Entries from January 2010 ↓

Imagine if you had x-ray vision about your competitors…and even your partners and clients!?

Well, lately, I feel like I do.

I’ve been using a free tool for a month now and it allows me to instantly see the following things about almost any Web site:

• How relevant Google thinks they are in their space
• How Many Web Pages They Have Built
• How Many Other Web Sites Link To Them
• How Much Traffic They Receive
• Their Ranking by Traffic
• How many of the social networking sites (such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.) link to them
• What organic position they appear (on Google) when people search certain keywords

It’s called the SEO Toolbar (instructions on downloading it are below); it provides you a toolbar on your Firefox Browser that you can turn on or off while you’re using the Web.

Let me explain a few of the top ways I’m using this SEO Toolbar (using eBay as an example)

In the first screenshot, I hit the blue info button in the upper left-hand corner to get the pop-up yellow screen of information about eBay).

Doing so tells me the following about eBay (I’m going to pick highlights):

• In the first column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • Page PR and Site PR (both of which are — This represents a 1 to 10 Page Rank score that Google is providing on eBay (Google’s Page Rank represents how relevant Google thinks the Web page and Web site you’re on is (the higher the score (out of 1 to 10) the better).
  • Site Age — This is when the Web site was first launched (e.g. useful to know if this is a veteran Web site or the new kid on the block (eBay’s been around since June of 1997).
  • G Pages indexed — This is the number of eBay Web pages that Google indexes (I tend to use this to measure how serious a Web site is about producing content)
• In the second column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • Compete.com Uniques — This represents an estimate by Compete.com of how many unique visitors visit this Web site per month (e.g. 89 Million in eBay’s case)
  • Alexa — This is the ranking of eBay by traffic (e.g. it’s the 23 largest Web site in the world)
• In the third column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • del.icio.us — This is the number of bookmarks that members of the Delicious Web Site have made of eBay’s Web site (Delicious is a site that allows members to bookmark their favorite sites and Web pages and share them with friends). So, in this case, Delicious members bookmarked eBay 16,000 times.
  • Diggs — Digg is a Web site that allows its members to “Digg” articles or Web pages they enjoy; and then the most Dugg Web pages are shown on Digg’s popular home page (so, 826 of eBay’s pages have been “Dugg”).
  • Twitter — This is the number of times that members of Twitter have linked to a Web site (e.g. 100 times in eBay’s case).

In the next screenshot, I’m showing the Rank Checker feature which allows us to type in any keyword (search term that people type into Google) and see where any given Web site ranks on the search results for that keyword.

So, as you can see in the screenshot, ebay would rank in the following position on Google (on the left-hand “organic results” if you searched those terms):

• 1st for the term “eBay” (this makes sense (though if the name of your business does not rank first when someone searches it, please comment below so that we can help you out!)
• 2nd for the term “Auctions” (eBay is the dominant auction provider on the Web (the company that ranks 1st is a Live Auction proider called Auction Zip).
• No Ranking for “Make Money From Home” — This means that eBay probably didn’t crack the top 200 positions on the Google search results
• 50th for “Businesses for Sale”
• 39th for “Pez Dispensers” (I thought I’d give this a try since Pez Dispensers is supposedly the first item ever sold on eBay)
• 46th for “Michael Jackson Memorabilla”
• 44th for “Bernie Madoff Memorabilla”

Rank Checker allows many keywords (at least 100 at a time) to be ranked.

Now, I highly recommend you couple this Rank Checker tool with Google’s Keyword Tool (which tells you how much any keyword is searched on Google) which SEO Toolbar also includes.

So now you can tell how well a Web site is doing in terms of its relevancy on the most popular keywords in your business!

If you use Google Analytics on your own Web site, you can simply copy and paste your top keywords from your Analytics account into Rank Checker and see where you’re ranking on Google.

The Rank Checker also shows you where a Web site ranks on Yahoo and Microsoft Bing — I just didn’t have room in the screenshot to show it!

There’s a lot more to the SEO Toolbar than this, but those are some highlights for me.

Here’s how you get SEO Toolbar:

Go to SEO Book Tools and download all three of the tools:

1. Keyword Tool
2. SEO for Firefox (if you don’t use the Firefox Browser, it’s worth it just to have the SEO Toolbar’s functionality)
3. Rank Checker

And if you have questions on any of this, feel free to post comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

If you like this article, you may want to check out my Got Googlejuice? posting.

Best of luck!

Here’s the 3 best ways of building teamwork my friend James learned  from watching his coach…

They include some teamwork exercises that can easily be applied to business.

3 Easy Ways For Building Teamwork

1) Sparring, Then Sharing

In training after two athletes have competed against each other (sparring) it is very important to him that they both sit down and share what they learned with each other.

