Startup Blog

Recently someone who works at a PR firm in Boston asked me "Can you recommend an SEO firm for one of our clients?"  I thought my answer would be interesting to others, so here it is:

I want to clarify that SEO alone is not the best strategy for inbound markeitng and trying to generate more qualified traffic and leads.  SEO alone does not leverage publishing new content (blogging, podcasting, etc.) and does not leverage social media to promote your content and attract more links and people to your company.  The best way to grow your business using the internet is through inbound marketing, and most SEO firms only address part of the solution.

That being said, let's say you have the in-house expertise to start blogging and using social media, and you just want to do some SEO.  There are three options when looking to improve your SEO:

1. "Do it yourself." - This is where you use a bunch of different online resources and learn how to do everything yourself. This is the most difficult and time consuming, but if you know what you are doing and have a lot of experience, it can be the most cost-effective since it will only take your time.
2. "Do it with assistance." - This is where you do much of the work yourself, but with assistance from trained experts and software to make it easy for you, even if you are not an expert or have any experience. The cost is a few hundred dollars per month (HubSpot is $500/month or less) plus some of your time, but the good part about this is that you get directly involved in your inbound marketing and learn a few things that will help your other marketing programs be more effective.
3. "Do it for me." - This is the easiest option because it takes little of your time. It is also the most expensive, because a good consultant will typically charge $2500-5000 per month, and you need to do a 6 month or longer engagement. The other issue here is that there is no knowledge transfer to your internal marketing team, so when you stop paying the consultant, you stop getting any of the benefits.

Overall, I'm a huge fan of "Do It With Assistance"since it build in house-expertise, gets you the results you want, improves other marketing programs besides SEO and just generally gets your company on the path to inbound marketing.  But of course I am biased since I work at HubSpot.  But you can't argue with our inbound marketing results, either...

The Twitter Charity Challengeended on 12/31.  Here are some of the accomplishments:

• $508 raised for charity by people following @mvolpe, plus I added $50 since Twitter did an account cleanup and dropped my followers by 100 during the month
• 6 other people joined the fun (thanks @corbett3000, @jessieX, @pmhesse, @SeanDaily, @JordanAyan, @dankeldsen) adding to the total raised and the number of people that heard about our causes

Overall it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I did it.  I actually don't think doing the challenge increased the number of people that were following me - I gained 1,050 followers in November... about the same amount as in December with the challenge.

I did learn a few things.  Some things I would do differently next time are:

• Start earlier so more people can join in and still have time to make a difference - and solicit friends to join before I publicly announced it.
• Use a wiki or public document for everyone to join and track their own donations.  There is no reason the Google Spreadsheet I used could not have been edited by lots of people and been a stacked chart to show the total raised for all charities.

Thanks everyone for your participation and help!

I just finished the first ever "State of the Twittersphere" report using data on over 600,000 Twitter profiles from Twitter Grader (yes, it slowed down Excel a bit).  There were a bunch of interesting trends, but the most surprising to me was that based on my estimates from looking at the data, Twitter seems to be growing by 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts per day.

See the full "State of the Twittersphere" report.

I had a chance to speak with Dan Schawbel today for an interview on his blog.  Some quotes that Dan made me think of because of his good questions:

Based on the success of our Oughta Know Inbound Marketing video (40,000 views in 5 days) promoting inbound marketing, I've gotten a few questions about how and why we did certain things.  Here's one example and my answer that I thought I would share.

"Would it be better to distribute the video from your site instead of YouTube to get the SEO credits for visits and links? When is it best to distribute a video from YouTube vs. one's own site?"

Inbound marketing is a mix of SEO, publishing content and using social media.  Sometimes to get the best benefits, you need to balance the focus on just one technique in order to get the greatest overall benefit.

If we had ONLY published the video on our blog or website, I bet we would have gotten a few thousand views, not tens of thousands.  That's a big limit to how far our ideas spread.

But, by putting it on YouTube, we were able to get tons of views within the YouTube community, and the video was much more easily shareable in other social media sites and blogs because users can directly embed it themselves.  We also published it on our blog.  Over half the views of the video were from social networks like StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter, and we were able to get lots of internal YouTube views because we made it onto the top 100 most viewed list, again exposing the video to more people.  None of this would have been possible if we had only put the video on our website.

