The Cheap Revolution

Review of Hubspot's Inbound Marketing System – An Entrepreneur’s Perspective

A brief history of Hubspot

After meeting at MIT in 2006, Hubspot’s founders created a digital search marketing platform designed to leverage the disruptive effects of the Internet to enable businesses to “get found”.  Just five years later, Hubspot.com ranks as a top 1000 Web Site globally and is in the top 350 most trafficked sites in the US per Alexa. 

I started using Hubspot a few years ago as part of my digital marketing business.  After watching a demo of the tool's capabilities, we decided to try using Hubspot within our company.  We quickly introduced it to some of our entrepreneurial clients as well.   I don't use Hubspot in my Philadelphia marketing consulting business today.  I'll explain why later, but first... 

Our Hubspot Review

In this review of the Hubspot platform, we explore what Hubspot does and how a startup or small business may benefit from using their software.

Hubspot’s message is all about Inbound marketing, a term Hubspot has rallied into a brand phrase.  What does Inbound Marketing do?   It allows you to turn your Website into a lead generation tool for customers.

What is HubSpot?

When I started using Hubspot, the central tools revolved around on-site organic search optimization.   The tool would help you discover a dynamic list of keywords that you could attempt to capture with your site optimization efforts.   You were able to track your competition's performance on those keywords as well, providing valuable insight into how their website's were positioned.   Coupled with the website evaluation tools, you were able to quickly optimize a site for organic search traffic.

The Hubspot platform seeks to take the realm of organic search and digital marketing out of the hands of the Internet marketing insider and put it into the hands of the entrepreneur or small business owner.  It has numerous marketing tools and tricks that allow a business owner to:

• Optimize keyword content on blog posts
• Track visitors and user engagement
• Analyze social media feeds
• Create and manage email marketing
• Nurture web leads
• View reports that measure the effectiveness of your marketing

Hubspot also supports their platform with a variety of training and advice.  They have webinars, downloadable white papers, community forums and conferences that support the Inbound Marketing experience. 

Indeed, you can tell Hubspot eats their own dog food. They offer free eBooks to their customer base on how to improve their marketing initiatives as a way to capture leads. A few worth nothing are:

• The Ultimate How-to Marketing Guide 
• Twitter for Business 
• How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day
• 100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts, and Graphs 
• 101 Awesome Marketing Quotes

How HubSpot Works

Hubspot provides six categories of marketing software capabilities:

1. Search Optimization – Hubspot’s first priority is to get your business found in search engines.  Helping your business to optimize its digital presence for the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing is where Hubspot got started.  When I used Hubspot, I was impressed with the ocean of keyword data that I could sort through.   Hubspot helps you with finding the best keywords for your business, prioritize them and use them effectively on your Web site.  
2. Blogging & Social Media – Social and Search work closely together today with personalized searching that draws on  the rapid growth of people’s social networks. Hubspot provides the tools for integrating blogging and social media monitoring, as well as  analytics  for both, into  your marketing efforts.  
   OTHER OPTIONS: If blogging is a central part of your digital strategy, bloggers may want to consider the popular Wordpress blogging platform.  While it’s nice to have everything in one place with Hubspot, the number of plug-ins and the broad community support make tools like Wordpress a must-have tool for serious blogging strategy.
3. Lead Generation and
4. Lead Management  - These two categories fall into the realm of the digital marketers' secret weapon of conversion optimization.   If you are serious about getting quality business leads from your website and social media presence, you must pay attention to where visitors are landing when they come to your site.  Application of best practices can dramatically improve your number of leads! Hubspot tools allow non-technical business owners to optimize the “Landing Pages” and to track exactly what people did when they visited your site.   Before you call the lead back, wouldn’t it be nice to know which pages they read, which videos they viewed or which whitepapers they downloaded.  Hubspot tells you all of that and more, making it a powerful lead nurturing platform.
5. Email & Automation  - like blogging, if you are looking for a “one stop shop” then you may want to consider Hubspot.  However, the areas of Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing have really matured in the past few years and, depending on your needs,  you might be better served by email marketing alternatives like Constant Contact, iContact or Mailchimp.   Lead Nurturing giants like Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot are worth considering as well.
6. Marketing Analytics – Hubspot’s analytics are organized and focused on driving sales for your business.  Understanding ROI by marketing activities and channels, running comparison tests (A/B analysis) and which channels get the best leads are organized into Hubspot’s “ full-funnel view closed-loop reporting”.  This is a results-driven marketer’s dream!  