He facilitates the conversation and asks both what is one thing your opponent did well and one thing that you think they could do better?

**Important distinction he gets the athletes to speak to each other NOT him…

After they are done sharing with each other he will tie it all together, praise each of them and reinforce that if they keep working together and talking to each other they will both get better faster.

Having had many of these conversations I find there is something different when I get feedback directly from an opponent or a teammate than from my coach.

Applying to business: We have started doing this on our team through daily huddle calls. Sharing with each other what’s working, what’s not, etc. Very effective and creates great bonding opportunities.

2) Make Success = EVERYBODY Hitting A Team Goal

Let me give you an example:

Typical boxing coach would have each individual athlete do separate drills on a heavy bag. Since it’s an individual sport the athlete will be focused on what they doing and not really have an interest in anybody else. In that situation some will work harder than others with no real consequence.

Coach Grant will sometimes set an environment where each individual participating in the drill is apart of the whole and he judges the result as a “team effort”. Therefore if somebody on the team isn’t trying their hardest or “fades” (gives up at the end or slows down)

EVERYBODY does the round again even if individually they were working as hard as they could.

What makes this really interesting is he typically saves a situation like this for the END of a work out when everybody is physically exhausted and just wants the work out to end!!! He doesn’t take any pity or make it easy. Instead he gives a challenging drill.

He does this intentionally because it’s how he gets us to develop the habit of “finishing strong” and develop superior mental toughness because at this point in the work out its ALL mental.

VERY Vince Lombardi like.

As you can imagine this creates an environment where EVERYBODY works together because if one of us doesn’t do our best everybody suffers the consequence. Trust me at this stage of the work out nobody wants to do another round.

So you can see how this plays out. Instead of just focusing on yourself everybody is now encouraging each other to do their best! Coach Grant will monitor and prompt us when somebody is performing below his standards…

“Looks like Johnny is fading on me… If he doesn’t pick it up everybody is going to be doing this round again”

EVERYBODY then starts encouraging and coaching Johnny…

“You can do it Johnny, Let’s go… only 30 seconds left, don’t give up… keep going…”

Incredible seeing this happen.

When the drill is complete the team naturally bonds because we ALL just helped each other push ourselves beyond what we thought possible.

If you are into football I read Coach Belichick once used a similar strategy. It was Friday the team was exhausted and wanted to get off early. He said everybody can get off early if one of of the offensive linemen could catch a punt successfully….

Only once chance and if he doesn’t catch it everybody has to do laps.

Offensive linemen never catch footballs so it was a huge challenge.

What happened is all the wide receivers were coaching him, the punter was coaching him. Everybody was working together and bonded. He caught it and the team got off early because they all worked together.

3) Let Others Lead Teamwork Exercises

Despite being the clear leader of the gym and head instructor during training Coach Grant frequently let’s OTHER coaches or students lead drills or give feedback.

Example: Bridget is going to lead the warm up today…

or

After doing some technical drills he won’t give feedback he’ll get another coach to share.

or

Sometimes during sparring he’ll get another student to “work the corner” and coach.

During competition or critical times of course he leads the whole time..

It’s very impressive how in a subtle way once again he gets EVERYBODY involved and does 3 things in the process: creates an incredible team atmosphere, helps others develop leadership skills and creates multiple feedback channels.

I was speaking to colleague James the other day and he was praising his VP of Sales as an amazing leader.

I asked James to outline what leadership skills he appreciated about his boss, and he shared the five tips below.

These leadership tips apply to any team situation you’re in:

Top Five Tips For Leadership

Leadership Tip #1:  Shout Praise & Whisper Criticism

This is #1 by far: he REALLY gets how to shout praise and whisper criticism.

On a daily basis he ALWAYS tells us “great job”, “good work”, “I like what you did there”.

Praise has such an impact!!!

What’s very interesting is even when I don’t get the desired outcome (In my case a sale) he STILL finds a way to praise me for what I did do great.

He’s so good I let him know and asked him about it. He mentioned his mindset is: “I’m always looking for when people are winning”

Leadership Tip #2:  Lead By Example

He’s out there selling just like I am…

Even if that isn’t the case in the future as things expand, I know he’s capable of it and he is speaking form a place of experience.

Leadership Tip #3:  Check Your Ego at the Door

He is genuinely interested in hearing ideas or thoughts from our team that might help him or others get better.

This = our opinions are valued.

Leadership Tip #4:  Encourage Teamwork

This item is so in-depth that we’re dedicating a 3 Easy Ways For Building Teamwork posting to it.

Leadership Tip #5:  Be Transparent

He keeps us informed what he is working on and what is coming up. Example:

“Hey guys the marketing pieces I’m working on are coming along great we’ll probably send those out next week to get us some leads.”

This = Makes me feel involved, helps me see the vision and be apart of it.

