Don't Forget

Here are some resources I've been meaning to look at. When I have time, I'll take a look at them:

Meetups in the Twin Cities:

http://www.meetup.com/twin-cities-lean-startup-circle#calendar

http://www.meetup.com/Bootstrappers-Breakfast-Minneapolis

Good SEO resources:


http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

http://randfishkin.com/blog/50/what-i-learned-about-sales-but-foolishly-forgot-when-raising-vc

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/10/about-author.html

http://theleanstartup.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz


Also don't forget:

St. Paul CoCo coworking space

Wordpress All-In-One SEO Plugin

Learn HTML5

Well I think it's inevitable that I'll have to learn HTML5 and CSS3 and break my old XHTML1.0 Transitional ways. I found an EXCELLENT resource online that explains everything you'd ever want to know about HTML5:

http://www.diveintohtml5.org/table-of-contents.html

SEO

I got a lot done in just a few hours today. First, I made some security enhancements to my database to make potential attacks against it much more difficult.

The bulk of my work centered on SEO. Rather than link building, I'm on a new project to add lots and lots of pages to my site which are optimized for very specific search terms. Patrick McKenzie has had great success with this method with his Bingo Card Creator software.

I was just able to create one such page today because much of my time was spent designing the layout. I now have a really good template to go off of, so I'd like to add more pages at the rate of about three per week.

I also started a new Adwords campaign. This campaign was specifically for keywords with very little competition that are very relevant to my site. Depending on how this goes, I have many more lists of similar keywords that I'll be trying.

The last thing to note is that I'm at the point where I really need to be tracking my conversions more closely. I'm getting traffic from Adwords, Microsoft Advertising, organic searches, and Facebook. I need a much better way to track where the sales are coming from. My next step will be to set up conversion trracking for each of these systems.

Focus

Last summer, this blog really helped me focus on my business. As a single founder, I don't have a boss to report to, but I still needed some accountability. Knowing that I had to update this blog every two days (a self-imposed rule) really motivated to actually get stuff done.

I launched my web app in January and am already turning a profit, not counting advertising expenses. The key to success will be perseverance over the long term. I think that three years from now, with slow and steady growth, the business will be in a really good place. Since three years will pass whether or not I decide to work on the business, it only makes sense to do it.

The school year has been very busy, allowing me to only make slow and incremental changes to the business. As long as this is done consistently, I don't see that as a problem. My FogBugz list is chock full of stuff that I want to get done this summer. I'd like to do a bit of consulting work this summer as well.

During the school year, I'll be lucky to post here every two weeks or so. This summer, though, I'm planning on regular posts again.