I woke up in the middle of the night last night and I thought to myself, I haven’t given enough credit to the Entrepreneur Magazine’s Winning Strategies for Success Conference yesterday. It was a real eye opener. Even though we’re a strategic online marketing firm, and we’re focused on providing the best results and the highest ROI for our clients, we tend to forget about how important the basics really are. Blogging, for example, is so easy to do, and so great for SEO. Our blog post from yesterday was already crawled by google, and SproutStart.com even received a significant bump in online traffic. This stuff works.

I was hesitant yesterday morning driving up to Long Beach in the rain for an event I knew little about. As Travis and I arrived we saw a double rainbow , and realized how good of a day it was going to be… jk jk. Seriously though, we walked into the main room and found 100’s of people wanting to learn. Everyone was trying to find how social marketing, SEO, and todays top technologies can help advance their businesses. It was great to see all these people trying to figure out how to utilizes these strategies to grow there businesses, strategies we use on a daily basis to help our clients.

One of the sessions, taught by Susan Gunellus – Build Your Brand, Build Your Business, was primarily focused on how to use social media to boost your business. Some of the take aways that we thought were really important for people thinking about using social media marketing were: Choosing which social media accounts to be on, and the importance of conveying your personality through your social networking. With 100’s and potentially 1000’s of social media outlets out there, which ones should you use? Start with what you’re comfortable with. If you have experience with Twitter or Facebook, start there. Build up your followers/friends based on relevancy, you don’t just want to add thousands of randome people. Next, really think about where your customers hang out. For example, with You Rock Guitar, many musicians are still on MySpace even though activity on MySpace has really dropped off over the past few years. Another example for them is YouTube. Videos are on of the the BEST ways to spread content on the internet and to teach people things as well. Make sure your posts are not all self promoting, you really should be using the 80/20 rule, 80% or more posting relevant content for your user base, and the other 20% or less promoting your brand.

Another focal point was on my favorite subject – Branding. What is a brand? You logo, or product, maybe your website? No. A brand is your mission, a brand is a promise that you fulfill on a daily basis. What do you think of when you think Kia - inexpensive… or Toyota – quality (even with their debacle earlier this year). What about Apple – Innovation? I just saw the Social Network – What do you guys think of when you think of Facebook?

A brand is not something you can have be successful within a few days of throwing up a logo and website, a brand takes years to build and years to prove value.

Well guess what, today, October 5th 2010, we’re going to start giving this blog thing a little more attention. I’ll tell you what, my business partner and I woke up this morning, and decided to attend Entrepreneur Magazines “Winning Strategies for Business” convention at the Long Beach Convention Center. We determined that we were way ahead of the game in implementing these online marketing strategies for our clients. I wanted to give you an update on a few of our success stores over the last year, and maybe you can learn something and apply it to your company.

UncleVic is one of Orange Counties fastest growing companies. When we first arrived they only had a few followers on twitter and an bleeding SEM campaign with Google Adwords. The past 6 months have not only been a blast working with their amazing team, but we increased their relevant followers 10x, spread the word about their online promotions and offers, and stabilized the adwords spend bleeding. So what do they say? – “I highly recommend SproutStart to anyone looking to launch or grow their business.”

Architype is an international architectural publication based out of San Clamente. We were hired on to come in there and consult with them to generating more subscribers and revenue. The cool thing about this innovative architectural publication is that each architect (or anyone associated with a project) can have their own profile of their projects. So you’re saying, “WOW guys, what’s the big deal with that?”, you say. Well, it’s all about SEO. Content is the easiest way to build your google Page Rank (or as we’ll call it, “PR rank”) and show up higher on google. Bottom line here… create new content. By allowing users to “tag” and optimize themselves in their projects we are creating new pages on the Architype Review website. The more relevant pages, the better that particular project gets picked up on search engines. This is one of the most effective techniques anyone can start using to help build credibility and relevancy with Google.

One of the most interesting projects we’ve been working on is for a company called Inspired Instruments, Inc. Their product, the You Rock Guitar is a the most innovative Midi guitar on the market.

Where do I start, there are a ton of things we’ve done for You Rock over the past few months. We have built them a corporate website a separate website for their product (for selling their guitar), full SEO optimization (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook), e-commerce integration, hired interns, brought in models and conducted a photo shoot, set their product up in foreign countries, and a dozen other things. The only thing left to do is wash their cars after this rain storm passes. Let me remind you, this was accomplished in 2 months as we dedicated ourselves as their own internal/external online marketing team (and soon to be car washers).

I don’t want to make any clients unhappy here because there are a lot of other companies we have worked with since our last / forever ago blog, but we’ll get into that another time.

So all this great, but only problem is we haven’t given our own online marketing presence as much attention as it needed. Since our last blog (sadly November 24th 2009) we’ve been fortunate enough, in this slow economy, to keep very busy. That said we’ve helped pump up everyone of our clients online presence, but not ours.

Yes it’s cool SproutStart’s ranked top 50 in Southern California on Twitter, and we have some of the coolest clients in town like You Rock Guitar (who’s site we just finished), but today is the day we begin our blogging journey into the world of the most badass online marketeers – Steve / Travis / Stu

You’ll hear from us soon, don’t expect to wait another 316 days.

Although some of his points are valid, and many are simply misunderstood or misconstrued, I say let’s focus on moving in the right direction. Instead of writing yet another commentary blog on how horrible these angel groups are, I’m here to provide a alternative solution. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs on how to raise capital and to setup support mechanisms to empower them to raise capital without paying these pay-to-play fees.

Frank Peters posted a great article supporting some sort of fees as a “bozo filter” to help weed out some of the entrepreneurs. It’s very difficult filtering through 100 applications a month, and although many have tried automating this process, you simply can’t take out the human element.

At the end of the day you must take control of your destiny. The greatest successes I’ve seen are from the entrepreneurs who focused on going after their customer first, not investors. Too many entrepreneurs put funding in front of their business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I need $1 million to get this idea off the ground.” The companies that are raising money are the ones that have proven their business model and simply need capital to scale. That said, go out there, network, take the money if it comes, but focus on making deals happen.
Here are a few organizations that will really boost your chances of funding, and help with everything from raising capital to local resources. SCVN (SCVN.org), TCVN (TCVN.org), and FundingPost’s local events coming up March 9th and 11th in OC and LA (Fundingpost.com).

If you take the proper approach to funding you’ll have better chances of raising capital attending these venture capital events than pitching directly to investors groups.

For these and many more local networking events, check out our calendar at: http://www.sproutstart.com/events.php