Here's the cool part... because we got all of those views and exposed the video to so many more people by putting it on YouTube, we actually got a ton of links into the blog article on our blog about the video, and to our main website as well.  So by not trying to focus on SEO, we actually got possibly a greater SEO benefit.

I had a chance to chat with Sean Daily about inbound marketing.  We talked a lot about the ways marketing has changed, what inbound marketing is, how to use social media and SEO as part of inbound marketing, and some marketing tips for startup companies.

Take a listen to the interview about inbound marketing - if you like it, subscribe to the show in iTunes.  It's pretty good.

If you're looking for other podcast content, you can subscribe to HubSpot TV in iTunes as well - we broadcast live at www.HubSpot.tv every Friday at 4pm EST, but we also load the archives into iTunes along with some other content - webinars, videos and more.

One update to the Twitter Charity Challenge... 

Peter Corbett has joined me with the same basic details.  Together as of the morning of 12/10/08 we have both raised a total of $265 for charity.  Read Peter's blog article about the charitites he is supporting.

If you want to join, reply or DM me on Twitter or leave a comment below.  Peter and I would be happy to have others join the Twitter Charity Challenge.

@mvolpe Twitter Charity Challenge Update

Bloggers and social media folks like to play funny Internet games sometimes.  One of these games is to "tag" people by linking to them and writing about them (most bloggers monitor their links and traffic so they will know when it happens).  You'll see that my articles both today and tomorrow are responding to being tagged in this way.  One reason bloggers like to play this game is it sends some traffic and links around, and helps introduce our readers to others and vice versa.

Today's response is to being tagged by Pamela Seiple in the 6th Photo Meme, where you grab the sixth photo on the sixth page of your Flickr photostream and write about it on your blog.  So here goes...

This photo is from the Inbound Marketing Summit, and is a picture of Seth Godin speaking.  I'm not sure it requires any more explanation than that!  If you want more visually appealing photos, see my Kenya safari photos.

Now... who to tag to keep the meme going?

• Chris Penn - because I am a fan and his photo gear and skills are vastly superior to mine, and because he does a great marketing podcast with...
• John Wall - because he does Marketing Over Coffee with Chris Penn, and he is a podcasting expert x 2
• Adam Fullerton - because he is a huge fan of HubSpot TV and is a repeat member of our live studio audience
• Sooz - because she loves photography and has a higher Twitter Grade than me
• Ellie Mirman- because she is a great creative marketer and a HubSpotter
• Rick Burnes- because he is a great writer and a HubSpotter
• Prashant Kaw- because he is a great analytic marketer and a HubSpotter

Yeah, I know I tagged 7 people, but don't hate me for doing a bit extra!

We've slowly been getting better at making viral videos at HubSpot, our first few got a few thousand views.  The last one has over 30,000 views right now.  I think this one is the best so far.  We took bets on how many views it would have on YouTube after 7 days.  What do you think?

THis was a video David Meerman Scott made for his blog for his new book "Wolrd Wide Rave" (which is awesome by the way).

Clearly we should stick to marketing as we had some trouble getting ourselves coordinated to do a proper wave.

Getting to be a finalist in awards like the Crunchies just isn't possible without a little self promotion, so here is a list of the top reasons I would like you to nominate HubSpot for the 2008 Crunchies in the "Best Enterprise" category.  It takes 15 seconds and does not require any registration at all.

1. We built the free SEO tool - http://Website.Grader.com/ - it has evaluated over 500,000 websites.
2. We've been in TechCrunch once before. Actually, twice. And Guy Kawasaki likes us too.
3. Robert Scoble says "Marketers are going to love HubSpot" 
4. During 2008, HubSpot has grown from about 200 customers to nearly 1,000 customers.
5. There are over 1,400 fans of HubSpot on Facebook. 
6. We like to make funny videos.  Lots of them.  The first one has over 30,000 views last time I checked. 
7. HubSpot has a proven business model - our customers pay between $250 and $500 per month for our software - unlike companies like Twitter that are still trying to find a business model.
8. We give away tons of free info and marketing tips on our marketing blog, which has over 8,000 subscribers, is in the AdAge Power 150 and the Technorati Top 10K.
9. In May 2008, HubSpot raised $12m in additional capital from Matrix Partners, giving us more than enough cash to last through the current economic downturn.
10. People rave about HubSpot.
11. We have the first and only live weekly marketing video podcast.  (You can subscribe in iTunes to see old episodes.)
12. We build the free press release marketing tool - http://PressRelease.Grader.com/ - it has evaluated over 50,000 press releases.
13. We built Twitter Grader - http://Twitter.Grader.com/ - it has evaluated over 500,000 twitter profiles.
14. We like to play foosball.
15. Working at HubSpot is different than working at Digg.
16. Tons of HubSpotters are on Twitter, and our @grader account is one of the top 100 profiles on Twitter.
17. We do lots of free marketing webinars.  Our last one attracted 5,000 people.
18. We have built a LinkedIn marketing group with over 14,000 members.
19. We had a fun second birthday party for our company (see birthday pics).
20. If you nominate HubSpot for the Crunchies in the "Best Enterprise" category, you'll make me happy!

