KEYWORDS are the language that computers use to understand what you and I are searching for. Keyword phrases are the currency of the Internet. This is a very rudimentary video about the foundation of Internet marketing. Search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and much of Internet marketing, in general, is built upon the use of keywords.

Keyword marketing refers to the ways keywords can be leveraged to get our messages more prominently distributed via the Internet.l

Keywords are at the center of the SEO Triangle, which illustrates the basic concepts of using search engine optimization to expand your business.

Click the video to learn the 3 basic points of the SEO Triangle that revolve around keywords.

What is Direct Response Testing? (3 minute video)

Advertising performance testing is the ongoing comparison and refinement of marketing elements and campaigns to maximize the impact of copywriting, sales offers and marketing messages to optimize the return on investment of advertising dollars. Inadequate market testing will not only generate inferior results for your advertising campaigns, it can be the difference between profitability and unprofitability.

Fundamental to Internet Marketing, and Direct Response marketing in general, is the importance of testing, comparing and refining the various elements that generate traffic, leads, subscribers and sales.

Mint CEO, Aaron Patzer, gave a presentation on building startups from the ground up. He started with an idea about handling personal finances more efficiently. He turned the idea into a company and built it from the ground up and sold it for $170 million in less than three years. This is one of the most revelatory resources I have come across in terms of providing real-world finance and start up details. Following are some notes from the video.

Three Phases of Startup Business Growth

• Phase 1: Garage (<$100K)
• Phase 2: Seed (<$1m)
• Phase 3: Funded (>$1m)

Phase 1: Garage Goal

• Main goal is to build a prototype
• Question: How do venture capitalists and angel investors determine the value of a company that has no product and no revenue?
  • Answer: Pre-revenue valuation:
    +$500K/engineer (prototype development)
    -$250k/business guy (idea, market research, biz plan)

Phase 1: Garage Expenses

• Founders: living expenses $30k/yr
• Engineering First Hires: low salary, high equity (1-5%) $30-50K year
• Office: by the cube, $400 /cube/month
• Tech: laptops, couple of servers, development software, $10K
• Legal: Corporate setup, deferred payment for 0.50 – 0.75% of company
• TOTAL with 2 founders + 1 engineer/contractor = $150k / year burn
  (Assumes 1 technical + 1 business founder)
• Need to raise seed money within 9 months

Phase 2: Seed Goal

• Main goal is an alpha launch of the prototype
• The product needs to be usable, but no polished or scalable product
• Headcount: 5-6
  • 3-4 engineers
    1 product developer / frontend specialist
    1 business generalist to do everything: fund raising, sales, marketing, recruiting, etc.

Phase 2: Seed Expenses

• Salaries:  Equity decreases, salaries rise, but below market, $50-90k  per yr, total $450K/yr
• Overhead:  Facilities + benefits + taxes + food + laptops, +20%, total $100k/yr
• Legal: VCs will make you pay for the financing, $25k incorporation, $2k/mo general, total $50k
• Total burn for 5-6 person team = $600k / yr
• Need to raise series A funding within 12 months

Phase 2: Seed Revenue Projections

• Your absolute revenue projections will be worthless.
• However, projections based on what you will make per product, per user or per transaction is best. If there’s a big market, investors can figure out realistic earnings.
• Walk investors through your revenue projections very linearly. Go from website, into revenue stream, scaling, etc.

Phase 3: Funded Goal

• Goal: Launch a real product and grow a profitable business

Phase 3: Funded Expenses

• Salaries and Overhead: Salaries at market + taxes + facilities – $200k /yr
• COG’s: Customer service, SMS, bandwidth, servers to scale – widely varying
• Legal: contracts, patents, employment scale up iwth headcount – $10-50k / month
• Total burn with 30 person team = $6.0m / yr
• “Hidden” expenses:
  • Legal: patents, trademarks, contracts, financing, employment, immigration
  • Consultants: SEO, SEM, design, logos, DB tuning, etc.
• Need to be profitable with 2 years

See the whole post on TechCrunch: Startups 101: The Complete Mint Presentation.

The subject of databases and database marketing usually does not inspire most people’s imagination, in the same way as say, finding long-lost buried treasure. However, effective use of business databases is analogous to finding buried treasure – it’s just hidden within your own business.

Database marketing refers to leveraging information about your customers and/or prospects, for the purpose of generating more sales and profit. Computer databases make the whole process simpler and faster.

Although there is much one can know about database marketing, for this overview, we’re simply going to address databases from a high-level perspective, and not delve into the many ways that database information can be dissected to yield even more efficiencies and profit.

