- “What do you do?”

- “I’m a Registered Massage Therapist. What about you?”

- “I’m a Reiki Master, and here is my business card. Can I have your card?”

- “Of course, here it is.”

The Internet has been around for a relatively long time by now, yet, business cards aren’t a thing of a past and it’ll probably take quite some time before one will not carry any around with them anymore and not leave a few here and there on various posting boards in cafés and community places.

Business cards have been around for centuries (In China since 15th century, Europe – 17th century) . So it’s not surprising that these days there are many shops that will print your business cards in various shapes and forms, using different fancy kinds of paper and color. But they can be quite expensive,  especially if someone designs them from scratch – since you’re paying for their time, their rent costs, etc.

I’d like to introduce you to a different way of getting your cards done and for free (only paying for the shipment). I have been using VistaPrint  for probably at least 5 years now. I’d get their 250 free business cards package about once a year and each time only pay for the shipment. You design your own card using their online card design software, which is not fancy but it does what you need – it lets you put the essential information on the business card, while making it look good. Here is one of the recent cards I’ve designed using vistaprint service.

They have a limited choice of backgrounds which are included in the free business card package and for a small extra cost you can add your own or browse through hundreds of other background designs. It’s tempting to spend a little extra, but for me I always was able to just choose one I liked from the free ones and go with it.

Once you’re happy with your card’s design, starts the process of going to the check out page. If you’ve ever been to Ikea, where they drag you through the whole shop to show you all of their wares,  the process is similar here. They will try to upsell you 10 other things before you reach to the page where you do your payment: magnets, mugs, stickers, etc., etc.. Unless you really *need* any of those things, simply quickly press “Next” and get to the checkout page, pay and be done with it. The only cost here is the shipment which usually comes to about $9. It looks like they ship pretty much anywhere in the world.

The only one important thing to mention is that they will offer you to have a blank back side of the card for something like $5 extra, as compared to the little one-line text advertising of vistaprint site on the back of the card. I won’t pay the $5, because I actually like having that advertising there and I tell anybody I meet about the great deal vistaprint gives to people and show them the back of the card so they won’t forget the url of the site. I think vistaprint should pay me to have that ad on the back on the card, rather than me paying them to remove it, since I actively help them to promote their business. If you really don’t want the little ad, I’d say choose to put the calendar for the coming year, people are more likely to carry your card around, as small year calendars are always handy, even in the digital edge.

Once you paid – the package should arrive within a few weeks. I ordered probably about 10 times from them so far and never had any quality or delivery problems.

Here is the link to their site: VistaPrint.com.

As I have only ever used one free business card printing company I don’t know of any others I can recommend, so if you have other recommendations for print shops that give away free business cards, let me know and I’ll add the link to other companies as well. Thank you.

Google I/O 2010 – SEO Site Advice From The Experts

I’d highly recommend watching this video if you’re interested in getting your site found on the Internet and not only when searched for the name of your site (which no one but you and your family would do unless you’re already very popular).

Here is the quick summary – If you follow the 80/20 rule SEO can be extremely simple.

The key point to remember: Build sites for users – not search engines. If your users like your site  so will the search engines. You must understand that the only way for search engines to remain popular is for them to make sure they deliver results that users like and find useful – if your site isn’t made for users you will get nuked by search engines [or better said ignored?].

So here are the specific points that you want to memorize:

