Beyond that, you can go deeper into your expertise.  Learn how to effectively target your ad campaigns, reduce your CPCs for your online ads, or find free ways of advertising your site.  Measure what your users use most, build human-friendly URLs, write keyword rich content.  Start your Twitter campaign, Friendfeed account, and Facebook account — then, link them all.  Now, take all of the various ways I’ve just described, throw in all of the techniques I’m missing, mix and match, and, well, you’ve got innumerable ways to build traffic.

Please, please, just don’t use the automated email request for a link exchange with other sites as a way of building traffic.  Anyone that’s ever run a barely popular website has seen one of these things:

Hi

My name is NAME. I’ve just visited your website
enterventure.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in
exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back
from my Business and Marketing website which is WEBSITE URL HERE
with page rank #.

As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site HOME PAGE, not on
any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure
this exchange would be benefitial for both of our sites, helping
towards increasing our visibility in search engines.

If you are interested, please add the following information to your
website and kindly let me know when it’s ready. I’ll do the same for
you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from your
site.

I’ve only recently begun receiving these emails at EnterVenture.com, but I’ve seen an almost bi-weekly message like this one while working at Wikinvest.  (Remember what that feedback email breakdown looked like.)  Quite honestly, I don’t know for sure that these messages don’t work (some people must buy into them or else they’d have died out by now); however, I’m fairly certain that any site worth it’s page rank isn’t going to respond to this message.  More importantly, if you’re relying on this stategy, or are relying on a “web consultant” employing this strategy, it’s very clear you’re fishing for an easy path to success where one simply doesn’t exist.  By virtue of using this strategy, you’ve already predicted your site’s future demise. 

There’s only one free lunch you’ll find at a startup — the one given to employees to keep them in the office working longer.

I’ve been working on blog marketing a bit these days and think Carsonified has nailed it. I’m happy to write this post (and would love to attend their events) so I’ll do them one better. I’ll link to their Carsonified Golden Ticket campaign and to their next Future of Web Apps Expo event in London from October 8-10.

For a little fun with the rest of the post, I’ve put together my Willy Wonka-inspired reasons for wanting to see events like the ones at the Future of Web Apps Expo event in London from October 8-10

Willy Wonka: It happens every time, they all become blueberries.

Enter Venture is all about early entrepreneurs. I want to help Enter Venture readers avoid becoming blueberries by listening to what Edwin Aoki of AOL has to say in his “Web apps are dead, long live web apps…” talk.

Willy Wonka: It’s Wonkavision.
Grandpa Joe: It could change the world.

Is this Internet TV thing going to happen or what? I need Ron Richards to tell me how the industry is “Bringing Internet Television to the Masses”.

Willy Wonka: The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Veruca Salt: Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?

How am I going to scale internationally? I don’t know the language. Blaine Cook and Joe Stump can help me avoid pitfalls with “Languages don’t scale”.

Willy Wonka: [singsong] There’s no earthly way of knowing / Which direction we are going / There’s no knowing where we’re rowing / Or which way the river’s flowing / Is it raining? / Is it snowing? / Is a hurricane a-blowing? /

Those iPhone Enter Venture posts have been doing well for me. I want to keep up and know “How the future of the mobile web is going to change everything” from Stefan Fountain of Soocial.

Willy Wonka: Oh, well then you know all about it and what a terrible country it is. Nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts. And the poor little Oompa Loompas were so small and helpless, they would get gobbled up right and left. A Wangdoodle would eat ten of them for breakfast and think nothing of it. And so, I said, “Come and live with me in peace and safety, away from all the Wangdoodles and Hornswogglers and Snozzwangers and rotten Vermicious Knids.”

I know I have to take care of my community, even if I think they’re a little short, orange-faced, and wear strange green clothing. Kathy Sierra can tell me “How to grow and nurture my community”.

Willy Wonka: So who can I trust to run the factory when I leave and take care of the Oompa Loopa’s for me, not a grown up. A grown up would want to everything his own way, not mine. That’s why I decided a long time ago that I had to find a child, a very honest, loving child, to whom I could tell all my most precious candy making secrets.
Charlie Bucket: And that’s why you sent out the golden tickets.
Willy Wonka: That’s right. So the factory is all yours, Charlie. You can move in immediately…

Children are in charge in both Willy Wonka’s factory and the web industry these days. Mark Zuckerberg’s Fireside chat should set that straight.

I think there’s a waterfall effect when it comes to creating a new website. First, you have an idea for a website that’s going to change the world (or just make you a lot of money). Once you have an idea, you have to come up with a name. Once you have a name, you have to design your logo. Once you have a logo, you have to design your site.

Once you have users, you realize that the idea, name, logo, and site design all need to be fixed, but that’s another post altogether. (There are a lot more steps involved, but this is a post about the logo and design so just go with it).

For this post, I’ll take you through my waterfall.

The Name

Enter Venture. I like the way the two words rhyme. Bingo.

Honestly, deciding to choose the name Enter Venture was an easy, gut reaction; however, it took it took me 2 months working with 3 different people, countless checks on register.com, and plenty of time with thesaurus.com to come up with Enter Venture / enterventure.com.

There were a few exercises I went through to come up with Enter Venture. My favorite exercise is the stream of consciousness word dump onto a whiteboard. Next, I took a step back to think of synonyms for the words that best encapsulated my idea. Working with other people helped further diversify my options. Finally, I confined myself to certain guidelines: no three word names, must have a “.com” address, etc.

There are probably a million ways to come up with a website or company name, but I think the three guiding principles of 1) Brainstorm 2) Build Constraints and 3) Get Feedback, in whatever order, will give you your best chance for naming success.

The Logo

It took surprisingly little time to conceive the idea for the Enter Venture logo. I knew we wanted a something simple (a theme you’ll hear repeated on this blog). I would much rather start with something simple and build on it. Also, who needs a great logo? I’d much rather have a great product than an intricate logo. See Facebook, Digg, etc.

One simple look at the “Enter” key on my keyboard gave me the idea to separate the two words Enter and Venture by putting Enter in button. I was open to any button but thought something that evoked the idea of an “Enter” key would be clever.

With an affordable designer I was able to test out this one idea and three other design concepts. The button idea looked great and with a few tweaks to color and font, Enter Venture’s logo was complete.

The Design

Another thing that we communicated to our designer was that we would have a white background site. I love white background sites. I don’t see any other real option for text rich sites. White backgrounds have worked for text since the days of papyrus so it’ll be tough to convince me to do otherwise.

The design, like the logo, is minimalist. It’s so basic that I decided to immediately remove the Google Ads I originally placed in the sidebar. With a basic, but unique design I will be able to focus on creating content.

(One final note about the design: it’s not done. For all of you IE browser users out there, bear with me).

I’ve now nearly wrapped up the ‘why i’m here’ and ‘what i’m about’ pieces. Stay tuned next time for my Modus Operandi, part 1. We’re almost there.