7 + 3 Lessons From Failed Startups
Great Inc post on lessons from a failed startup include:
1. Consider the entire experience
2. Raise money when you can not when you need too
3. Don't give away equity too soon or too fast
Read the other 4 from the Inc post: https://www.inc.com/yoram-solomon/7-lessons-you-should-learn-from-my-failed-startup.html
I'd add three of my own lessons from my "failed startup":
1. Don't think in terms of success and failure, win and lose. Think about impact, learning, and potential. Startups require a more nuanced sense of win/lose.
2. Don't hire your friends even if they are the right people because you are probably blind to faults, issues, or other "round peg in square hole" problems with friends.
3. Create any startup in collaboration with customers. Don't do the "mad inventor" thing and go off and think you've created a better mousetrap. You won't. Instead, collaborate and build on what you learn from real customers facing immediate problems.
Scoop.it's Republishing Study
We loved the attached republishing study Scoop.it CEO Guillaume Decugis and his team shared. Since you need a tool to fully know SEO benefits we fired SpyFu up and took a look at Scoopit's blog.
Good News
The team is right. Their republishing post gained rank on keywords WITH TRAFFIC. "With traffic" is in all caps because adding in SEARCH DEMAND (of keywords) is where most content marketers trip up.
It is possible to KNOW exactly how many clicks Scoop.it gained and then estimate subscribe gains as we did in this public Google Sheets:
http://bit.ly/scoopit_republish_seo
YES, Scoop.it gained clicks from their republishing post (though not exactly from where they thought), and they weren't hurt by duping the content (at least not what we could see with this tool and the hour we had to riff the analysis).
Smaller Posts Daisy Chained
We eliminate any SEO dupe problems by breaking up posts into pieces and sharing on multiple platforms as we did with Why I'm Not An SEO:
Linkedin Post (part 2 of 3)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-im-seo-martin-marty-smith
Why I'm Not A SEO (Personal blog part 1 of 3)
http://www.scenttrail.com/why-im-not-a-seo-triptych/
Why I'm Not A SEO (Curagami part 3 of 3)
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/new-seo/why-im-not-a-seo-3/
Little extra work eliminates a concern that didn't impact Scoop.it's republishing post (as far as we can see) - duping content.