Vanessa will be speaking about “Technical” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how searcher can be integrated into a broader marketing strategy. Search marketing is so much more than ranking. There’s an amazing amount of search data available that provides great insights on your customers and their needs that can help you define your product strategy, build your brand, and have a deeper engagement with customers. I do a lot of writing, speaking, and training about that these days.
My plan is to put together comprehensive online marketing resources at ninebyblue.com and web development resources at janeandrobot.com. I also am an editor at searchengineland.com, where I write more analytical pieces on the search industry. And I’m cochairing the O’Reilly Found conference (conferences.oreilly.com/found), which I believe is the first search conference aimed entirely at a technical web developer audience. As search acquisition evolves, it will become an integrated part of everything businesses do online, and certainly building SEO best practices into the coding processes is a big part of that. (Any search marketers who are reading this and want to send the developers they work with can use the discount code fo09cc10 for 10% off.)
I’m also an entrepreneur-in-residence with the venture capital firm Ignition Partners (ignitionpartners.com). I talk to a lot of startups about how to build search best practices into their plans so they can start acquiring customers without a lot of marketing spend.
I’ve done a lot of things over the years, but likely of most interest to your readers is the time I spent at Google. I built webmaster central there (google.com/webmasters), helped spearhead sitemaps.org, and worked to help define the overall relationship between Google and site owners. Search can seem like a black box to site owners, and it’s such an important part of operating a business today that search engines should provide as much insight as they can about how a site is performing and what issues should be addressed. This helps both site owners and search engines.
2) In your Janeandrobot.com article on Robots.txt, you did an amazing job of explaining technical concepts clearly for a broad audience. If you were to offer some tips for “writing clearly about technology”, what would they be?
I spent the early days of my career writing technical documentation for a variety of audiences, from those who knew nothing about computers to programmers who needed technical API details. The most important element to good writing is the same as for building a web site or a product. Understand your audience. We all have a tendency to think that our audience is like us, but all you have to do is watch one usability study session to realize that’s not the case. I think the key is asking what does your audience want to accomplish and what are they bringing to the task? Then write what helps them achieve their goals.
3) How has the economic downturn affected technology venture capital and what are the keys to getting funded in 2009?
I think the keys to getting funded now are the same as they’ve always been. The difference is that VCs are being even more judicious, so companies looking to be funded need to be really focused on those keys. Who is your audience? What problem are you solving? What’s your customer acquisition plan? What’s your long-term revenue model? A lot of companies have a neat idea, but can’t articulate a compelling problem statement. Or they want to solve a problem for a particular audience, but don’t have a plan for accessing that audience.
The team you’ve pulled together is equally important. Can you work well together to execute on your plan? Do you all bring something to the table that will get you to where you need to be? Do you have the key people you need? And are you flexible to change if customer data or the market landscape tells you that you need a different business model or product direction?
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.