1. Search engines can’t read pictures (yet) – Make sure you use text as much as possible – you can use a stylesheet to make plain text look very good.
2. Use a good Title [<title>Healthy Herbs For Cats</title>] – Use relevant keywords in the title, but don’t spam. [my addition: Remember that whatever your page is about, it usually is about 1-3-5 main topics, which are the keywords you want to use. If you think you have more than that you probably want to split that article to stay more on-topic and have a better chance at competing with other sites. Google to learn how to write good titles - there are plenty of free tutorials out there.]
3. Use a good URL [http://example.com/healthy-herbs-for-cats] rather than [http://example.com/brr/q3928/874/y] – Use relevant keywords in the url, but don’t spam [see the explanation above]. Separate the words with dots [.] or dashes [-] (not space or underscores as the latter have all kinds of issues). If you already have a weird URL and you have inbound links to it – leave it, otherwise you will loose what you have and try from scratch.
4. You want at least one <h1> tag, but don’t overdo. [my addition: Use <h1>. <title>Healthy Herbs For Cats</title> doesn't show on the page itself  - instead it goes to your browser's top - and usually users don't look there. <h1> is designed to show the title of the page that's seen by users at the top of each page. Typically <h1> and <title> are the same. Use relevant keywords in <h1>, but don't spam. ]
5. You must use a good and meaningful to a user description meta tag, since it shows up in the SERP ( Search Engine Result Position or simply Google search results listing) immediately after the title of the page. You want to have a unique and relevant description for each page of your site. You can automate the generation of this meta tag – just make sure it’s useful to the human beings.
6. The “Keywords” meta tag is dead. Don’t use it. [my addition:  Or at least don't stuff keywords as you lose points there, as it's easy to tell when you spam if your keywords meta tag contains 69 keywords. Why is this tag dead? Because too many people abused it].
7. Don’t stuff keywords on your pages – you lose points here. Even if you put those at the end of the page. Even if you make them invisible to users.
8. Design your site for the long tale search – most people don’t search for a single keyword, they search for 3+ keywords. Watch your server logs (e.g. via google analytics) to see how people found your pages and make more pages that fit the keywords in those searches.
9. Don’t copy stuff from other sites – you will get deindexed (i.e. removed from Google Search) or not indexed in first place. [my addition: Of course just like with books, using some content from other sites if it enhances users' experience is good.  If however you want to quote too much - link to the site with the original content instead.]
10. Don’t buy/sell links. Instead spend that money to build a better site that will be more useful to people – you will then get tons of links for free.
11. Better build one big good site, rather than a 100 mediocre micro-sites.
12. Try to think of an interesting unique brandable name, rather than chosing a name by appending words to the topic you’re going to write about. [my addition: Matt didn't say it'd directly help with SEO, but it'd help to differentiate yourself from the crowd  and thus have a much higher chance of recognition down the road and thus better SEO results in the long run]
13. Have canonical URLs.
    • redirect http://www.example.com/ to http://example.com/ [i.e. drop www] or vice versa
    • have only one canonical url in case you have /index.html, index.php, /, etc., all delivering the same content. Otherwise you lose Page Rank as it gets spread across several pages – and then you can’t compete with other sites as well. You can also tell search engines which page is the canonical one via <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/herbs.html” /> in the <head> section of the page.
14. TLD of the domain name (.com, .info, .net, etc.)  plays only a minor role in the SEO formula. Yet certain domains are considered suspicious by most users – e.g. .info which tends to host spammy sites.
15. If you use stock software [wordpress, joomla, etc.] upgrade often or you will get hacked. Use Google Webmaster Tools to have Google tell you if your site was hacked and now sells things your grandma won’t have liked you to sell. The other good indicator of your site getting hacked is when you notice that Google stopped sending traffic to your site – they don’t want users find your site and get infected.

As you can see from the above listing, it’s not that difficult to do SEO for your site. Save your money paying SEO companies which promise to magically get your site to be number one in Google and instead spend it on building a better site. In the long run you will be much better off. Build for the future.

That’s said I can’t deny that there is not that 20% from the 80/20 rule. Yes there is advanced SEO, but you will have to invest 80% of your time/money to get those 20% of extra results, where you’d have to find some good SEO experts which are far and in-between. It’s your choice.

There was a time when one could either buy links from other sites or do link exchanges. None of the two works for you these days. If Google detects that you buy links on other sites, you will get punished and demoted in SERPs, if you do link exchanges, you’re simply wasting your time since Google has been ignoring those pages.

Most sites that produce useful content have no problems getting links from other sites, because there is always someone out there who’s interested in what you have to offer. This works especially well if your potential audience is big or even better huge, and ideally those people should be technically inclined so that they know how to link to your site (at least in their blog posts). So if your site is about nutrition, celebrities, politics, and other very popular topics as long as you produce unique and interesting content you will get those highly sought after inbound links.