Note: If you enjoy the subject of leadership skills, check out these articles on leadership tips that I and others have written for you.

I chatted with DocStoc Founder & CEO Jason Nazar the other day.

You should know abut Jason and DocStoc because Jason is an amazing networker (among other things) and DocStoc has been one of the fastest growing Web sites in the last few years (ranked 407th by Quantcast with 15 million unique visitors per month, according to DocStoc).

Jason and I had a little chat in which I asked him a few questions. He agreed to let me share it with you.

Q: Hi Jason, you really value business networking — tell me your philosophies.

I personally enjoy networking. I like meeting smart, interesting successful people.

From a professional standpoint, I believe the principal of it’s “who you know not what you know” is very true.

One thing about the Internet is that we spend a lot of time behind our computers…you’ve got to get out there and meet people.

Typically the larger the network you have, the more opportunities you have.

We spend a lot of time behind our computers…but business still gets done in person.

People want to work with other people they like, trust and respect.

And you don’t do that by just sending emails and sending IMs…you have to get out and meet people.

And if you want to have opportunities such as getting hired, raising money, building your company, and hiring the right people…you need to have a large network.

Typically, the larger your network is the more opportunities you have.

The business we’re building is a consumer-facing Internet company – we’re trying to get pretty much everyone in the world to use DocStoc.

There’s a lot of value in reaching out to other connectors….people like you and your sphere of influence…and now DocStoc and its hundreds of thousands of people is in your sphere of influence…and that’s one of the ways you get things to grow virally.

Q: Would you share some of your business networking principles?

I have three main networking principles:

1) Habitualize the process – like anything else you need to make time for it. I carve out a couple of hours a week to reach out to new people.

2) Make it One to Many — You want to do not just one to one but also one to many – You want to get to the point where people reach out to you. This is one of the reasons we put on events, which attracted 2,000 people last year.

Now instead of just me reaching out to every conceivable person who might value in a win-win situation, there are many people attending who are telling lots of other people about it and telling them about me.

I’m leveraging a one to many approach. More people know about you then you know about. Then it’s just a matter of filtering out people you don’t want to talk to.

3) Maintain Your Relationships — Networking has no intrinsic value unless you do something with it. My goal is not to be popular. It’s the fact that you can get things done that you couldn’t do otherwise. You have to be clear about what you want to get but more importantly what do you want to give.

What matters is how you build and maintain those relationships. What really matters is that’s the more important part to habitualize.

You can’t approach networking out of your own selfish interests.

Think of it as a bank. Do lots of things to help out other people.

Know that you’ll have credit in your bank and one day you’ll need that credit and people will really want to help you out for what you did.

People will gladly want to pay you back. .. for all the things you’ve done for them.

Q: What are the top networking mistakes people make?

Here are the three biggest networking mistakes people make:

1. They don’t go up to talk to the people they should.
2. If they do go up to people they should talk to, they don’t do a good job building and maintaining the relationship.
3. If they do talk to people they should and build and maintain a good relationship, they often come at it from a selfish standpoint of what’s only good for themselves.

What they really should do is:

1. Talk to as many people as possible.
2. Keep and maintain as many good relationships as possible.
3. And always come at networking from the standpoint of what can I do to help other people out.

If you do those things, and you do them consistently, it’s gonna come back your way…and probably in ways you couldn’t imagine.

I’m a good example of that.  I’ve always tried to do that as an adult. I’ve been very lucky in what’s come my way…in large part because of that.

Q: You’ve created a top 500 Web Site in  just a few years – would you share what the top keys you used to drive free traffic?

[Jason referred me to a presentation he did on these 7 ways to drive free traffic to a Web site:]

1. Search Engines (distinct URLs, more content, more links)
2. Referring Traffic/Press
3. Social Media
4. Online Partnerships/Distribution Deals
5. Refreshing Content
6. The Viral Loop/User Email
7. Solve a Personal Compelling Need

The full presentation can be found here: 7 Ways To Drive Free Traffic To Your Web Site

Q: Tell me more about your growth

We have a way to provide valuable content, give it to them for the most part for free and monetize it with ads as well as some paid content.

And we deal with user-generated content where we were able to unlock two million registered users with millions of documents being uploaded (about 2% to 4% of the users upload documents).

And when you do that, you become a magnet for search engines. And when you do that, you’re able to raise a lot of money, a lot of people know about us, there’s a lot of referral traffic.

Q: Can you talk to me about the financial side is working – what’s the business model.

Our goal is to build the largest repository in the world of publicly available professional documents. And the premiere marketplace to buy and sell documents on the Internet.

Q: Who’s the competition? Scribd?

Yep. Our business approach is different [than Scribd] but our products are similar.

We focus on owning the small business market and on professionals.

