Guaka! - seo

How I became my own CMO

Guaka — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:38:13 +0000

Introduce yourself and B2B Pay

In 1998 I was running my own web server, at home on a broadband internet connection from my University. A Linux box with Apache, running some homemade websites. I've always considered myself a techie, a geek. On a RTW trip a decade ago I met Neil Ambikar. We stayed in touch over the years - and then Summer 2015 we decided to start a fintech business.

With B2B Pay we provide virtual bank accounts in Europe, with an individual IBAN number, to companies that export to Europe, coupled with a one percent fee for currency conversion and transfer.

What you were doing before starting to be a CMO

In 2008 I had a brief stint with the biggest Dutch social network ever and there it became totally clear to me that a full-time office job working for others is not an option for me. I'm not capable of sitting at a desk from nine to five, working for someone else. I spent too many years of freedom, both at universities, scientific institutes and simply on the road. So I started working as a freelance web developer. Most of this growth was based on search engine optimization.

What happened that made you need a CMO

I've been actively involved in my own and other founders' startups for a long time now. Always in web developer roles, up to CTO. Only when B2B Pay started looking like it could one day be huge I realized my obsession with growth and finding ways to hack it meant that I'm now more CMO than CTO.

Why did you decide to be the CMO rather than hire one

With B2B Pay it didn't even occur to me to hire a CMO. I believe people should do what they enjoy most. I do enjoy coding now and then, especially Python, but I prefer to spend time looking at graphs, figuring out what's the most efficient way to make the numbers go up. Really, I'd rather hire a CTO at this point.

How you divide your time of being a CMO and CTO

For an early stage lean startup traction is everything. Getting to a point where you prove that you business model works is much more a matter of marketing, and sales than of building a sophisticated product.

What your initial marketing goals were as a CMO

I set my first goal as a CMO at the start of the first Nordea accelerator in Helsinki (2016 program application deadline August 7th). Before the end of the three month program: One sign up on our website coming in through SEO and one through social media marketing. That first conversion is the hardest.

"..when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1." Peter Thiel

Interesting story you can tell

I feel that "growth hacking" is the term used mostly for what I'm doing now. It's just that "hacker" is not a word you want to use when talking to customers. So for now I'm sticking with the title Head of Growth, which in my case is a kind of combined CMO/CTO role, with currently a slightly stronger focus on the M than the T.

Marketing campaign that succeeded

With a total marketing expenditure of less than 1000€ on both SEO and social media marketing combined managed to get an average of 2 incoming leads per day in just a few months [and growing, this is currently much higher] when we simultaneously got do some conversion rate optimization.

Post to multiple social networks with this great ping.fm alternative

Guaka — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:18:34 +0000

tag:

I only met Callum briefly in Melbourne in 2007, right after I stopped volunteering for couchsurfing, right before he started volunteering for couchsurfing. A brief encounter with Callum was enough to know you're dealing with someone very smart and special. Later we started opencouchsurfing.org and regularly communicated online. I was happy to meet him again last summer in 2012. He wanted to start a new project and we brainstormed a bit about this. We were both avid users of ping.fm. I think Callum actually got me onto ping.fm at some point in 2007 or so.

Ping.fm: post to 20-something networks at once

Ping.fm was pretty good. There were some minor annoyances but overall it was a great way to post once and spread your message to tons of different networks. Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, but also Identi.ca, Plurk and many other fantasy named sites not used by many. But for an Identi.ca fan it was a great way to update your status on more than just identica. (For the uninitiated, Identica is an open source, slightly decentralized alternative to twitter.)

Then some day Seesmic, the slightly bigger social networking company with a nice looking product, took over Ping.fm. And quickly thereafter slashed the main feature that made Ping.fm stand out from the crowd. Since then there was no easy way for me anymore to post to Identi.ca, Twitter and FB at the same time.

Thus I was very happy Callum decided to build an alternative for ping.fm: Composer.io.

Composer.io: Post to multiple social networks

Now, half a year later Composer.io has become quite usable and you can post on multiple social networks simultaneously. It's actually a bit smarter than ping.fm as it will already allow you to post longer posts that will be automatically shortened for platforms like Twitter that only allow 140 characters.

Why post to more networks at once?

Personally, I have a bunch of followers of my twitter, quite a few friends on facebook. Identi.ca is not that active but unlike on twitter the links are dofollow links, so for seo I prefer to put links to projects I want to support with google juice on my identi.ca, but for social networking reasons twitter and facebook are much better. Like this I get the best of both.

Composer.io is a work in progress and your input is very welcome!

guaka: http://ur1.ca/aic8n #betonvloer #storten 1st try to use http://composer.cal.io/ for #seo (hence crossposting to #twitter and #FB :)

Guaka — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:04:10 +0000

tag:

guaka: http://ur1.ca/aic8n #betonvloer #storten 1st try to use http://composer.cal.io/ for #seo (hence crossposting to #twitter and #FB :)

My first mobile site, in Drupal of course

Guaka — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 20:58:12 +0000

tag:

In 2008 I built my first Drupal site, for a furniture business. The site proved to be a big success and we started some other furniture sites as well later on. I also worked on many other Drupal sites and the web in general hasn't been standing still. So last year we decided it was time for an upgrade. Not as easy as thought with a site that is ranking extremely well for a wide range of keywords. It also appeared more difficult to get to a new design.