Once again, there are big dogs that only do analytics like Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture, but those systems require someone who knows those platforms to craft the equivalent “conversion funnels” and channel analysis. Compared to Hubspot, those platforms are going to provide a broader range of analytics capability, but Hubspot trumps them on providing easy access to the most important numbers.

HubSpot in Real Life

While I used to employ Hubspot for my marketing clients and my company, we used it to manage landing pages and do our SEO research.   More recently, I've come across companies who use Hubspot for the analytics and the drip marketing capabilities.  Given the rich set of features, there are endless combinations of approaches to using HubSpot.  

Did it work?   Take a look at this graph of a client we launched using Hubspot for landing page optimization and search engine optimization.  

Using HubSpot, we helped this client grow their monthly traffic from zero to 15,000 in roughly six months, including a comparable growth in leads. 

We stopped using HubSpot when our client's using HubSpot took their marketing in-house.  From a digital agency perspective, that kind of sucked.  From the entrepreneur's perspective, this was empowerment - and they took full advantage of it.   

We kept HubSpot around for a while, but it requires a monthly fee and, THIS IS IMPORTANT, it requires ongoing attention and time to work.   When we stopped using HubSpot in late 2010, our small band of merry marketers did not have the time to justify the monthly expense.  But the lesson here is that someone - whether an outside agency or your internal team - must be willing to invest the required effort to use HubSpot and keep abreast of their latest additions to the toolkit.

If you're willing to make the investment of time and aren't afraid of the monthly investment (see Pricing below), then HubSpot is worth checking out.  Friend and colleague David Newman of DoItMarketing provided this review of how he walks the walk and talks the talk with Hubspot. 

Hubspot has totally lit up our visibility to our target market, independent consultants and small professional services firm owners who want to grow. We are now much more findable, visible, and credible. We get between 3-4 leads per day through our Hubspot-powered website AND in addition to that, we get several leads each week via email and phone from people saying, "I just found your site and I'm calling to see how you might be able to help us." Working on both sides of the fence (we are also a Hubspot Certified Partner), it is now very easy to share the value with our prospects and clients because we were the first to "eat our own dog food" and we continue to invest in our own inbound marketing efforts as we help our clients do the same!

If you have the technical and business skills to use an online bill payment system (e.g. from your bank),  online accounting system (e.g. Quickbooks) or navigate an online portfolio (.e.g from The Vanguard Group or Fidelity), then you can use Hubspot.  Some Hubspot capabilities will require an investment of time to be able to use them productively, but there are a host of educational resources from Hubspot.  

Hubspot support ranges across online videos, white papers, best practices seminars and an active and responsive community of marketers using the platform.   It is an exceptionally well-supported product.

Why You Should Care About Using HubSpot

Bottom line: if you are a marketer for your company, this is the most cost effective way I know of to get multi-channel, agency-level marketing help with a DIY  approach.   If you can run an email marketing program, or can get around Quickbooks, then you can use Hubspot.

Using HubSpot requires an investment of time and money - and it requires you to adopt the HubSpot methodology and platform for a lot of what you do.  Some companies, particularly larger ones, are better served by a collection of best-in-class tools.  I believe HubSpot is best suited to startups and smaller businesses. 

Try it out and let us know how it worked for you. You can get your free trial by signing up here.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot has a monthly fee.  As an entrepreneur, this is a strategic investment that you'll need to carefully consider.  For entrepreneurs, you can get started with the Basic, Professional or Enterprise version with $200/month up to $700/month.  

What’s the difference? 

The more advanced levels provide advanced interaction and lead nurturing techniques like A/B testing and custom lead scoring.  These are tools that you can adopt over time.   The Basic package has all of the core offerings and provides an excellent Inbound Marketing starting point.

