SEO Clinics have to be some of my favorite sessions at any conference hands-down. This is a great opportunity to hear SEO pros give feedback on real sites that they haven’t seen in the past. For privacy reasons I won’t be publishing the sites reviewed but I will discuss some of the tips and tricks that were shared during the clinic.

Michael Martin, Senior SEO Strategist, Covario Inc.

Backlinks – this was one of the biggest issues that came-up with people submitting sites without enough backlinks to rank well for terms they want to rank for. The panel emphasized the importance of having a few solid backlinks with anchor-text matching your dominant search phrase. Reach-out to bloggers and news sources, don’t worry about having a million links, just get links that count!

Site Load Time – this is critical and even more important since Google has now made it clear that this is a part of their ranking algorithm.

Taylor Pratt, VP of Product Marketing, Raven Tools

Don’t Index Shopping Cart Pages – this was a great tip that I haven’t seen come-up in SEO sessions much in the past. The idea is simple, your shopping cart pages have no useful content for search, so they should not be indexed.

Content, content content – at the end of the day it all boils down to great content. One of the sites displayed had thousands of pages of great content, this was a key for them to rank for some of the terms they did. Along with having great content it is so important that your on-page optimizations are spot-on to get the most benefit.

Of course a lot more was covered in this session but I can’t give-away all the good stuff. Now back down to the blogger lounge. There’s a Jenga competition going on and the winner gets a free one-hour Domain Name Consultation with yours truly. For any of my current consultation clients reading this, you know what a kick-ass prize this is

I am excited to say that tonight we’ll be enjoying some R&R away from home in a beautiful cabin nestled in the snow. Before we leave I wanted to make a quick video for all of you wishing you happy holidays and reminding you to spend time with family, not on Domaining blogs or staring at drop lists!

This weekend I will be completely unplugged but I’ve already written and scheduled my posts so you can still enjoy updates tomorrow and Sunday. I just sent-out my Christmas Newsletter which is by far the most detailed and content-rich publications I’ve ever produced.

Now some final words before we’re off!

Happy Holidays!

Today Apple opened it’s biggest store in the world, and where better to do this than the big Apple (some pun intended). The store is absolutely enormous and as usual it was completely packed on opening day. I’m a huge Apple fan but am yet to understand why anyone would want to wait in a long line, shuffle like cattle into a packed store just to see products you’ve already seen. I could understand it if Apple unveiled something new but I’m looking at video of people oogling over the iPad 2 which is pretty far from a new product.

Either way Apple fans (myself included) are fanatics, we’re all just fanatical about Apple in our own ways. Of course TechCrunch was on the scene and they took some videos from within the chaos. If you’d like to get inside the mayhem while enjoying the comfort of sitting at home in your PJ’s then watch and enjoy:

Of course with the grand opening of the Grand Central store I had to take a look at who owned AppleGrandCentral.com. Right now the site is currently being used as a personal blog which they clearly state is not affiliate with Apple in any way. As you can see from the screenshot below it does look like the site was designed by a five-year old so Apple may be UDRPing their parents if they go after the site.

The domain name was originally registered in February of this year and I’d imagine they’re enjoying a bit of a traffic boost with the grand opening today. I am monitoring this domain through Domain Tools so will let you all know if this mysteriously changes hands and lands with Apple anytime in the near future.

Hello and welcome to Part Four of my coverage of the Startup Conference LA! If you haven’t read parts one, two, you can find them below:

The Startup Conference LA – Part One

The Startup Conference LA – Part Two

The Startup Conference LA – Part Three

After the pitches, Gagan Biyani, co-founder and President of Udemy took the stage to talk about raising money for first time founders. Gagan recently raised four million dollars and has met with over 100 investors so knows how to work it.

Gagan quit his job in February of 2010 when he found himself having investor meetings during his work-at-home Friday’s as a consultant for Accenture. He learned from this experience that before you start raising money, make sure that you’re ready.

When Gagan first quit his job they had not product, just an idea. Five months later they had over 10,000 users and a real product, that’s when the timing was right. So what did Gagan do to go from quitting his job in early 2010 to getting four million in funding?