I am a complete Twitterholic.  I am also passionate about a nonprofit organization that I co-founded, the Boston Scholars Program. So, why not put these two things together?

For every new Twitter follower I gain before December 31, I will donate $0.50 to the Boston Scholars Program.

I have 2,955 Twitter followers today, so if I have 4,000 followers on 12/31, I will donate $523... And so on.  My Twitter followers increased by 1,000 in the last 30 days, so we could be in for a big donation if this actually starts to spread the word and accelerates the number of people following me.  I'll track our progress here, and of course in my tweets.

So... Follow Mike Volpe on Twitter today!

Click here to view the spreadsheet with the raw data.  Here is the fine print: I am not going to track follows and unfollows, the donation will be based on the difference between the number of followers I have today (2,955) and at 6pm EST on 12/31/08.  Maximum donation of $2,500.

UPDATES: More People Joining the Challenge 

@corbett3000 = $2,500 max. More details here.

@jessieX = $250 max. More details here.

@pmhesse = $2,500 max. More details here.

@SeanDaily = $500 max.

@JordanAyan = $2,500 max.

@dankeldsen = $2,500 max. More details here. 

Reply or DM me on Twitter or leave a comment here if you want to join the fun.

Final Update: I raised over $500 for charity for the 1,015 followers I gained.  I added another $50 to the donation since Twitter cleaned up some accounts and dropped my folowers by about 100 during the month.  So, in total, I made an additional donation of $557.50 to the Boston Scholars Program.  Thanks everyone!

Write a caption to this photo, win a free t-shirt. (Update: contest is now closed, but you can still add captions for fun)

This photo of me (Mike Volpe) and Ann Handley just seems weird/funny and deserving of a humorous caption.  So, let's have a contest!  (Photo credit: Bob Collins).

How to Enter: Enter by Tweeting your caption along with the hashtag #mvolpe-pic, or for those of you not on Twitter you can leave a comment on this blog article below.

Rules:Caption must be less than 140 characters long (for Twitter compatibility).  Winner will be chosen by Mike Volpe, maybe with help from Ann Handley based on humor and cleverness.

Prize: The prize is any t-shirt from the HubSpot Gear store, including free shipping to you.  (There are some pretty cool/funny shirts there if you ask me - "I'm kind of a big deal (on Twitter)." and "I love f*cking with Google." are my favorites.)

Sample captions (bad ones, hence the reason for the contest):

• "Big or small, marketing loves them all"
• "On Twitter, we can all be 7 feet tall, even @marketingprofs"
• "Clearly, Twitter followers are not proportional to your size in real life"

Update: Winners

I picked based on the shortest and cmost clever ones, and rather than just pick one, I picked two.  Here they are:

• Tim Jackson (blog comment): "Proof that size does not matter."
• missleah26 (Twitter): "Marketing genius: Now available in 2 sizes."

Thanks everyone for the fun.  I might have to do something like this again.

This morning I attended a breakfast meeting for the marketing VPs at the portfolio companies of General Catalyst (they led the HubSpot A round investment).  The major topic of discussion was what was on our minds.  The GC folks were trying to get a feeling for what speakers and panels would be good to include in a marketing event aimed at helping their portfolio companies.

The general consensus around the table was the following top topics:

• Getting more with less - What are best practices on using viral marketing and internet marketing to generate more inbound leads at a low cost?
• Getting more out of your database - How can you use lead nurturing and other practices to convert more leads into opportunities?
• Finding good vendors - How can you easily get honest reviews and pricing information on services companies for web design, PR, advertising agencies, etc.?
• Product management for web 2.0 and Saas - How do you find good people and what are the best practices for product management for software as a service and web 2.0 products?

What's on your mind?  Leave a comment below.

