If you run a searchable website, you’re likely sitting on a potential gold mine: user search logs.

“The data is semantically rich,” said Lou Rosenfeld, information architecture consultant and founder of Rosenfeld Media. “Users are telling you want they want in their own words.”

Search analytics – an often under-utilized and free resource – allow you to “carry on a conversation with your customers” by listening to their needs and measuring how well your site meets those desires. You can also analyze search queries and results to improve UX design, site navigation, search performance, content strategy, and – as many online retailers have done with search analytics – product offerings. “If you just take the top 50 most frequent queries… and then throw that data into a spreadsheet and play with it, you’re going to get an unbelievable amount of insight in an hour,” he said.  Continue Reading »

Every biz dev advice column, book, speaker or video you come across can probably be summarized by what Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein recently said:

“Lose your sense of shame.”

And while he was specifically referring to how often to ping a contact (it’s more frequent than you may think), the larger lesson learned is how tenacity can affect your startup’s business success.

Adam will share a number of other lessons, tips and tricks for improving your startup’s business development this October during his session at Web 2.0 Expo New York. (Use code BLG20 to save 20% on registration.) He took the time last week to talk to us about what relatively young travel search site Hipmunk has learned about startup business development since it launched. Continue Reading »

.CO’s administrators have aggressively marketed the extension unlike any before it. In the year since they made .CO available for worldwide registration, Juan Diego Calle, .CO Internet S.A.S CEO, and his team have experimented with a Super Bowl ad, lent Twitter t.co (its official URL shortener) for free, pursued major event sponsorships, and even ran a charity auction. They’ve also built video case studies about using .CO, purchased billboard ad space, and held startup contests.

“If we had ended with 500,000 registrations I would have been pleased. We’re ending the year with over 1 million registrations our first year. Clearly it exceeded our expectations,” Juan said about the company’s growth. “Going directly and talking to our users has worked.” Continue Reading »