 

Pricing captured from Hubspot site (www.hubspot.com/pricing) on 01/22/2012.

Even if the pricing doesn't work for you, there are a number of free resources from Hubspot.  Consider checking out the Hubspot Grader for a free Web Site assessment.

In Summary: Our HubSpot Review Conclusion

While HubSpot is straightforward to learn and use for the do-it-yourself marketer, it does require a serious investment of time.  In effect, you are in-sourcing your digital marketing agency.  Be ready to get to work!  If you do, the results can be dramatic. 

If you are using Hubspot, please include your experience in the comments below.   We want to hear your stories – good and bad!   By leaving your experience, you benefit the whole community of entrepreneurs reading this review of Hubspot.

- Skip Shuda

Note: This Review of the HubSpot marketing platform contains affiliate links which may provide the CheapRevolution.com with  compensation.  If you find this blog helpful, please patronize our advertisers using the links you find on the site. 

Cheap Design Resource - 99Designs Crowdsources Design of your Wordpress Theme or Logo

Crowdsourcing is a new tool in the entrepreneur's arsenal.   According to Wikipedia, the term crowdsourcing first appeared in a Fast Company article in 2006.  The term is defined as:

the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call.

For entrepreneurs this provides an amazing opportunity to tap into a global pool of talent for everything from designing your Web site to designing a tee shirt to creating your logo at very affordable prices.   Platforms have emerged to manage the process of crowd-sourcing and savvy startups are using them to move quickly with a splash of style.

Today we spotlight one such crowdsourcing platform in 99 Designs.   99Designs is one of the original leaders in crowdsourcing and has provided businesses with over 50,000 designs.   While they started out with logos, 99Designs can now be used to help design:

• Logos
• Web sites
• Wordpress themes
• Stationary and business cards
• Tee Shirts
• Banner Ads

I've used 99Designs in the past and they provide a well managed process which moves along very quickly.    If you need a design in a pinch, they provide a great solution for startups.   Starting at just $99, the price point grows as more designers and more customization is added.  However, entire Wordpress themed sites can be designed and built for $595.   

In our work with entrepreneurs, finding good Wordpress themes has become a pressing issue.  99Designs gives you a professional platform, backed by a money-back satisfaction guarantee to ensure you are satisfied with your design and project.   Given the challenges in finding quality designers who can deliver, this is a terrific option to consider.

The process is straightforward. You fill out a brief detailing information about your Company and what you're looking for. After you determine how much you're willing to pay and set a time duration, you post your contest and designers submit their designs. This is the most exciting part of the process as you get to see the various directions you can take your logo. Tip: Provide feedback from the beginning by rating the designs, disqualify designers who are not providing the type of work you're looking for and answer questions as soon as possible. The more engaged you are during the process, the more likely you'll receive something you're happy with. 

Are there any drawbacks to crowdsourcing approaches like 99Designs?  Sure.  As with anything, there are pros and cons.   Designers may recycle some of their design concepts to get started quickly.   After all, to make 99Designs work for them, they have to bid on several projects.   That means you may end up with designs that aren't 100% unique to your business. To combat this, be viligent about checking their previous designs and ratings. 

If you are hoping to build an intimate, long-term working relationship with your designer, then the arms-length process managed by 99Designs might not work as well for you.   The designers are mostly anonymous, which is necessary to make the 99Designs business model work. 

For most startups, these tradeoffs are minor compared to the advantage of inexpensive, professional quality design that a 99Designs project can provide.   Check 99Designs out and see how they can help you get started on your brand. 

Disclaimer: 99Designs is an affiliate marketing partner of CheapRevolution.com that provides advertising revenue to this blog.

Using Webinars to Grow Your Business

 

Whether you’re a multi-national corporation or an aspiring entrepreneur, webinars can play an instrumental part in reaching your target market and growing your business. They provide a platform for you to engage with your core audience and allow you to showcase your expertise to your target market at the convenience of you and the listener.  You can easily record webinars and post them online so that your audience can listen to them whenever and wherever. You can let your users help you promote your brand by encouraging them to share the webinar on their social media channels.  In this post, we’ll talk about webinar best practices, and provide a comparison of the best webinar platforms online.