I feel like I have been attending social media events non-stop lately... is it becoming too much?  Not yet.  :)

BosUp08

This was a very fun Tweetup event held at Jillians on Friday organized by @pprlisa (thank you!!!).  I have some photos on Flickr of BosUp08 (or see below).  It was great to connect with so many people I have talked to on Twitter, but previously had never met.

SMB10 

This morning I attended and live streamed the Social Media Breakfast panel discussion for SMB10 at Ryles in Cambridge.  It was a great discussion hosted by Bob Collins and featuring Brian Halligan, Andrew McAfee, and Matt Cutler, and HubSpot also sponsored the event.  There will be a video in the next couple days on the HubSpot Blog and in iTunes on HubSpot TV.

Much better coverage of the event than I could write is here:

• http://quiverandquill.com/2008/11/social-media-breakfast-10/
• http://www.hallme.com/blog/roi-of-social-media-and-putting-your-pants-on/
• http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2008/11/you-can-count-your-moneyand-you-can-count-your-leads.html
• http://www.limeduck.com/2008/11/12/social-media-breakfast-whats-the-roi-of-putting-on-your-pants/

Thursday Tweetup

For those of you in Boston there is a Tweetup tonight organized by Shel Holtz and John Wall as a "Pre-SNCR (Society of New Communication Research) tweetup". 7pm, Thursday, November 13, 2008 - Vox Populi - Map- Shel's blog has more info.

BosUp08 Photos

This graph from www.CNN.com I think tells the most interesting story.

I know little about politics, but I think this is the first time in a long time that the younger portion of society has basically picked our president.  It will be interesting to see if this is a fad, or if the new generation will be engaged in society and leadership.

Once I got to about 1,000 followers on Twitter.  I noticed that something changed.  I used to Tweet, and not get much of a response.  And if I did, it was from people I knew.

Just a couple days ago, I tweeted that I was in the Atlanta airport (with a link to a photo).  A few months ago nothing would have happened.  But now I got a number of replies and carried on a couple mini-conversations - all with people I have not met in real life.

I continue to be surprised by the entertainment / community / usefulness of Twitter as my network grows.  So, follow me on Twitter!  I'll follow you back.

This is quite creative.  It is a viral video campaign that you can use to create a custom video featuring your name (or a friend's name).  The way they did the video is quite clever, and the customizations bring it to a whole new level.  No matter what your political view, you need to respect the creativity of the idea.

Here is the "Mike Volpe" version of the video:

Ann Handley interviews me while we both try not to laugh. 

I had a lot of fun at the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer last week.  Similar to the Inbound Marketing Summit, they had some of the luminaries of inbound marketing talking about SEO, blogging, podcasting, video, social media, and more.  The cumulative knowledge at the event was huge and the feedback from folks I talked to was very positive.  (I think that the combination of Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott at the Inbound Marketing Summit just can't be beat as far as raw power of a speaker lineup, but hey... I'm biased!)

It was great to connect with old friends Chris Penn, Chris Brogan, Jason Baer, and host Ann Handley.  I also met lots of new folks including Frank from Comcast, CC Chapman, Rohit Bhargava,  Greg Cangialosi and Gary Vaynerchuk.  Gary V exudes a passion and energy that just can't be beat!  It was a lot of fun to see him present (you can watch the video of Gary V here).  Unlike the keynote from the day before by Arianna Huffington, who was clearly very smart but a little flat and perhaps used too many political insider jokes for the crowd, Gary V has so much passion and energy, he just can't fall flat.

Overall it was a great eventbecause of the people, especially.  But only because my personal appetite for even more sessions about inbound marketing is not too big right now since I live and breathe this stuff 24x7.  For others who lead a different life than I do, it was a solid event and worth going.  As the governator says... "I'll be back!"

I recently got an email from someone with a question about the difference between a hashtag (#) and a reply (@).  See my reply below in bold, and you can also follow Mike Volpe on Twitter.

Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 11:57 AM
To: Mike Volpe
Subject: RE: Twitter

Mike,

Sorry to bother you but you seem to be a "goto" guy on twitter matters.  I noticed in your tweet last week regarding Seth Godin's book, you had a reference to #hubspot as opposed to @hubspot. What is the significance of the hash mark? Where did I miss that information?

What's the difference between #mvolpe and @mvolpe?