It seems to me they (Scribd) are more focused on publishing and book publishers.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge these days?

To iterate and grow at a face pace. How to take a site that has a lot of traction – that’s grown quickly — and turn it into one of the premiere brands on the Internet…that everyone knows. And how do you cross that chasm.

How do you measure success?

Revenue and profits. We have very significant revenue growth year over year.

We have 2.5 million registered users, over 10 million publicly available documents and we do over 15MM unique visitors per month.

How do you sell advertising these days?

A couple of one-off deals but it’s mostly AdSense.

Thanks, Jason.

My pleasure.

Note: Thanks to Drew Kossoff (another amazing networker) for introducing me and Jason.

For more business networking tips, check out the series of articles in my networking category.

I first heard of Posterous when I saw that Steve Rubel, an influential writer & publicist about trends in the digital space (and my former colleague at CMP Media), had moved from WordPress to Posterous to publish his content.

I’ve tested Posterous — which allows you to email content to the Web — myself and see its potential: indeed, it may be the fastest way to publish pictures, audio and video to the open Web (as opposed to through a more closed environment such as Facebook).

Note: Mashable does a good review of Posterous versus Tumblr (a somewhat similar tool) here: Posterous Versus Tumblr).

I decided to ask Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal some questions about his business. Enjoy.

Q: Hey Sachin. Congrats on Posterous’s fast growth. How do you describe the market that Posterous is in?

Posterous can be used for many different kinds of sites. It can be used as a micro blog or blog.

Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal

But it can also be used as a groups product, an email list, a photo stream, a video channel, and much more. Posterous doesn’t limit what you can post or how you can use it.

So the market is pretty large. You might be new to technology, but you can use Posterous via email.

Or you might be a pro blogger. It doesn’t matter. Posterous can be used by anyone

Q: What’s the difference between Posterous and blogging?

We don’t like the word “blogging.” Historically, people have set up blogs…and then done nothing there.

It’s about photos to share with friends and family or business. We don’t want to be known as middle blogging or micro-blogging.

Posterous has no limitations. What can you not do on Posterous that you can do on WordPress?

It’s more of a LifeStream (Steve Rubel is the first person who used this as it has to do with Posterous) — I’m out and about and this is what’s happening to me, live.

Twitter doesn’t allow this because it’s confined to 140 characters. And almost none of my real friends are on Twitter.

Facebook doesn’t provide it because it’s completely closed (I can’t export my data (and the only people who can see it are Facebook users (and that’s not most of my family). And much of my family is not on Facebook

Q: Who do you consider your competitors (besides Tumblr)?

WordPress, Blogger, Google Groups, Flickr, YouTube. But we can do all of what those can do right within Posterous.

Q: I noticed Michael Arrington’s Posterous and it was just a flow of photos with a headline (describing the photos). Do you see emailing photos and videos as a popular application of Posterous?

Defintely. One of the big reasons we created Posterous:

1) We wanted rich media support (video and email out of the box) and

2) Wanted to make sure you can post via mobile.

It’s the simplest way to use Posterous. It acts as the on-boarding for Posterous. Our goal is not to be a micro-blog.

Q: Who are you proudest of that’s moved to Posterous from some other platform?

Q: How Large can Posterous get in terms of unique visitors compared to Facebook or Twitter?

1. No limits to what you can post. 140 characters isn’t enough. People want to share photos and video
2. It’s fully customizable. Make it yours. Use your domain and your theme
3. Posterous has an extensive API. Use it to post, or to export. We don’t lock you in
4. It’s easier to use than these other services since all you need is email and no account

Q: How are you doing financially?

Right now we don’t have any revenue. Raised an angel round in 2008…and using it to expand.

Q: What do you think the most likely business models for Posterous will be?

We’re planning to charge pro bloggers and commercial users in the future for our Pro version. This will allow javascript, ad sense, and more advanced features. But we’ll always stay free for consumers.

Q: How are businesses using Posterous?

Small businesses are starting to use it as company blogs. And large companies, such as PR companies, are setting up Posterous accounts…such as Chevrolet Posterous and Microsoft Posterous.

Chevrolet's Promotes Audio and Video Clips Directly From Events

Q: What’s your biggest opportunity or challenge these days?

Hiring — hard to find good people. It’s such a big risk to bring the wrong new person into the company.

Q: You were with Apple for more than five years — How accessible was Steve Jobs during that time and what were the most important lessons you learned from him or Apple?

I met Steve Jobs a couple of time while I was at Apple, but I didn’t work with him directly. However, it was very clear to me the impact that he had on the product that I was working on.

Our managers and VPs would let us know how their meetings with Steve went and what feedback he had. It was clear that even for Final Cut Pro, he had an impact.

Thanks, Sachin.

Thanks, Rob.