The first step was meeting tons of people. Affiliate with great startup brands, things like incubators, coworking spaces, or other affiliations. Go to conferences and events but don’t only listen to the talks, also spend time meeting interesting people and learning from each other.

Don’t be afraid to pitch at startup events, even if your pitch sucks it’s still a great opportunity to practice pitching and get feedback. Apply to dozens of competitions and do everything you can to get into them. Don’t pay to pitch, this is a waste of time and money.

When meeting with investors pick the right people. Don’t start with the famous guy, start with his friend. Fellow entrepreneurs in your space can be a great asset, especially those who are not yet successful but are “on track”. Industry experts like lawyers can be useful as well but should not be relied upon.

Grab coffee/drinks with people and ask for specific advice. Try to pick a location with WiFi so you can really show what you’re doing. Angel List (Angel.co) can be a great place to find information about investors and get your name out there and into the community. If you’re posting on Angel List it’s important to show social proof, some data point that will show someone why you are important.

Once you get a “Yes” from an investor use this as a springboard to approach other investors. If an investor is not okay with you using their name with other potential investors then they probably aren’t a great lead investor. This gives you enough credibility to get meetings with other investors.

One of the most interesting things I learned from this talk is about emailing the pitch deck. Gagan recommends that you do not email your pitch deck until after you’ve been able to schedule a face-to-face meeting. You can send-out the deck once you have the meeting scheduled but if you can’t talk through the deck then you lose a lot of the value.

Usually I talk about tools that people can use to work more efficiently in their small businesses. Today I’m going to talk about an organizational strategy I’ve developed that you can use with a number of different tools. Today I wanted to talk about solving a problem that many small business owners have – lots of goal but not real timeline or process for which you plan to complete those goals.

It can happen, and does happen to all of us. Life is busy and before you know it you have an endless to-do list that your knocking things off of whenever you can. The problem is – without tying your to-do list to dates you might not be setting real goals, instead you may just be building a wishlist.

So how can you set real goals that actually get done?

I’ve developed a new technique for doing this that anyone can do using a number of different software tools or even just a piece of paper. In my case, like the cloud-based geek that I am, I use BasecampHQ to manage my to-do lists on a per-project basis. So let’s say you have a master to-do list, all the things you want to get done on a certain project – it might look something like this:

The problem is that many people stop with the to-do list. They feel that once they have an action item on a list, it’s going to get done. It may get done, however getting something done 6-months after you planned to is hardly an achievement. So here’s what I do that’s helped me get things done. I go just one step further, it doesn’t take long but it does make all the difference in the world.

Once I have my to-do list I take all of these goals and assign dates to them. I’ll try to be generous, if I think something will take one week, I’ll give it two weeks, the point is every single item on my to-do list is assigned to a date. Soon it becomes automatic, every time you think of a new to-do item you’ll start thinking about how long it will take to complete and you’ll immediately assign a completion date to it.

So what happens if you miss your completion date? Don’t panic, it’s okay, just move the task out, but whatever you do don’t just let it sit back in the past in your calendar. Move it forward, set another date, and focus on hitting that goal.

While this may seem like a really simple process it’s amazing how many businesses don’t do this and instead live with long to-do lists that slowly get chopped-away over time. If you want to set real goals for your business you need to not only know the goal, but when and how you are going to complete it.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed and thinking that you can’t get anything done, give this technique a try and start setting real goals!

Last week I shared a case study on building a brand on Kayaking.org and saw some really incredible feedback, so I’m back again this week with another case study. One of the things that I enjoy the most about building businesses is learning about different niches. The debt niche is a very lucrative one however suffers from an incredible number of very low-quality sites and scams. Every brand I build is something that I think we can make a real impact with and finding underserved niches is really part of the game.

There are plenty of niches online that have dominant players that own the search space. Take a look at televisions or electronics in general – Best Buy and Amazon are duking it out as are major brands like New Egg. If you want to make a meaningful brand in this space you better do something truly revolutionary or have a budget to go up against the big guys otherwise you’re probably just wasting your time. When I find a niche online the first thing I look at is who the category leaders are, and if they’re delivering the best customer experience possible. The debt space has a need, some of the top terms are dominated by low-quality sites that haven’t been updated in eons, I’m looking to change that!

