, Vonage, and HotJobs
• Jonathan Hsu, CEO of 24/7 Real Media
• Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus
• Anand Subramanian, Founder and Chairman of ContextWeb

Panel Video

Presentation Slides

Main Presentation – Ad Networks and Exchanges for Startups

Blog Posts About this Panel

Online Advertising Discussed by Ultra Light Panel (by NYConvergence)

Online Advertising Entering a “Golden Age” (by Ultra Light Startups)

Panelist and Moderator Bios

Jonathan Hsu
Jonathan is the CEO of 24/7 Real Media, a leading global digital marketing company acquired by WPP in 2007. 24/7 Real Media powers more than 45,000 web sites, delivers over 800 billion ads and reaches 200 million unique visitors. Previously, Jonathan was an M&A specialist at JP Morgan Chase Securities and served as a venture capitalist at American Lead Ventures, focused upon digital start-ups. Mr. Hsu is a member of the World Economic Forum Future of the Internet Council, the Paley Center for Media, and Vistage Global CEO Group.

Brian O’Kelley
Brian is the CEO and Co-founder of AppNexus, an advanced ad management platform specializing in real-time performance advertising. Brian created the first successful ad exchange as CTO of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo for $850MM in July 2007). Prior to Right Media, Brian was CEO of Netamorphosis, an early social networking and e-commerce site for events and venues. Brian is an active partner at Grape Arbor, an angel investor group with investments into more than a dozen technology companies.

Anand Subramanian
Anand is Founder and Chairman of ContextWeb, creators of ADSDAQ, an easy-to-use online advertising exchange that brings together advertisers and publishers to enable mutually beneficial advertising transactions. As CEO, Mr. Subramanian directed all aspects of ContextWeb’s business and operations including building and managing a team of technology innovators, sales, marketing, operations, product management and new product development. Today, the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange ranks among the top 15 ad-supported properties, according to comScore, reaching 143 million monthly unique visitors.

[toc]

Event Summary

This event will cover:

SEO Basics

• Terms: SEO/SEM/PPC; keywords, pagerank; on-page vs. off-page; black hat vs. white hat; crawling, indexing & ranking
• Strategy: Defining objectives, ROI tracking/analytics, keyword and competitive research, research tools
• On-Site Tactics: Sitemaps, robots.txt files, page title/H1/H2/meta/URL, image alt tags, manual submission to search engines, internal linking
• Off-Site Tactics: Link building, social media, PR, backlinks via badges, widgets (html, iframes, javascript)
• Myths and Facts: Duplicate content, link sharing networks, indexing Javascript, AJAX and interactive content, speed as a ranking factor, keyword meta tags, the “Google sandbox”

SEO for New Websites

• Why is SEO for new websites different than for established websites?
• Thinking more like a consumer, and less like a marketer
• Strategies when using off-the-shelf platforms (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, etc)
• Strategies when building a site from scratch (e.g. php, Rails, .NET, etc)
• Top SEO must-do tips for new sites (see here, here, here, and here)
• Site launch – press releases, blog backlinks, social bookmarking

Advanced Topics in SEO

• Social Media and Real-time Search: How do social media and real-time content play into your SEO strategy?
• Content Types: Video, audio, images, products, locations, etc
• Innovations in Search Engines: Real-time/Twitter search, Bing, Google squared, Google social search, semantic search, mobile search, voice search

Moderator:

• Graham Lawlor, Founder of Ultra Light Startups and CEO of BrightMap

Panelists (alphabetic order):

• Seth Dotterer, Senior Director, Marketing at Conductor, Inc
• Christopher Hart, Director, Eastern Region Operations Bruce Clay Inc.
• Kevin Lee, CEO of Didit and Founder of SEMPO
• Dennis Yu, Founder and CEO of BlitzLocal

Panel Video

Presentation Slides

Main Presentation – SEO for New Websites

Panelists and Moderator Bios

Seth Dotterer

Seth is Senior Director of Marketing at Conductor, Inc. a leading provider of SEO measurement and optimization technology. Seth has helped companies from startups to the Fortune 100 on their marketing strategies and utilizing technology and metrics to increase sales and profitability. For over a decade, Dotterer has been obsessed with SEM/SEO and taking an analytical approach to online marketing for clients including Microsoft, Dell, and Circuit City. Before Google existed, Dotterer was running successful pay per click advertising on Goto.com (which later became Overture, which became Yahoo! Search Marketing).

Christopher Hart

Chris runs the New York office of Bruce Clay Inc., a leading global Internet marketing consulting firm that specializes in SEO and PPC. Chris manages client SEO projects and coordinates the company’s East Coast sales. He also teaches many of the company’s acclaimed SEOToolSet® Training and Certification courses, and has spoken at national search industry conferences. Before joining Bruce Clay, Inc., Chris worked for 12 years in the online B2B publishing industry, helping architect SEO-friendly best practices and publishing production processes.