Let’s look at the four fundamentals of database marketing.

You Need a Database

The first and most obvious fundamental is that you need a database. Any database.

Although this may seem too obvious to state, here in the 21st century, there are still companies that are so focused on selling and delivering products and services that they haven’t had the time to go through the process of converting paper records into a database.

And although creating a database from past records won’t likely be featured within your favorite list of business projects to contemplate, even starting a database is better than having no database at all.

At least any effort it takes to begin a database, even if it’s not companywide to begin with, is a step in the right direction.

Having said that, converting old records to a database is very desirable.

Update The Database

Fundamental #2, you need to update the database. Setting up a customer database, or prospect database, and not updating it with ongoing information has very little value. It’s almost like having a map of where to find the buried treasure, but not using it.

And to be clear, by “updating the database,” I’m simply referring to putting information into it. And continuing to do so.

Analyze The Data

The third fundamental is where database marketing begins to better parallel the idea of digging for buried treasure. Except in this case, you can have a very high certainty that there is treasure to be found. However, a better way to describe the “digging for treasure” would be to call it “analyzing the data” for ways to better market your products and/or services. And this kind of treasure reveals more and more of itself the more you dig.

Stated another way, you will not receive the payoff until you analyze and act on the data.

Act On The Data To Generate More Sales

Which is the fourth fundamental point here. Acting on the data to generate more sales would be analogous to poking your shovel into the treasure chest and actually pulling it up.

In the spirit of keeping this short and on point, and merely reflecting a high-level perspective, recognize that the process of analyzing the data and extracting the treasure will vary from business to business.

If we considered a spectrum of applications of database marketing, from simple to more complex: on the easiest side of the spectrum we’d have examples like sending seasonal emails to past buyers who made seasonal purchases. If they bought holiday gifts last year, send them an email promotion about buying holiday gifts from you this year.

A slightly more complex example would be to isolate those prospects in your database whose contact information was derived from a specific series of trade expos over the past 3 years. Once that segment of your database has been established, then conduct an email and telemarketing campaign featuring a new product or service that is directly pertinent to that niche.

A more complex aspect of the spectrum would be paying to have your database of customers and/or prospects cross-referenced through a national database clearinghouse to find which of the customers who purchased running shoes from you in the past, might also be camping or hiking enthusiasts. In which case, they would be good prospects to email and to send direct mail promotional offers about your new line of hiking boots.

There are more sophisticated ways to leverage the value of any business database but this simple overview expresses the fundamentals of what database marketing is about.

Today we produced a 3-camera television talk show at a local public access TV station and this video highlights the integration of the studio, camera equipment, lights, audio equipment, control room, and of course the Director, crew and on-camera talent necessary to making it all happen.

In addition to any advantages associated with having the shows broadcast locally as a TV program, a bigger advantage is simply publishing quality productions that can be broadcast more broadly via Internet channels, which also allows them to be viewed indefinitely into the future, providing a far greater exposure for the same production.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz Blog presents an overview of search engine crawling and indexing in this 10 min video.

“Crawling” (or spidering) refers to the process of a computer program (Web crawler, Web spider, or Web robot) that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner to maintain up-to-date information.

Search engine “indexing” refers to the collecting, parsing, and storage of the data that is crawled to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval for searchers (you and I).

In this video Rand presents the basics of crawling and indexing for the purpose of understanding how search engine optimization can enhance the presentation of a website’s visibility to searchers.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and MIT professor who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web by way of his first memo on the subject in March 1989, as well as his later development of a successful test of his ideas on Christmas Day in 1990.

The above 17-minute video is of a talk he did in Feb 2009 in Long Beach, CA., at TED (Technology Entertainment Design), which is an annual conference about “ideas worth spreading” that has been held annually since 1990. The TED Talks cover a broad swath of humanity, including science, arts and design, politics, education, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Since June 2006, the TED Talks have been published online and are available at TED.com

In the talk, Berners-Lee discusses opening up and linking data that is currently locked away: such as government data that could be useful for scientists, businesses and individuals; as well as research data that could help find medical cures faster and more efficiently; and social networking data, so that users (such as you and I), would be able to interact with, and update, data in all of the places we store it, without visiting each location individually.

At the beginning of the video, Berners-Lee discusses the development of the World Wide Web, which is a very interesting historical reference coming from the man who started it. (Click the following link for the Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web.)

In the talk, Berners-Lee differentiates between CONTENT (such as documents, files, photos, music, etc.), which are what the web facilitates connection between, and DATA which can be analyzed in always-improving ways to forward mankind’s understanding of so many areas of the human experience.