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How To Launch Startup In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000 – Founder Institute

@arpitshah — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:49:06 +0000

For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan.

While there is no foolproof recipe for every launch, Ressi says his template will help any tech entrepreneur get a business off the ground for less than $2,000. The program, which Ressi recently presented at the Founder Institute’s Boston location, is a bare bones guide to securing your startup’s online identity, enhancing your appearance of legitimacy (through low-cost but well designed logos and marketing materials), understanding your startup’s priorities and target consumer, and finally, getting it to the point of a rough web launch.

Given that the presentation occasionally offers very specific advice (for example, step 3 centers on the use of 99designs for your logo), the ten step plan will hardly work for everyone. However, I imagine many young entrepreneurs can mine this tip sheet for some valuable advice on how to save a few extra pennies here and there on the road to launch — pennies that can later mean the difference between success and failure.

Below is a bullet point summary of Ressi’s ten steps to launch. The video above significantly elaborates on these points.

1. Get your domain and e-mail working: “When you register your name, you should register the misspellings as a .com, you should register the primary and the .net or .org or it will be sold back to you for thousands of dollars later…”
Approximate cost: $160

2. Produce some mock-ups: “You want to show the key functionality that you’re trying to bring to the marketplace…You just need three sort of pivotal experience screens that will demonstrate your core idea or three…mock-ups of the physical product…you’re trying to capture how it will be done.”
Approximate cost: Free

3. Logo and materials: “Get a good looking logo so at least you look legitimate…” says Ressi who recommends 99designs. After you pick the winning design, “you contact him [the designer] offline, you say I want you to do my business cards, I want you to do my Power Point backup and I want you to do my mock-ups. Now for not so much money you’re getting everything you need to appear somewhat legitimate to the world.”
Approximate cost: $750

4. Pitch deck: “You always want to have a pitch deck, even if it’s bad…you need something to start with to go on that refining path.”
Approximate cost: Free

5. Create a landing page: Ressi recommends Unbounce.com, which is a drag and drop landing page.
Approximate cost: $60/year after free trial

6. Create a company blog: “I recommend doing blog.yourcompany.com…it keeps it in a consistent place as your company scales…You want to be posting on your blog, at this phase, one or two times a week.”
Approximate cost: Free

7. Test marketing: “First thing I strongly recommend is immediately test marketing using Facebook and Google ads. Not so much for the value of driving people to your bullsh*t website, but to understand what messages resonate with your target audience and then so you can then refine your marketing messages.”
Approximate cost: $250

8. Survey customers: “So now you’ve got these leads coming in, survey them… you want to understand, the demographics, who are they. You want to clarify what the pain points, like why did they sign up, were they just stupid and duped into it or did they really feel that something was valuable and what was it that they find most valuable.”
Approximate cost: $200

9. Create a sticky note roadmap: Write all of your company’s features on separate sticky notes and then group them in logical buckets. “What I do, is I put on the left side I put the most important group and then at the top, the most important features. So on the top left is the most important thing I have to do…When you have that roadmap in front of you, you can sort of visualize the one thing that flows through everything and usually there’s an unknown around that.”
Approximate cost: $100

10. Ghetto launch. Test the unknown. “Whatever you can find that can test out your core stuff that’s free…Identify the metrics, collect the data and validate…”
Approximate cost: $250

Read detailed story on TechCrunch.

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WordPress Security, Plugins and Basic Tips

@arpitshah — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 06:58:20 +0000

WordPress Security:

We all agree that having a secure wordpress weblog should be our first priorities when keeping a successful blog. In this post we’d like you to share your knowledge and help us create the WordPress Security guide to keep the bad guys out.

WordPress is an awesome publishing software and Auttomatic (the company behind WordPress) always tries hard to secure it so that millions of blogs can be safe from hacker threats. Recently TechCrunch the world’s biggest blog, got hacked twice in a short time frame of eight hours.

According to the lead programmer of WordPress, Mark Jaquith, the hack was most probably because of an insecure WordPpress plugin which allowed the hacker to use the method of php injection to hack tech crunch. It wasn’t a server side hacking.

Basic Tips:

Don’t install WordPress in the root directory. Install it in some folder with a weird name which is not easy to know. Something like 442dgdsaps. This will save your wordpress installation from bots as well as hackers.
Move wp-config.php file: Did you know since WordPress 2.6 you can move your wp-config.php file outside of your root WordPress directory? Most users don’t know this and the ones that do don’t do it. To do this simply move your wp-config.php file up one directory from your WordPress root. WordPress will automatically look for your config file there if it can’t find it in your root directory.
Follow this guide on how to open WordPress on the main url after installing it in a sub direcotry.
Use secret key: This is probably the most followed security tip on the list, but still I’m amazed at how many people don’t do this. A secret key is a hashing salt that is used against your password to make it even stronger. Secret keys are set in your wp-config.php file. Simply visit https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1 to have a set of randomly generated secret keys created for you.
Change the WP prefix of database tables. It will save you from sql injection hacking.
Never use the admin account. After installing WordPress, you should change the administrator user name.