Debt elimination programs is one of the newest sites I’ve launched in the credit/debt niche and I think it will make a great case study over the coming months. First let’s look at where I am and then I’ll let you know what I’m planning to do.The first thing I did is had ten articles written for me, all focused on debt and the most popular related topics. This is usually a core that I like to start with so I know we have a basic information-base to build the brand on top of.

The issues that I’ve seen many new developers make is to stop here and assume that a ten page site will stand on its own. This is just the base and expecting to make a fortune just by building something like this is selling yourself a dream that will probably never come true…I won’t say ever because I’ve seen and still own some exceptions, but those are more like nice surprises than the norm.

Once the initial site was up I went on over to Twitter and Facebook and created social media accounts for the brand. I was able to add these to the header so that when people visit the site they have a way to connect with the brand via social media. Don’t feel bad if your social media accounts aren’t very active in the beginning, for me it’s about building the right business structure so I can create a real brand.

Initially I had a basic logo but I decided to have a better one designed and I’ve incorporated this into the Twitter account and will soon be adding it to the Facebook Page which we haven’t launched yet, it really just exists right now. Next I thought of one cool interactive feature we could add to make our site useful beyond simply providing information. I asked a few visitors that had sent me emails in the past what they’d like and debt calculator was the top request. My developers quickly found a cool calculator from Bankrate and our graphic designer put-together a great graphic that makes the calculator look more like part of our site rather than a disparate element.

Finally, we’ve recently added a blog to the site to allow an easier way to add content and become a bit more of a voice in the community. Now here is the most important thing to understand – this is the base, the very beginning, this is the product that we start with. For so many people they expect this to be the end, the finished product, when nothing could be further from the truth. Think of any website that you visit daily and what it would be like if it was never updated, never added new features, and never tried to innovate. A brand starts with a good site, good content, interactive features, social media account, a blog, and potentially even a few more elements. It is what you do from this point that will make you a category leader in the space.

So what’s ahead for this brand? I’ll give a quick summary below and then keep you updated through these weekly case studies so you can follow the progress and see exactly how I take each step. Please understand I am simply sharing what I am doing and not trying to be an advisor telling you all the right things to do – every niche is different and it is the lessons you learn with each brand that allow you to create something truly special.

• Begin using the social media accounts daily – I have a social media manager that runs a majority of my social media accounts outside of those for me specifically. Each brand doesn’t take infinite resources to promote thanks to Twitter and Facebook. To start I’ll have them spend five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening sharing articles and blog posts from our site, and retweeting related information from trusted sources in the space. I’ve found that by helping promote reliable people on Twitter you can also in turn build your own brand and your following.
• Add new blog posts three times a week – to get the blog started I’ll be having 12 articles/month posted on it, spread-out so that three posts are added each week. What’s my cost? I pay $12 for each post so this will cost me $144/month in content. This is where a majority of my money is spent when I’m building a brand and is, in my opinion, the best way you could spent money on your business.
• Getting the blog posts out into the world – we’ll be using social media along with partnerships we are creating now to get these blog posts out into the world and generating backlinks and traffic to our site.
• Add more interactive features – the debt calculator we have on the site now is a good start, but there’s a lot more we plan to do when it comes to creating interactive features that will make our site an incredibly useful resource.
• Partnerships – every week I am reaching-out to leaders in the space and building relationships. Initially I don’t focus on trying to make money with other people in the space, instead I just try to share ideas and discuss how we can make the space better. I think that learning from your partners is far more valuable in the beginning than finding a million ways to make money off of them. An example of this would be talking to a debt elimination company and asking them how they reach their customers, what works for them, what doesn’t, and what they are looking for in a site that promotes them. Getting to know your customer is some of the most valuable work you can do.

Amazon’s elastic cloud, better known as EC2 is down again for the second time this year. For those who missed it, the king of the cloud went down in April of this year as well and for quite a long time. When a service touts 99% uptime it’s pretty easy to break that agreement from a single outage, add two outages and you’re in trouble. Q4CUN6NSQMNQ

One of the biggest issues with Amazon EC2 disappearing into the ether is that it takes some pretty big startups with it, innovators like Turntable.fm, Instagram, Quora, Fab, Foursquare, Heroku, the list goes on. Heck even companies like Netflix use Amazon EC2 and are impacted by outages like this.

