Ben Huh

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• How can we build a sense of community around our business?

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    Be honest and open about your successes as well as struggles. And communicate consistently without the flowery marketing lingo we’re all sick of hearing. But most of all, create a product or service your users can love.

• How important has email been in driving traffic to your sites? How does it compare to Twitter/Facebook?

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    I think email and chat are the most important, followed by Facebook/Twitter. It’s a tool we undervalue.

• As a new internet SaaS start-up, if you had to give one piece of advice that would result in more twitter followers; ultimately driving traffic to our website - what would it be?

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    Honestly, I’d focus on building such a great SaaS biz that you have raving lunatic fans who would market for you. Don’t think of Twitter as driving traffic to your biz, think of it as enabling your fans to love you more. Focus on your core business, then the marketing channels will become obvious.

• Have you done any formal marketing/advertising to increase visibility for your business?

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    No. Instead, we took all our resources and poured them into helping users market their own content.

• How do you evaluate potential job candidates? What are the most important traits to look for?

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    We look for two main things: 1) Top 1% of their skill/trade and 2) cultural fit to our company. What’s really hard is making sure you have an environment that draws the 1%ers. Bad environments attract poor performers. Great environments attract great performers. It’s hard to change the environment once you’re set in your ways. Never lowering your standards in the face of convenience/time constraints are hard, but lowering standards is a one-way ticket to failure.

• Should we focus on link-building to get higher in search engine results?

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    Focus on building compelling content. As Google and others crack down on SEO gaming, what WILL survive is unique, interesting content. SEO is an arms race — the Internet’s cold war. Writing meaningful content is really adding business value. If you focus on SEO, you’re NOT focusing on your core business.

• How important is blogging for me as a business owner?

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    I’m assuming you mean as a small business owner — someone who runs a brick and mortar biz. In this case, it’s not. What is important is the fundamentals of running a small business: 1) inventory management, 2) customer service, 3) cost controls, etc. Don’t go down the blogging path because other people are doing it. The same applies to social media. Blog if you love blogging, not because someone told you to do it. If you are going to blog, try wordpress.com, it’s free and easy. It’s what we use.

• What advice would you give yourself if you had to start a blog network from scratch today? I'm particularly interested in how you'd find bloggers, how much you'd pay them on average to attract and retain them, as well as how you'd attract traffic to your new blogs without spamming.

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    If you had money, you could start paying them I suppose. But I’d focus more on finding like-minded people who could share in the risk and reward. Passion trumps cash. The amount of money new bloggers can earn by blogging is not a huge sum. It’s more important to create a sense of purpose and making sure that if the enterprise is successful, that they succeed with it.

• If you were to start over today, what would you do differently? Specifically, would you take funding and what internet/technology areas do you find compelling?

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    I think today you can get much more bang for the buck than you used to be able to get 3 years ago. I would take on an area that I’m personally passionate about, and start rolling up my sleeves – put words on a blog, put code to action, put pixels on a screen – and see what i can learn and see where there are big problems people just seem to ignore.

• How do you leverage social media for your business?

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    I actually admit that we’ve done a poor job of this. We see social media as a way to amplify personal connections. We’re currently in the process of hiring our first social media manager.