Top 10 Security Plugins:

LINK: http://arpitshah.com/top-10-latest-powerful-wordpress-security-plugins-and-tips-tricks/

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Awesome: Boomerang for Gmail – Set a time to send-receive an email

@arpitshah — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 06:50:26 +0000

Boomerang for Gmail lets you control when you send and receive emails. Scheduled sends. Get email when you need it. No more cluttered inbox.

Link: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/

It is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. It works for Gmail accounts and Google Apps / Hosted Gmail email accounts.

Whether for personal use or business, Boomerang is simply a great idea. Here are some instances where Boomerang might just make your day:

Paying bills on time
Scheduled email in other time zones
Send a birthday message while it’s on your mind
Reminding yourself to follow-up with a client

Video:

Now who cares of Google Undo-Send option??

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Top 5 SEO extensions for Google Chrome

@arpitshah — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 05:40:58 +0000

The web browser is arguably the most important piece of software on your computer. You spend much of your time online inside a browser: When you search, chat, email, shop, bank, read the news, and watch videos online, you often do all this using a browser.

Its very long time I moved to Google Chrome and specially DEV Channel . While working on Chrome I’ve found some very useful SEO extensions which I want to share with you.

1) META SEO inspector: Meta data is not just the usual HTML meta tags, but the XFN tags, various microformats, the recently introduced canonical attribute, the no-follow links and so on.

This extension is mainly aimed at web developers that need to verify the description tag of their site to follow the Webmasters’ Google Guidelines, SEO, or even to who is curious about page contents that are usually not visible, but can reveal interesting site properties.

2) Chrome SEO: The Google Chrome SEO Extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other daily SEO tasks.

3) iPageRank: Unlike all the other PageRank checkers, this one will tell you, how much PR will be transfered to your site with a dofollow link on that page. It is handy to see if a site would be worth your time of commenting or requesting a backlink.

4) SEO SERP: A simple tool to quickly check the position of a list of sites given a keyword. For example, on the sample image you can see Wikipedia ranking #3 and Amazon ranking 16 for the keyword “lcd”.

5) SEO Site Tools: This tool is the most comprehensive SEO Tool on any browser… not only does it pull more metircs from more sources, including social media reactions, it also enhances common tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster tools with links anchor text and pagerank.Even nofollow link hilighting, popout ability, color themes, even more.

Bonus Extension (my own extension): Handy Google Shortcuts

What is your favorite SEO extension??

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10 essential WordPress resources you may have missed

@arpitshah — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:01:08 +0000

We know you’re busy. Even with every social media, web, and RSS tool at your disposal, you can occasionally miss out on some of the week’s most insightful content.

Never fear. I’ve taken a moment to round up the best WordPress resources from past 3 weeks and present them here for your enjoyment.

1) Top 10 WordPress Plugins For More Traffic – Blogging is a good way to share information. We desided to share some useful plugins for one of the best blog softwares these days.

2) Top 10 Latest Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Tips & Tricks – After putting in all of the time, and perhaps money, into your WordPress website or blog, its now time to secure and protect it from outside enemies and general bad guys: hackers, spammers and all round tossers.

3) My Favorite Top 3 WordPress themes – There are more than 1100 themes available on WordPress Theme Directory. Out of them here are 3 my favorite themes.

4) Must have top 10 plugins for your WordPress blog – There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.

5) Best top 5 WordPress Plugins for SEO – With WordPress SEO Plugins you can more optimize your blog for search engines, here is a list of BEST SEO WordPress plugins for year 2010.

6) Power of Social Bookmarking: 5 Best WP Plugins – Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

7) The Power of jQuery: 8 Wonderful WP Plugins – jQuery is ideal because it can create impressive animations and interactions while being simple to understand and easy to use. WordPress awesomeness lies in its fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! But what happens when you combine the power of jQuery with WordPress, the possibilities are infinite.

8 ) 5 best WordPress plugins to increase Adsense revenue – Most of the Webmaster depends on Google Adsense for revenue from their blogs/websites. Adding Google Adsense in WordPress Blog is little bit difficult. In order to help new Webmasters, I have collected some of the best Adsense WordPress Plugins those are available on WP Registry.

9) Top 5 WordPress BACKUP Plugins – Do you backup your blogs? If not, you should! All the efforts you put into writing, advertising, marketing and administrating your blog can go to waste if appropriate reservation measures are not taken in time. Even though many hosting companies make backups of your account, it is still a must to have your own ones. As you never know when a disastrous failure can take place, having several restoration points is reasonable.

10) Top 5 best Tracking Plugins for your wordpress blog – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!

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