When you’re running a startup, be it a wild success or still in the growing phase, having all systems go at all times is absolutely critical. Amazon was chosen as the right provider by all of these companies because of their guaranteed uptime, reliability, and come on, it’s Amazon, we all love them…right? You can see the latest Twitter stream below, one company seems to be back up however you can see major social media services like Foursquare are still down for the count:

One tweet I find a bit humorous is iFixit which says they are back up, and then thanks Amazon. Not sure now is the time to thank Amazon however I guess every hosting company deserves a second, er, third chance! Were you impacted by the EC2 outage? It’s times like these I’m glad I decided to go with Hostgator and Rackspace

Recently I’ve been moving just about every single part of my business into the cloud. This hasn’t been a completely new move for me as I really started storing most of my files online years ago. Of course this meant uploading everything to a remote directory via FTP rather than using one of the slick apps that uses the ever-so-popular word cloud to make the service hip and web 3.0ish. That being said it really isn’t all marketing, there is a movement going on and it makes a lot of sense, why store files, documents, really anything on your computer? In fact, why even run apps on your computer? Aren’t our computers just going to become thin clients someday soon…I think so and I’m getting pretty close to that reality.

This weekend I was talking with a friend about moving documents, products, and services to the cloud. In reviewing the solutions that I use I realized that the world of cloud computing is quite segmented at the moment. I find myself using a number of different services and I’d imagine that as we move forward in time, there will be one or two killer services that encompass most of our cloud-based needs.

Below is a list of the services I use to run my business in the cloud. At the end of the day there is something I really like about knowing that I could use any computer, anywhere in the world, and have access to the same environment I have on my desk at home. I also like the security of knowing that if my computer is stolen or website is hacked, there are backups, and backups of those backups out there. So if you’re ready to take the plunge, check-out these services below, I highly recommend them not because I’ve heard they’re great but because I use them every single day and know they are!

1. Dropbox – this is #1 for a reason, I absolutely love Dropbox. Awesome company, amazing integration, and really easy to setup and use. It integrates across my Mac, iPad, and iPhone – what more could you want? I’ll answer my own question here…iCloud could be serious competition and I’ll be giving it a try when it comes-out but right now I’m proud to say that I’m a Dropbox fanatic.
2. Google Apps - I’m not shy about saying that Microsoft products drive me crazy, they have, well…forever. Yes, I am a major Apple-fanboy but I just think MS has made some pretty clunky products over the years. Google Apps is great but it’s taken me a while to really switch, the major loss for me is Excel which I still use religiously on my Mac. Still I love the document sharing features and I think over time this solution will improve and I’d say I’m using Google Apps a majority of the time for office-based apps.
3. Rackspace – I use a cloudserver at Rackspace for testing the software projects we are working on. It’s lightning fast and really easy to upgrade and they have absolutely phenomenal technical support.
4. Spotify, Napster, Pandora, etc. – music is a major part of my life whether I’m working, sitting on the beach, at a bar, sporting event, club, you name it – I’m a huge music fan. All of my music lives in the cloud and I listen to music all day while I’m working. Heck, even when I get a phone call I keep my music on, I just turn it down a bit.
5. VaultPress – I backup my WordPress sites using VaultPress so that they are constantly being saved and updated in the cloud. While I hate it when my blog(s) gets hacked, it happens, and being able to go back in time quickly and easily is a great feeling.
6. CodeGuard – all of our code is also backed-up in the cloud and monitored by CodeGuard. If you have one or more software projects you are working on CodeGuard can provide great peace-of-mind knowing that your code is constantly being backed-up.

I’m sure that I’ve missed a few services here but it’s Sunday night at 8:30PM and I’m getting ready to make an amazing stir fry with tofu, baby bok choy, and green onions. It’s late for you too so get your head out of the clouds and save the work for Monday…now time to take my own advice

As you all probably know I’m a bit of an Apple geek, okay, let’s be honest, I’m a huge Apple geek. What I have always really appreciated about Apple is that they are constantly challenging the norm and innovating and doing things differently then they have ever been done. Now with Mac OS X Lion they have completely revolutionized the process of upgrading your operating system and the process was just too damn cool not to share with all of you.