Kevin Lee

Kevin is the Founder & CEO of Didit, a provider of search engine marketing strategy, analytics, and modelling producs and services. Kevin’s books include Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales and The Truth About Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising. A founding board member of SEMPO and its first elected Chairman he is also active on DMA and IAB Committees. Kevin has been quoted in The Wall St. Journal, Business Week, The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNET, USA Today, San Jose Mercury News among others and blogs at KevinLee.net.

Dennis Yu

Dennis is CEO of BlitzLocal.com, an online agency specializing in local lead gen via integrating Facebook advertising with social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, directory listings, web analytics, and call tracking. Clients include Quiznos, Equifax, Maggianos, Famous Daves, and other national retail and franchised outlets. Dennis is a 14 year veteran of online marketing via Yahoo! and American Airlines. He has spoken at SMX West, SMX Singapore, SMX Sydney, Affiliate Convention, the American Marketing Association, and other venues.

Graham Lawlor

Graham is the Founder of Ultra Light Startups, a networking group for technology entrepreneurs, and ofBrightMap, a business to business directory of companies. Since 2008, Ultra Light Startups has helped over 900 businesses and entrepreneurs build efficient online businesses. He is a frequent speaker at classes, business schools, panel discussions and events related to technology businesses and startups and has been quoted in publications such as BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.

Question provided by Faraz Qureshi – an Ultra Light Startups member.

Answer provided by Dennis Yu CEO of BlitzLocal – and panelist at SEO for New Websites on Thursday, March 4.

Faraz’s Question:

Can anyone comment on the value (from SEO standpoint) of submitting blog posts to ‘article aggregation’ sites? For example, I’ve posted blog posts/articles to this site:  http://ezinearticles.com/ but not really sure how much [SEO] value its adding.  Any thoughts?

Dennis’s Answer:

The simple answer is that if sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Such is a nature of shortcuts to high rankings and “guaranteed #1 rankings”.  Every year for the last 10 years, we’ve seen new versions of mass submission software, content “generation” (randomization) scripts, and outsourced SEO firms selling their wares.

The medium answer is that if Google or Bing can’t distinguish you from a spammer, then you’re guilty until proven innocent. So if a spammer can submit a ton of articles to ezinearticles or other directories, whether auto-generated or created by low wage people offshore, then you have no advantage.  Search engines base rankings on linkjuice and trust– are you getting links from high authority sites.  A cnn.com isn’t going to link to a spammer, so if you can get such high quality sites to “endorse” you by linking to your site, then that’s a massive trust signal.

Because you’re guilty until proven innocent, the strategy of relying solely upon having great content isn’t sufficient. I could have the best article about a particular topic put on a brand new domain and at the same time create some crappy article on wikipedia for the same topic—who do you think will win in the SERPS (search engine results pages)? At the same time, you can’t get links from high authority sites unless you do have great content. So if you place your great content on these article distribution sites, it’s not the direct linking value that matters, but the SECONDARY effect of actual humans reading your article, writing about it, and then linking to you from their sites.

The long answer is that search engines use a mix of signals to see who actually deserves to rank for a particular keyword.  Imagine that– the goal of the artificial intelligence is to judge as accurately as if a human were choosing which pages among many should show up first.  Forget SEO for a second– do you think your content deserves to outrank what’s already there?  If your content sucks, then search engine trickery will get you only so far.

Ranking in search engines is like passing a lie detector test.  Thus, two strategies– You can either be telling the truth or be an expert at lying. A lie detector measures dozens of signals– your pulse, blink rate, fluctuations in voice patterns, perspiration, and so forth– knowing that a liar can probably keep some signals in check, but not ALL of them.  Likewise, if you want to rank in search and want to fake it, you can generate a natural looking page creation and link velocity, a natural looking mix of high quality and low quality sites linking to you, a natural looking keyword density or theming around certain topics, and so forth.

That’s why there’s been so much discussion about how to buy links in a way that doesn’t look spammy, create auto-generated content that isn’t quite duplicate content, create fake twitter profiles that look like they might just be human (“forgive my English, I am a foreign exchange student”), and so forth.  With the explosion of social media– everyone generating content everywhere they go– the problem of surfacing the “right” search results is more like a needle in a haystack.  Just too many pages to sift through– and they’re multiplying like nuts, especially as social networks make this information public by default.

If you already have a high power site (Google PageRank or SEOmoz mozRank 6 or higher), then you can play the Demand Media, Mahalo, or Patch.com strategy of barely human content that sits under a high power domain to flow down link juice.

If you have a great social site– stupid doggy tricks or other voyeuristic/humorous content– then you can send signals via actual traffic and mentions in social sites, even if those links don’t pass juice.  Yes, the search engines use actual traffic and mentions in rankings, since a popular article created a couple years ago might have gotten 50 links, but that same article created today might get 5 links and 100 tweets.

So to answer your question, using article submissions may give you a slight boost, but cannot substitute for the core of great content and great promotion of the content.  If you’re doing something a spammer can do, it’s probably not high value.  If you think there’s a shortcut via software, you’re likely taking a huge risk, making someone else rich, or both.