 

Webinar Best Practices:

An Enticing Webinar Title : The title of your webinar is just as important if not more important than the content itself. An enticing title will attract prospective attendees to learn more about the webinar and your services. Without a compelling title,  you will lose the opportunity to entice your core audience. If you need a source for inspiration, try Richard Bayan's Words That Sell.

A hot topic in your field: Choose a topic that has staying power and will be relevant in a month's time. Look into seasonal trends within your industry to find a topic that your audience is interested in.  The topic should help your audience learn a new skill, become better informed about a certain field, or improve use and understanding of a product. 

For example, if you’re in the gourmet food industry, a great educational webinar in the summer would be "How to Make your own Olive Oil Gelato."  If you are a yoga instructor, a great webinar topic on healthy living could be “Is Yoga Enough to Keep you Fit? How to Create a Healthy Lifestyle.” Marketing companies can capitalize on the Google Plus new release and discuss how businesses can leverage it.

Ease of Understanding v. Complexity : Because the success of your webinar hangs on your audience retaining the webinar in one sitting, the topic must find the right balance between being understood easily while being intriguing. Since your audience is investing their time in you, you want your audience to feel smarter than they were 15 minutes ago. Always include time for a Q&A session at the end to provide them the chance to have their questions answered by you or your speaker.

Don’t assume the webinar is going to market itself: Take the time to develop a plan on how you’re going to get promote the webinar to your target market. We found a great list on this post.

 

Webinar Platforms:

 1.      GoToWebinar - One of the most well-known solutions.

Features: Allow the host to create a registration page and invitation emai to send, branded with your Company logo. Some of its core features include the audio conference by phone and the computer, full desktop or specific application sharing, recording, drawing tools, chat, etc. You can also submit post webinar surveys. And GoToWebinar automatically sends out follow up emails to attendees. This platform provides support for the most attendees of the platforms we surveyed.  So if you anticipate big audiences, GoToWebinar may be your option. It is compatible on PCs and Macs.

Price: All plans offer a 30-day free trial. The smallest plan allows for up to 15 attendees at $49/month. $99 per month for up to 100 participants, $399 per month for up to 500 participants, or $499 per month for up to 1,000 participants. Each plan has a corresponding annual pricing plan which comes out to be 20% cheaper.

 2.      Budget Conferencing

Features:  Pay as you go service plans ranging from basic services to operator assistance for each event. Capacity for thousands of attendees at no additional charge, mp3 audio file download is available for participants (at an additional cost).

Price: 12 cents per minute for standard webinar features, 18 cents per minute for one dedicated operator, or 24 cents per minute for multiple operators.

3.      Adobe Connect

Features: Connects to your mobile and tablet. In addition, Connect helps you manage and plan your webinars. They also have great customer service. 

Price: $55 per month per host for up to 25 participants (I had to call them for a price check since the price is not easy to find on their website). The annual contract is $540 which comes out to $45 per month per host.

 4.      MyMeeting123

Features: File Sharing. Money back guarantee within the first 14 days of use. Cancel anytime and get refunded on the unused months.

Price: $209.85 for 3 months, $419.70 for 6 months, or $755.40 for 12 months (10% off for yearly subscription). All plans host up to 100 participants (including host).

 5.      Intercall

Features: Integrates with MSN Messenger, Lotus, and MS Office Communicator Messenger.  Free iPhone, Android, and Blackberry app.

Price: $42 per month for up to 20 participants or use the pay as you go plan at $.17 per minute. The pay as you go plan can host up to 125 participants.  

6.      Yugma

Features: Yugma integrates with Skype so you can invite your Skype contacts to meetings and share your screen with them. The Yugma A plan contains audio conferencing while the other plans do not. 

Price: Webinar registration is $19.95 per month or $199.50 annually on top of the price of the plan that you choose. The price depends on the number of participants allowed in a webinar. Plans range from 2 participants at no charge or up to 500 participants for $159.95 per month or $1599.50 annually.

