Net Money Journal

A lot of great stuff in Jason Calacanis’ ten best tips on PR for your startup.  I especially like number #6, How a CEO should e-mail a journalist.

Your job as the CEO/founder is to create direct, honest and personal relationships with journalists. The truth is that PR people are selling you a share of their relationships with journalists, and their relationships are typically on shaky ground. You’re much better off building a personal relationship by sending a personal email like this:

Saul,

Nice piece on Facebook’s valuation. One insight I had: if the value of the company BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH than should Microsoft be thinking BLAH
BLAH BLAH? Thoughts?

best regards,

Jason Calacanis
CEO, Mahalo.com

If you do that once every other day for a year or so you’ll develop relationships with 50 to 100 important folks. Of course, you have to have something of substance to say, so don’t waste their time and don’t write five page e-mails or you’ll look deranged. Short, to the point and intelligent. If you’re not smart enough to send something insightful, well, than I can’t really help you and you might want go work for someone smart for a couple of years.

Check out #9, where Jason gives good reasons for welcoming competitors and copycats and not suing them.

And #10 talks about leveraging small media outlets to reach the big ones.

Getting someone at The New York Times, WIRED or The Wall Street Journal to pay attention to you can take years. Small publications, however, don’t get their calls responded to by the big companies. This creates two big wins for you:

a) Small publications have more time for you
b) Big publications troll the small publications for stories

In fact, you might not want to waste too much time getting to Walt Mossberg or John Markoff–those guys are jammed up big time. Great guys, and they know a great story when they see it, but the amount of incoming traffic they have is insane. Your best bet might be to find a vertical blog or podcast and talk to those folks. After you speak with them you can send the link to Mossberg or Markoff–or they might find it themselves.

1) Make money.

I know, this is a no-brainer but without massive action you won’t make any money.

2) Learn.

This is for all the internet marketers with 100 make money online blogs in the RSS reader. Stop reading so many blogs. Most of the best stuff you learn will come from trial and error not reading.

3) Feel better about yourself.

If you don’t do anything today, you’ll probably feel bad at the end of the day.

4) Gain motivation.

The secret to getting motivated is momentum. Even if you don’t feel like taking action, do it anyways and you’ll usually find yourself getting motivated to do more work.

5) Change your future.

Each productive action today will lead to a better tomorrow.

Yaro Starak has some great commentary on the effectiveness of Twitter for internet marketing.  Also, he talks about the Twitter tools he uses.

Link: Is Twitter A Time Waster Or A Powerful Business Tool?

SEO Book has this great list of 5 must have apps for webmasters:

1. Camtasia - Screen Recording Software
2. SmartDraw - Business Diagram Software
3. RoboForm - Password Secure Storage and Manager
4. Carbonite - Web Backup
5. Fastone - Screen Capture

Scottie Claiborne provides a good explanation why anchor text trumps alt tags:

General theory holds that alt text isn’t as “powerful” as link text, and for good reason. Webmasters who try to “game the system” stuff zillions of phrases into their image alts in an attempt to rank better for those terms. Because it isn’t an element that is likely to be seen by users (unless they hover over an image), it can be more easily abused. In general, search engines prefer to give more weight to elements that users can see.

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings With SEO Digger from Dee Barizo on Vimeo.

Check out the original post at Tubetorial for the show notes.

Your business blog should be on your own site - not on third party sites like blogger.com and typepad.com.

You don’t need to advertise on traditional media.  Through blogging, your content can become the favorite TV show, radio show, or magazine.

Here are 3 reasons why blogging will increase your search traffic.

It’s not a good idea to participate on too many social media sites.