Now what if your company does something very very technical and non-sexy that hardly anybody in the crowd of those who could link to you cares about? Let’s say you make light fixtures for commercial buildings or you provide concrete scanning services (these examples are based on industries for companies I consulted for recently). These topics aren’t not-sexy and I’d say even boring — why would anybody ever link to those sites. In that’s what those companies suffer from. Low page rank and tough time getting the attention of potential customers searching for those companies.

So what do you do? The solutions are relatively simple and don’t require much technical knowledge.

Think Out Of The Box

While your main product or service is not sexy, you can write about things that are interesting to the general crowd while still staying in the area of your expertise. For example if you’re in the light fixtures business, you can write about light. Topics could include:

• What light ruins our vision.
• What kind of lighting for home and work is most beneficial.
• How to deal with computer screen glare.
• How to keep the depression away in the short daylight during long winters using special lamps that generate sun-like light (and feed the body with vitamin D).

and the list could go on – in fact you probably know a lot more about topics in your industry that could be of interest to general crowd how is likely to appreciate your content and link to your site.

Based on the talk with the concrete scanning company, we discovered that this company has an expertise in treasure hunting. But they could also probably expand into handyman’s area giving advice to people looking to make improvements to their houses. And again there is probably a lot more – I know nothing about those industries – but you who knows the industry inside-out will have tons of ideas. Just don’t lock yourself in a box. Bring all of your employees in and have an open brainstorm on the whiteboard. Get every person to write things and have an editor polish the result. Think of wikipedia, provide useful content that others would want to read for years to come.

Put Your Manuals Online

The other idea that most companies haven’t thought of is putting their manuals and any paper work that could be useful online. Most of these sites have 2-3 pages of content, and another 2-3 pages that have close to zero content (“contact us”-like pages). Moreover those pages talk about their company, rather than talking about what a potential client might be looking for. The page titles include the name of their company, or some custom product names, and of course a potential customer can’t find those pages/sites because they don’t know those brand names exist and therefore they don’t search using those words. Instead they search using the keywords/phrases that they know about and the sites who want to get those customers need to know what those words are and match the content to them. But this is hard work, which requires advanced SEO/Internet Marketing skills.

A much easier approach is to load your site up with hundreds if not thousands of pages that will naturally cover all possible keywords/phrases potential clients are likely to search for. And one way to accomplish that easily is by simply looking at what materials you already have. For examples instructions and manuals you give to your clients, any literature you wrote, etc. – if you dig in your coffers – you probably have many things that could safely go online. I trust you practicing common sense and not putting sensitive information online. If you don’t have the digital versions, scan and OCR those documents (Abbyy’s FineReader or Nuance’s Omnipage are excellent at doing this kind of work)

The only requirement is that you make those materials into HTML pages. PDFs don’t work well, since if somebody links to the PDF file you can’t pass that page rank to the rest of your site. And you’d lose visitors, since they would simply download the PDF never visiting your site.

You also want to make sure that you don’t just dump huge documents into one file. Instead you want to split those into multiple files, each talking about just one topic or a sub-topic. Huge documents that talk about many topics in one page don’t fare well in SERPs.

Create Inbound Links

I have mentioned already that you shouldn’t buy or exchange links – it’d only cause damage or in the best case will result in a waste of time. But you could get other sites to link to you by giving them unique quality content which includes links to your site. A lot of high-profile bloggers out there are in a constant search of new high quality material to use in their blogs. Identify such bloggers (using technorati or similar blog ranking sites) in your industry or the topic you want to write about and email them articles that fits their blogging topic/style with links to your site and chances are very high that they will happily publish your materials and even ask for more.