First, before getting-into the details of the install process let me talk about the price. I have never, not once upgraded the version of Windows I’m running and the main reason is price. I’ve never wanted to shell-out $200 or more to upgrade my PC operating system when Dell is selling new computers for $500. Instead when a PC that I own starts to get a bit old and slow, I just buy a new PC, the idea of upgrading really doesn’t make any sense because Microsoft has made the OS upgrade price so close to the price of a new computer. Apple has been very smart with their OS pricing model by allowing users to upgrade for $30. This completely removes any barriers, there really is no decision to make, $30 for a new OS – done!

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way let me talk about why I’m so impressed with the Mac OS X Lion installation process. Apple has streamlined the entire OS installation process by making the new OS available from their app store. All you do is go to the Mac App Store, click on the OS X Lion App, enter your password and boom, the download begins. I’m not sure how long it took to download because I just did this at night before I went to bed but most people I’ve spoken to tell me its taken under an hour.

I woke-up in the morning and there was a super-slick circular icon on my dock, I clicked it and here is what I saw:

Is that clean or what? Sorry, but I’m just constantly blown-away by how simple, clean, and fun to use everything Apple creates is. I was actually excited to click the “Continue” button just to see what the rest of the install looked like. After that you literally just pick your hard drive and the operating system begins installing, no inserting disks, no entering endlessly long strings of numbers and letters, it all just happens.

Just like that the OS was installed and honestly I feel like I’m using a brand-new computer. I’ll be doing a separate post on Mac OS X Lion and all the cool features Apple added however I just had to cover the innovation they’ve made in the OS installation space. Apple has made installing an OS so convenient that you’d honestly have to be crazy not to upgrade, price is no longer an issue and without having to use a physical disk or enter one of those insanely long Microsoftian serial numbers the process is completely painless.

Stay-tuned, next week I’ll be covering Mac OS X Lion with a special video post showing you some of my favorite features!

Apple announced phenomenal earnings and Google announced monumental growth with Google+ this week as these two tech giants get ready for the battle of battles. For those keeping score Google+ grew over 280% last week bringing over 1.8 million visitors in a single week. From all vantage points it is clear that both Apple and Google are on fire.

However there is something brewing, something that you might not see amidst the glitz and glamor of their latest new, a battle is coming. The battle I’m talking about is not in the social media world, it’s not in the computer world, and it doesn’t have the word “cloud” attached to it yet. These two giants are about to enter into a battle after the most sought-after spot in the galaxy, your television.

If I was a betting man (and I am, but only in craps, and only once a year) I would suspect that Apple is going to launch a television next year. Just think, they’ve conquered the phone, unseated Sony and it’s mighty Walkman, shown Microsoft that people would actually use Mac OS and flock to the computer like crazy despite having less software. Oh, and that whole tablet thing, they made it a reality and continue to be a star player in a sea of “blah” products.

Google on the other hand has owned something pretty darn big for a long time, a little thing we like to call the Internet. Remember when you used to use Yahoo? Now do you even say search or do you say, “I’m going to Google that.” However if you dig a little deeper you will see that both Apple and Google have failed miserably at replacing or even enhancing your television.

Steve Jobs still sees the Apple TV as a hobby and the product has been far from a runaway success. Google TV, well, do you know anyone that has it? Last time I checked Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, and Vizio were busy kicking ass and taking names. Both Apple and Google though have their eye on the prize, a market so big it would make one of them the rules of the universe, or at least many people’s universe given what a prevalent part of our culture television has become. The big TV makers probably won’t even know what hit them because while they’re all great companies, they’re no Apple, and they’re no Google.

So this is one of my first “prediction” posts. I haven’t done a lot of these but this time I’m pretty sure I’ll be referencing this post next year saying, “see – I called this one a year earlier.” However I don’t know if I can really tell you where to put your money, I’m an Apple fanatic so I’m biased, so that’s where you come in. Who do you think will win this battle? Do you even think this battle will take place? Comment and let your voice be heard!