7.      Maestro Conference

Features: Participants can share the webinar link to their peers on   Facebook. The "green room" provides a private chat room for webinar staff to coordinate prior to the event.

Price:  $47 per month for up to 50 lines, $97 per month for up to 100 lines, or $187 per month for up to 200 lines. Contact the sales department for a quote if you are interested in adding more than 200 lines.

Already a pro? Let us know what webinar program you use and how webinars have impacted your business. If you're a webinar vendor, feel free to leave additional comments or clarifications on your product.

Photo credit to the Missouri League for Nursing

 

Quiz: Are you ready to launch your Web Business?

You have a great idea and you are ready to move it forward. You have your tech team lined up. Your web designer is ready to go. Your business plan is nearly finished and you're at the point where you're ready to launch your new Web business.

Are you SURE you've thought of everything?

We've found that there are a number of common pitfalls that Internet startups encounter when starting out. To help you determine if your business is ready to launch, we put together a quick 15 point Web Startup Readiness assessment to help you with some self-examination. (It takes about 15 seconds to load... so please be patient!)  The graphic shown here is an example of the quiz output, tailored to your startup. You can have your custom profile emailed right to your inbox.

If you don't have time to take the assessment, check out the fast five pitfalls we've seen below.  The more you answer "Yes!" to, the stronger your odds for success.

1. Have you refined your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to be simple enough for your mother to understand? Understanding your USP indicates how well differentiated your offering is in the marketplace.

2. Have you talked to at least three potential clients or suppliers/sponsors? Primary research provides a measure of how well you understand your customers, suppliers, and partners in your market. It is also important in building your product/service.

3. Can you point to others who have been successful with your business model? Researching similar models measures the intensity and appetite for your service in the market.

4. Do you know your top five competitors? This research can be instrumental in identifying differentiators, go-to-market strategies, pricing models, business models and much more.

5. Do you have an idea of how you'll make revenue? A monetization strategy - even if not implemented - must be understood before launch.

Take our full Ready to Launch Quiz (give it 15 secs to load) to test out the readiness of your startup. The quiz will further help you evaluate your team, business model, market, financials, value proposition and much more.

If you hesitated in some of your responses, join us in our first complimentary webinar, "Getting Ready to Launch." In this webinar, we'll focus on the "Ten Things to Ask Yourself Before You Launch" listed above and provide specific examples of tools and resources you can use to improve your chances of a successful launch. Space is limited – so take our quiz and register today. We have room for twelve entrepreneurs to participate live in our Webinar and we'll be selecting newly launched startups as case studies to profile. The webinar will be recorded and made available on our website for those who did not have the opportunity to participate.

"Getting Ready to Launch" Webinar Details:

• Date: Monday, October 27, 2008
• Time: 7PM Eastern
• Duration: 1 hour

SPACE IS LIMITED - SIGN UP NOW!

Experimenting with Omnisio, Riffing on Virtual Teams

I ran a fun little experiment with Youtube and Omnisio this afternoon to see what a little "Do it Yourself" elbow grease might yield.   After a friend sent me the presentation "The Secrets to Making Money Online", I decided to give it a Omnisio a try on my own (well my 14 year old son helped.  Thanks Nick!).

Since our newsletter this month is covering Virtual Teams, I decided to use that as my topic. The result can be found below ... but PLEASE realize it was just an experiment and not meant to represent a professionally produced video.  See the lessons learned below for how we can improve next time!

At Team and a Dream, we like to do a "lessons learned" after any new project and ask "What Went Well" and "Even Better If".  After Nick and I finished filming two clips on my Kodak EasyShare DX6490 (refurbished off of eBay), I transferred to my tablet... (where hardware gremlins ate an hour of my time) and uploaded to YouTube's teamandadream channel.  I tried to download Microsoft's PDF converter (three times but the PDF format never showed up in the "Save As" filter) and ended up using PDFonline.com to convert my PPT to PDF (required by Omnisio).  Omnisio just wanted a Youtube link and the PDF. The editor was self explanatory.  I published and generated code to link into this post.