The other approach is creating link bait pages, which typically include some content that’s very outstanding, but usually outrageous, social-bookmarking worthy. How do you find out what kind of content people like to vote high for – simply by going to social-bookmarking sites (digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com and alike) and checking what kind of articles are deemed popular and applying the same idea to your content. Granted you want to stay close to the topic of your industry, but as long as you think out of the box you can always find something that’s social-bookmarking-worthy and on-topic for your site.

Conclusion

To conclude, remember that at the end of the day it’s sites that provide useful information get most of the traffic. So don’t worry too much about how to appease to search engines, thinking about which words need to be bold, italic, keyword density, etc., but create content that visitors would get excited about, want to share with others and link to you. Google is trying to match users to the content they search for and it’ll constantly refine their algorithms to improve this process. The technical aspects will constantly change. Good quality content will work for your business for many years to come.

That’s not to say that you won’t get a lot of benefit from knowing more about technicalities of SEO – it’s just shouldn’t be the highest priority. Once you have a lot of useful content on your site, then you could go and learn more about SEO and polish things for an extra squeeze of traffic.

Good luck.

Let’s take a concrete example. My company’s name is StasoSphere, which resides in Vancouver and besides other things that I do in this life I’m a Reiki practitioner (which is an energy-based healing modality). Now let’s search google for ‘Reiki Vancouver’, which most prospective clients would type in to find a Reiki practitioner in Vancouver.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=reiki+vancouver

And this is what we get:

My company shows up at the very top of search results and it includes a map indicating my location, and the information about my business.

Note: Google will show different results depending on your country, so if you aren’t using google.ca (Canada) you might get different results.

If you click on my company’s listing you’d get a more detailed view:

OK, so how do you accomplish the same? It’s very simple and it’s free.

All you need to do is to add yourself to the Google Local Business Center, by going to:

http://www.google.com/local/add

(if you already have an account with google, use it, otherwise create an account for free)

[Update 2011: Google renamed this service to Google Places]

Once logged in, click on “Add new listing” and fill out the details about your business, add working hours, photos, videos, payment options, industry and of course a detailed description and contact information to help your prospective clients contact you.

Tip: If you don’t want to disclose your exact address, you can use a street intersection to have the location on the map to be more or less correct. e.g.:

Broadway Ave and Commercial Dr

Once you filled out the information it might take a few days for your listing to show up in Google Search results.

Dealing with Competition

As of this writing it seems that my company is the only one that’s listed with Google Local Business Center. But what if more than one company is listed in the same industry? For example let’s look at a query: ‘Vancouver Acupuncture’:

There are quite a few companies in that industry that discovered this service and got listed in search results. As you can see that Google now shows a much more condensed view of companies.

So How do you compete for the first listing with other companies? As you can see from the snapshot, it seems to be a combination of the relevant keywords and the number and quality of reviews. Companies with words ‘Vancouver’ and ‘Acupuncture’ come up higher than those that list only one of the keywords and of course the number of high rating reviews affects the listing as well. Therefore you need to do two things:

1. Smartly choose the title for your listing to match the keywords the prospective clients are likely to search for (typically that would be the name of the city your business is in and the name of the industry you are in)
2. Contact your clients and ask them to submit high rating reviews of your business (they will have to go your business listing, click on ‘Write a Review’, login into their google account and submit a review).

It shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes to list your company with Google Local Business Center, so don’t procrastinate and do it now!

I found two startup companies that stood out, both in the “do good” space:

H2O3 Inc

Tim Piwonka-Corle, presented H2O3 Inc, whose product is a portable water disinfection unit that you can see on the right. The process is done using an ozone sterilizer, which uses less than 100 Watts of power (think incandescent light bulb). Each unit is able to produce 20 liters of sterile water in about 15 minutes.

Now the original purpose of this device was to help the third world countries, where contaminated water sources is the main cause of a high death-rate. And since this unit’s operation cost is supposedly quite affordable in poor countries it could make a huge difference to people who live in those areas. The upfront cost though might be still pretty high though, but Tim suggested that they will get that cost down as they improve things.