Check out http://www.hashtags.org/.  Basically, #hubspot indicates a threaded discussion on a TOPIC, while @hubspot is a directed message toward a specific person/entity.  Think of "#" as like "about" or "re:"  and @ as like "to".  Typically people will search on twitter for #hubspot to follow a conversation, but not as much for @hubspot.

[Apologies to the blog readers not located in Boston.  This is one of those 0.1% of my posts that are personal / local.]

Four years ago I co-founded the Boston Scholars Program which provides educational support to Boston high school students.  Our first class of scholars just graduated from high school, and 100% of the graduates started at a 4 year college this fall.  That makes me happy.

We're holding our 4th annual Halloween party fundraiser this Friday October 24.  Want to join me?  I promise it will be fun!  Learn more about Boston's best halloween party or buy tickets.

Here are some photos from past events:

Seth Godin is a marketing genius, and I normally agree with him on most everything.  I am a giant Seth fanboy, and even have a photo of me with him.  So, don't interpret this as Seth-bashing.  I just think he called this issue wrong.

Seth Godin wrote an article called Ads are the New Online Tip Jar that basically asked blog and website readers to click on ads to support bloggers in what amounts to "Pity Clicks".

This is a short sighted and bad idea that actually does not help anyone.  Here is what would happen if people started to actually go with this "Pity Click" program.

Why Seth Godin's "Pity Clicks" are Bad Idea

1. Blogs would get a short term boost in revenue from the additional clicks.
2. Advertisers would see that these useless "pity clicks" did not buy anything or register for anything on their website, making them (the ads and clicks) pretty useless.
3. Advertisers would see their ROI drop from these ads, causing them to either cancel the ads or negotiate lower prices.
4. Bloggers would see ad revenue drop because they asked for "pity clicks" on their ads.
5. We end up back where we started.

A business (like a blog) needs to figure out how to both create value and capture value.  Many blogs create value (for their readers) but have not figured out how to capture it.  The reason why ad revenue on most websites is low is because banner ads don't work!  Marketers need to use more inbound marketing, and many people are discovering this and using fewer banner ads.

Seth Godin's idea for "Pity Clicks" might be clever, but it is not sustainable in the long term and does not make sense to me.  What do you think?

Last week I spent a bunch of time in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I spoke at Online Market World about blogging, I attended the Tech Target ROI summit, I was at the Pro Marketers marketing meetup (you can meet me tomorrow, Oct 7 in Boston), and I met individually with a bunch of folks through Twitter, Facebook and email.  [mvolpe70.gooruze.com]

During this trip, I met and spoke with over 50 marketers of all different types, some were short chats, some were longer conversations.  here are my observations on wha was on these marketers minds:

1. Learning about inbound marketing.  Many marketing experts were interested in learning about SEO, blogging, social media, landing page optimization and marketing analytics.  (If you want to learn about these topics, watch these free marketing webinars.)
2. Concerns about the economy.  None of the marketers I talked to had actually seen a slowdown in business.  The "recession" seems to just be on Wall Street, at leat for now.  but it was on everyone's mind and people were worried about the future.
3. Not much social media.  Given that I am a heavy user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other forms of social media (StumbleUpon, YouTube, Flickr, Hi5, and more...) I really expected the tech-heavy, lead-user bay area to be teaching me a ton about social media and introducing me to new tools.  That was not the case.  I actually had more Twitter followers than everyone I met, except for one person.  The people I met with did not seem that interested in using social media as a lead generation tool.
4. Fascination with SEO.  While I did not get many questions about SEO, I got tons of questions about SEO.  I talked to lots of people about Website Grader, and gave out lots of SEO advice.  it was great to see so many people thinking about a core part of inbound marketing.

What do you think?  What is the vibe of marketing in the San Francisco Bay Area today?

I am making a trip out to San Francisco to speak on a panel at Online Market World on Friday, check out the Tech Target ROI Summit on Thursday, attend the ProMarketers Happy Hour Meetup on Wednesday, and meet with some other friends, customers and marketing gurus.

Send me a message on Twitter if you want to meet, or contact me.  I'll be back on the east coast in a week, and also going to the ProMarketers meetup in Boston.

Upcoming ProMarketers Events

Pro Marketers / Social Media Meetup - West Coast
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 6:30PM
Gordon Biersch, San Francisco, CA
Facebook Event    Upcoming.org Event

Pro Marketers / Social Media Meetup - East Coast
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 6:00PM
Lucky's Lounge, Boston, MA
Facebook Event    Upcoming.org Event