What Went Well (WWW)

• It worked!
• The Omnisio tool is really easy to use - and I think could be addictive.
• Only two trials were used - and the 2nd one improved the lighting considerably.  The whole exercise took about 2.5 hours (not counting 1 hour in which my machine-camera interface froze)
• Cheap - my "cameraman" charged me $10. Everything else was free!
• I already have 1 subscriber on our new "Team and a Dream" video channel on YouTube (Sign up by clicking here)
• A good way to give people who don't know me a better sense of who I am and what I'm like. 
• PDFOnline saved my butt from the failed Microsoft PPT add-ins. 

Even Better If (EBIF)

• We had a tripod to steady the camera.
• My old video camera wasn't so blurry.
• I didn't experience those periodic "tongue slips" which I think additional practice would have helped.
• More editing of the content - sharper, shorter, funnier
• I looked like Brad Pitt

-----------------------------------

I'm looking forward to your comments, reactions or opportunities for improvement.  I'm no Brad Pitt, but it was fun getting out there in video.   I look forward to what comes of this... if anything!

Quiz: How Open Are You?

Photo By: Orange_Beard

Our business demands that our team members have a strong entrepreneurial spirit.  A key element of success is how open each of us is to new approaches, new business models and new markets.  

We had a couple crack Ruby developers, Dinko and Greg, put a tool together that generates quizzes.  Our first quiz helps us to challenge ourselves on Openness.  This five question quiz is available for anyone to try - and it gives some suggestions on how to make yourself more open. 

Note: You'll probably be able to figure out which answers are considered "more open" - but if you answer truthfully, you might get some useful advice from the tool.

If you try the quiz, drop us a line or a comment and tell us how it worked for you.  

We're currently working on a screening assessment for potential members of a virtual team meshwork to see how well they fit with our projects.

Happy Quizzing!

2007 in Review: The Best and Worst in Business and Entrepreneurship

I've been coming across different lists from Mashable, Techcrunch, Business Week, Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others that feature the best and worst products, startups, websites, moments in business, venture capital investments, etc. of 2007. What better way to re-evaluate the end of the year, get caught up on what you missed, learn from what worked and what didn't, and prepare for 2008? Lots of interesting stuff here - enjoy!

1. PC World – The 100 Best Products of 2007
2. PC World - The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year
3. Entrepreneur.com - 15 Revolutionary Inventions of 2007
4. Inc.com – The Dumbest Products of 2007
5. Business 2.0 – Startups to Watch
6. Mashable.com – The Dumbest Startups of 2007
7. SEOmoz.org - 2007 Web 2.0 Awards
8. Time Magazine - 50 Best Websites of 2007
9. Time Magazine - 5 Worst Websites of 2007
10. Mashable.com - Best of 2007: The Coolest Web Apps
11. Lifehack.org - 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007
12. Time Magazine - Top 10 Best Biz Deals (of 2007)
13. Time Magazine - Top 10 Worst Biz Deals (of 2007)
14. PartnerUp.com - Complete List of 2007 Web/Technology Acquisitions
15. Forbes.com - The Midas List (Top 100 Tech Investors)
16. Techcrunch.com - The Year in Deals (Venture Fundings and Acquisitions)
17. Techcrunch.com - The Year in Deadpool (2007 Edition)
18. Mashable.com - Best of 2007: Trends that shaped the Web
19. Fortune Magazine – 101 Dumbest Moments in Business (of 2007)
20. Business Week - America's Best Young Entrepreneurs - 2007
21. ManagementToday.com - Britain's Top 100 Entrepreneurs
22. The New York Times - The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
23. Business Week – The Best Product Designs of 2007
24. The Wall Street Journal – Best of Ads, Worst of Ads
25. Content Marketing Today - The 5 Most Popular Examples of Bad Content Marketing

Have you come across a similar list? Let us know by leaving a comment below and we'll add it to our list.

Related Posts:

Most Popular Posts of 2007

By: Yasmine

Most Popular Posts of 2007

Our 10 most popular blog posts of the year based on traffic are:

1. Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes - This post was featured on the first page of Digg and on Entrepreneur.com's Blog. It features inspirational quotes from people of all walks of life. 
2. Quiz: What kind of Entrepreneur are you? - Take this quiz our own Skip Shuda created and figure out which of the 8 entrepreneur types you are.
   
