Fantastic articles this week on small businesses, online marketing and startups. Trada has been drowning in rain here in Boulder. Also, to entertain ourselves Anna and I wore glow-in-the-dark necklaces all day at work on Thursday. Finally, if you haven’t had a chance be sure to check out Trada CEO Niel Robertson’s interview in Adexchanger.
- 10 Sites to Compare Google vs Bing Results Side By Side – According to my awesome co-worker Anna, last night’s episode of Gossip Girl had Eleanor Waldorf saying to “Bing It.” Now that both sites are a verb, this post provides 10 sites to breakdown the differences between Bing and Google.
- Risk and Startups – Mike Perham provides a brutally honest picture of what it’s like to work at a startup and how to mitigate the risks that come from working at one.
- Facebook’s Ambition – Robert Scoble provides a thorough analysis of all the announcements at the F8 conference and what they mean to marketers, entrepreneurs and the everyday man.
- Blending Social Media, Ads: ROI Alchemy – MarketingProfs cite the study showing homepage ads on Facebook that “have social media context—that is, they include the names of users’ friends who are already fans of the brand—are 4.0 times more likely than those that don’t to increase purchase intent of a product or brand.”
- Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups – Vivek Wadhwa declares Boulder the best town for startups, a fact that I agree wholeheartedly with.
- Compelling Landing Page Design Is Not Formulaic - Scott Brinker on landing page design, “There are no simple recipes for universal landing page design. To the contrary, the possible ways in which one may design a compelling landing page are unbounded. That’s why design is “creative,” and not merely paint-by-numbers.”
- Our pick for the best blog post of the week (a must read!) is Building Highly Reliable Websites For Small Companies - Patrick, an entrepreneur with a small business, provides useful tips on keeping your website up. He identifies ways to set expectations, identify risks to your service and mitigating failures before they happen. Good stuff!
And for fun – this week an incredible mix of Lil Wayne vs The Office theme song is making its way to the top of Hypem. Listen to it if you enjoy rappers and Jim Halpert.
