Grasslands

High school kids rock. Especially the ones I had the pleasure of meeting last week at the Massachusetts State DECA Conference in downtown Boston. DECA is an organization that aims to empower young people to pursue careers in marketing, management, and entrepreneurship through education and leadership development events. 185,000 high schools students participate through 5,000 chapters across the U.S.

Along with my colleagues, Jeremy Butler (DECA alumni) and Jon Kay, I served as a judge in the Entrepreneurship category and Grasshopper donated scholarships for the top three participants in our category. The scholarships we gave will help out the winners of our category with travels costs for the DECA National conference. Over the course of three days, we each heard from between ten and fifteen groups of young entrepreneurs who pitched us their entrepreneurial ventures. Their businesses ranged from internet properties to landscaping companies and everything in between. The vast majority were outstanding.

We were also given the opportunity to do a couple of workshops on Friday afternoon. Jonathan presented on generating buzz and Jeremy and I teamed up for

As the SEO Manager here at Grasshopper, a large part of my job is ensuring customers and potential customers find our site. Even more importantly, that they find our site and convert.

As a small business, you probably hear that you need to have a website and you need to be doing SEO. Yes, both of those things are true but what is the point of spending all that time if you aren't going to do it correctly?

Here at Grasshopper we use analytics every step of the way. We know what keywords are performing the best both traffic wise and conversion wise. We also know what content appeals to our users (and the search engines) and in turn, we are able to create a better and more defined SEO/content strategy.

Analytics can offer some extremely valuable data and is vital in improving your website. But how can you use analytics to guide your SEO efforts?

Evaluating Keywords

• Which keywords drive traffic organically?

  So often we focus on the keywords we WANT to drive people to the site with vs the keywords

I'm going to be semi-live blogging today from Carsonified's Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami. As each session draws to a close, I'll enter some quick notes about the highlights and main takeaways. Enjoy!

Update (10:00am): There is a FOWA live stream on Ustream, but I don't have the URL right now.

Update (10:30am): Just found out I got locked out of Twitter for 60 minutes because I changed my password yesterday and Tweetie has relentlessly been trying to log me in with my old password. Ugh.

The 10 Golden Prinicples for Successful Web Apps - Fred Wilson

9:05-9:35

1. Speed

• Speed is the most important feature
• Pertains more to mainstream users than power users. Mainstream users leave or get frustrated when something is slow
• Have all portfolio services on pingdom and monitor those results

2. Instant Utility

• Must be useful right out of the box
• There are tricks you can use (i.e. pre-populate content from sources you don't intend to use long-term, like scraping the web)
• Compared Google Video's "come back later"

A piece of advice to web entrepreneurs just getting started: rather than becoming consumed with starting the next Google or Facebook, focus on creating a remarkable company with a niche target market that solves a problem that you yourself have had. Here are four and a half great videos from six entrepreneurs to help you focus, get inspired, and launch a successful startup.

1. Make Money - David Heinemeier Hannson, Co-founder of 37signals

David from 37Signals gives an uplifting, straightforward talk on creating a profitable company, charging money for your product, and to solve simple problems. David and I have similar views on growing a business: do it yourself without venture capital, focus on entrepreneurs (he calls them Fortune 5,000,000), and solve a problem you face yourself. What changes can you implement to either make or create an additional $1 million a year from your niche target?

Connect with David on Twitter: @dhh

2. Break Conventions - Eoghan McCabe & Des Traynor, Founders of Contrast.ie

Breaking conventions is easier said than done, and Eoghan and Des