3. An Evaluation of Popular Project Management Tools - Looking for a project management tool for your company? We evaluated six different tools for your convenience.
   
4. 25 Free (and Useful) SEO Tools - Free online search engine optimization tools to help you optimize your site.
5. Build a Web 2.0, Long-tail Social Media site for 12k? What's missing? - Skip questions Guy Kawasaki's post about building a Web 2.0 site on the cheap.
6. Find your Sweet Spot - What are you good at it? What should you pursue? Adapted from Jim Collins' HedgeHog Concept.
   
7. Top 12 Books for Entrepreneurs - Check out our book recommendations divided into two categories - for companies in the concept stage and for those in launch stage.
8. Alternatives to Guru.com - Ten alternatives to the popular online service site.
   
9. Natpal's Nate Stevens talks about recent venture raise - Skip talks to a former client about how he achieved funding for his startup.
   
10. An Evaluation of Logoworks - A post about our experience with the popular online logo design firm.

By: Yasmine

Top 12 Books for Entrepreneurs

There's no doubt that knowledge is power and the books below are a must read for those starting their own online business. In fact, these books have been selected exclusively for Internet startups. They're divided into two categories – those for startups in the concept stage and for those startups in launch mode. With Christmas around the corner, they also make great gifts! Note: These are in no particular order.

Concept Stage:

1. The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki - Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley icon who knows how to start businesses. His "pitch deck" format has become a staple in most Team and a Dream engagements. He also talks about the rough road of dealing with Venture Capitalists.
2. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore - How do you identify your early markets and your earliest customers? How do you get to that market quickly and grow to a "real company"? This book provides the roadmap.
3. Good To Great by Jim Collins - The home of the Sweet Spot Analysis used in many Team and a Dream conversations. Jim Collins calls it the HedgeHog Principal. Find out why some companies have continuing growth and some don't. What is it that makes them different? Based on 5 years and thousands of manhours of research.
4. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey - Covey details seven habits, if implemented, help people improve themselves. These habits can also help entrepreneurs deal with the unstable and unpredictable world of startups.
5. The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman - Important reading for anyone wanting a good overview of how the world is changing in dramatic ways. Globalization is here. You decide what to make of it.
6. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston - A look into the minds of the founders of Apple, PayPal, Flickr and many more as they tell in their own words what life is like hour after hour behind the keyboard, developing technologies and bringing them into market.

Launch Stage:

1. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell - Eye popping insights into viral marketing, the world of cool and why some things catch on and others don't.
2. Artful Making by Lee Devin and Robert Austin - What managers need to know about how software teams work. Taking lessons from the theatre and other art venues, authors Rob Austin and Lee Devin drive home some important ideas of working in a more creative way, while still making deadlines.
3. The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida - Big trends book on how a new breed of the knowledge worker is coming into its own. 
4. The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida - Why America needs to be wary of the cultures it creates for today's knowledge workers. We want to encourage creative people and growth of cultures around them. Instead, we are chasing them from our shores.
5. A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink - Left brain and right brain will combine to create the ideal worker of tomorrow. Dan Pink outlines some terrific ideas on how to get your creative side in gear for today and tomorrow's business world.
6. Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson - Find out how to achieve successful marketing results using non-traditional marketing tactics to make your company stand out.

Honorable mentions go to The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. No time to read? Pick up an audiobook version and listen to it in your car - you'll save some trees as well!

Are there any other books you would recommend? If so, let us know by posting a comment below.

By: Yasmine

SEOmoz's SEO Expert Quiz

How well do you know SEO? Enough to do it yourself instead of hiring someone to do for you? To find out, take this SEO quiz by SEOmoz. It's 75 questions and should take about a half hour. See how you rank and then decide whether or not you can do it yourself or if you need to hire a professional!

Previous SEO posts:
"25+ Free (and Useful) SEO Tools"
"Does SEO work? See for yourself!"

By: Yasmine