But the interesting thing is that this same device could have a variety of other applications, where a lot of money can be made. And two things that Tim mentioned were military usage and residential pool & spa industry. While the former is quite obvious, the latter has to do with chemicals used to disinfect water in pools. Those chemicals aren’t very healthy for our bodies, and therefore using Ozone to disinfect water is a much better proposition. And if the price is right, it could get a huge adoption there.

Apparently this is not a new idea, but H2O3 advantage is that they have a patented technology that is much more efficient than most current competitors have.

It’s an interesting company, since it has a potential to accomplish two goals – do good and also be quite profitable for those involved in it.

MakeGood Technologies Inc.

Rick Goosen said that his company is all about giving things in a new way (giving 2.0 he said on his site). One of the projects that start with is socially responsible yellow pages. Rick identified the need for being able to find companies that are socially responsible, as there is a growing segment of population that boycotts companies that aren’t socially responsible. Yet it’s very difficult to find the companies that fit the bill. Rick’s idea is to develop a process that will certify companies as socially responsible and give budges to those companies, which they can post on their sites and products, and thus attract more customers.

As any new idea, it’s hard to tell how their idea will work out, so we will just have to wait and see.

There were a few companies that I found particularly interesting.

fundfindr.com

This company’s idea is to help entrepreneurs with fundraising. Startups make a video of their pitch and upload it to fundfindr’s site. Potential investors can watch those videos and contact the entrepreneurs if they are interested in the idea. The site also provides listing of various investor groups and their contact information, which is a helpful resource.

I think it will probably be a very useful tool for both investors and startups. Though entrepreneurs should be careful at posting their pitches in public. If your video tells too much, you might be creating an unnecessary competition. No need to be paranoid, but exercising common sense is probably a good idea.

letsgofordinner.com

Apparently millions of restaurants have a problem with not being able to fill in the empty seats and lose money because of that. letsgofordinner is set to solve this problem, by equipping the restaurants with software that will send SMS messages to potential clients offering a 50% discount (restaurants are still very profitable, even at 50% discount – imagine the real cost of the meal). The startups says that people are embarrassed to use coupons and therefore having the payment done via the site removes the awkwardness element.

peerfx.com

I will gladly become their user once they live and running. peerfx brings a solution for an interesting problem – currency exchange spread that banks take is huge. When exchanging big sums of money this becomes pretty expensive. Personally I don’t use banks to exchange money, but go to smaller shops that specialize in money exchange and get much better rates. e.g. one such shop in Vancouver is Vancouver Bullion & Currency Exchange and another is Custom House Global Foreign Exchange. You just call them ask for the rate and if you come within a few hours they will reserve it for you. My teller at VanCity told me that they now also give custom rates to customers who exchange bigger sums of money. And of course there is xe.com that tries to give the best rates, but the problem is that it involves wire transfer and it might take a few days to convert your money.

Back to the peerfx story – banks charge higher rates, because they take the risk of buying foreign currency reserves (and because they can charge more). peerfx solves the problem by letting two people simply swap currencies removing the middle-man and the need to have a cash reserve. Of course peerfx is still the middle-man, but they are going to charge a lot less than banks. This is very exciting and if successful may force banks to reduce their rates (or may be not).

One thing I’m not sure about is how quickly peerfx could grow, before competitors realize that this is a great idea and provide the same features. I’d imagine that it shouldn’t take longer than a couple of weeks for paypal, google cart and alikes to provide such solution. They already have everything in place, including huge user-bases. Florence Leung, the CEO of peerfx.com, tells me that they have a patent on the whole idea. But I’m not quite sure how defendable that patent would be.

wommp.com

wommp is the “word of mouth marketing project”. Alexandra Skey had an impromptu presentation where she impersonated a typical consumer and a provider, each having a problem of communicating to each other their wants and needs. Users don’t want to see irrelevant advertisements, marketers in turn would love to figure out how to find the consumers that want their products and services and have everybody happy. The ultimate goal of the project is to implement “permission marketing” as coined by Seth Godin. i.e. they want to attract a lot of users which will specify their needs in a very detailed way, so that marketers could talk directly only to consumers who want their products and services. The idea is interesting, but as they say the devil is in the details. Let’s see what Alexandra can come up with. Watch Alexandra’s presentation here.

Typically there are two segments to each meeting. There are 5-minute pitches, for those who do it for the first time. If the 5-minute pitch went well and people found the presenter prepared, then the next time they are given 15 minutes. They also get time to answer questions — typically 10 minutes presentation, followed by a 5-minute Q&A session, where startups get “grilled” a bit, or should we say get a “reality-check”.

Recently one of the meeting organizers, Thealzel Lee, started running prescreen sessions, which allows startups to run their presentation in front of a small expert panel, which give suggestions for improvements and the panel also decides whether the company is ready to do the long pitch, do the short one, or send them home to do their homework.

There is one more nuance to the selection process. A startup that wants to pitch to VanTEC investors group has to find a sponsor investor who either had already invested in the company or considers to do so. This is a great filter, because if a startup can’t find a single investor themselves, chances are that they will waste other investors’ time.

Meetings are held monthly – usually the first Tuesday (but not always) morning of each month between 7:30 and 10:30am. Attendees are charged a nominal $10 to cover the coffee and snacks. Attendance is by invitation only, but if you really want to come and look at other companies present (hint, hint for you entrepreneurs) you will be let in. Most of the attendees are active investors, but there are always a few wannabes and handful of MBA students.

There are two kinds of meetings: Technology startups and Biotech/Life Sciences startups. The two alternate every month, so investors interested only in one kind of startups don’t have to attend every month.

You can read more about the VanTEC group.

If you would like to come and pitch to Vancouver Investors you need to contact Thealzel Lee tlee@rocketbuilders.com if you are a Biotech/Life Sciences startup and Mike Volker mike@volker.org for all other startups.

Often I find myself wearing one of the two hats: entrepreneur hat and investor hat.

I run my own business, but there are too many things I’m interested in and I can’t possibly work on too many projects at the same time and actually accomplish anything. I could hire people to work for me, but I don’t like management. I want to work on exciting projects, not manage people who do those projects. Some of us quit their employers to start their own company, because they hated being a slave to their company and not being able to work on things they really want to. And then they end up having their own company, but because now they need to manage people they don’t really get to enjoy their own company either. There must be a better way.

I outsource some of the work to contractors that works out quite well, since I don’t need to manage those people. The secret is finding an outsourcing company that will do the management for you and just deliver the results. But that only works for simple tasks that can be explained in a step-by-step spec. Anything that requires “thinking” is often not very suitable for outsourcing. I sometimes find independent people in the outsourcing industry, but it’s quite quite rare.

Some time ago I found a solution to my big dilemma. I now find startup companies that want to work on similar projects to mine. I then invest in those companies with cash and mentoring time. Startup companies love getting me on board because typically they don’t have extra cash to spend and I don’t charge them anything for my services, but accept stock options in lieu of cash. Because I have so much experience in a variety of industries I often can advise on a wide range of subjects. However I often need to be careful not to get too deep into the low-level details, because this is precisely what I wanted to avoid in first place — low-level details are very time consuming, and if I go there I can help with the big picture. So I need to remember that others can figure many of those things out without my help.

The kind of investments I do is called ‘angel investments‘. Basically this is the riskiest of the investments because typically it involves investments in companies that have very little or nothing accomplished at the time of the investment. They need money to hire people and buy equipment so that they could build the thing that dream of. As this is the riskiest type of investment, the returns tend to be the highest as well.

However the way I do it, this is the actually the safest kind of investment, because I’m directly involved with those companies. This is very close to having hired all those companies to work for me. So just like having my own employees if I’m good at helping the companies, I invest into, do the right choices — I increase the chances of success. Compare that to stock market investing, where most of it is a pure gambling – you have zero control at whether the company performs better or worse. Moreover often stocks perform badly regardless of how the company performs.

In the course of research I watch many startup pitches, talk to other investors and some interesting observations are made. I will try to share those observations in this blog and also talk about interesting events happening when I wear the entrepreneur hat.

Enjoy.