I moved the entire teakdump site to teakmeubelen.nl, which is super easy with Aegir, added the new theme, and many of the custom modules I had developed for the new Meubels website. With that most of the site was ready except for some settings that weren't easy to grab in code.

As early adopters of technology (especially within the furniture world) we'd also been entertaining the thought of having a site that works well on mobile phones. I had already seen and heard of Mobile Tools, so I gave it a quick try.

The Drupal modules

I was pleasantly surprised by the integration with Display Suite and Context. That plus the Fusion Mobile theme gave me fairly decent mobile site in a very short time.

The mobile build mode make it a snap to get a slightly more usable rendering of nodes on mobile devices and the mobile context makes it easy to quickly rearrange the entire site for mobile devices.

I noticed an issue though: the Display Suite build mode was showing on the desktop site! I had to disable Mobile Tools and look back into this the next day.

Then I checked WURFL but that seemed to just complicate matters a bit more.

As it seems now there was a little bug in the code that sets the build mode, at least I wrote a patch for the Mobile Tools that works very well for me!

The main other thing I ran into was the caching of the theme. I'm using two different themes, one for the desktop version and one for the mobile version of the site. This doesn't work at all if you have the same URLs. So finally I had to take the redirect out of Aegir and into my nginx configuration so that m.teakmeubelen.nl also points to the same install (without a redirect).

SEO

From blog posts I gathered that Google doesn't seem to consider the same content on both desktop and mobile URLs as punishable duplicate content. I just wonder how Google is supposed to detect the mobile URLs (which is one more reason for a nice blog post about my first mobile site).

Now things still need some work here and there but overall I think this site looks great, both on the desktop and on mobiles. And I wonder where to put the iPad and other tablets, as I think the desktop site is just fine on an iPad but Mobile Tools probably considers it mobile hardware anyway.

guaka: is #grenen #pinewood? another #furniture site: http://grenen-meubelen.nl/ - #seo is a fun game

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:51:23 +0000

tag:

is #grenen #pinewood? another #furniture site: http://grenen-meubelen.nl/ - #seo is a fun game

guaka: usually I prefer no-www but apparently http://www.industree.org/ has already been indexed like that for 10 years so we'll stick with it #SEO

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:11:46 +0000

tag:

usually I prefer no-www but apparently http://www.industree.org/ has already been indexed like that for 10 years so we'll stick with it #SEO

guaka: http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/05/seo-spam-network-code-used-and-more-details.html more info about the #wordpress #seo #spam network

Anonymous — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:12:10 +0000

tag:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/05/seo-spam-network-code-used-and-more-details.html more info about the #wordpress #seo #spam network

Support for Dutch sites in Drupal Service Links

Guaka — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:59:37 +0000

tag:

For my little project site about swimming pool construction I decided I needed some way to spread links better over Dutch sites. So I hacked around a little bit in Drupal's Service Links module and I just uploaded some files to support nujij en eKudos. I want to add some more Dutch sites, but there ain't that many it seems. The result can be viewed on the individual articles pages of my blog - there's still some work on Service Links before it can be conveniently shown on the main page.

memcache doesn't necessarily speed up your Drupal sites

Guaka — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:50:31 +0000

tag:

Sites that show up quickly on a user's screen tend to keep the user's attention for longer and also rank better in Google. So when listening to the excellent Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited I was caught by Drupal experts stating that Memcache would even speed up your site if it's not a high traffic site. It could off-load the database. I decided to give it a try on a relatively low traffic site of one of my clients. The site is already being served by nginx so the load times are already pretty good. When setting up the experimentation I was a bit confused by the thorough but chaotic instruction to set up memcache. I ran into a problem setting up PECL memcache:

$ sudo pecl install memcache
downloading memcache-2.2.5.tgz ...
Starting to download memcache-2.2.5.tgz (35,981 bytes)
..........done: 35,981 bytes
11 source files, building
running: phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20041225
Zend Module Api No:      20060613
Zend Extension Api No:   220060519
shtool at '/tmp/pear/temp/memcache/build/shtool' does not exist or is not executable.
Make sure that the file exists and is executable and then rerun this script.

ERROR: `phpize' failed

Since I run Debian I solved this by running apt-get install php5-memcache instead. I restarted php-fastcgi (needed for nginx) and added $conf['cache_inc'] ='sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.db.inc'; to settings.php. Then I ran some tests in Hammerhead. Not on the front page since there is an embedded Youtube video. I chose a page without any external elements. I was a bit confused at first, and ran several short tests. I forgot to log out and the memcache module was adding a lot of extra information in the bottom. I thought that was the reason that my site was a lot slower with memcache than without it. So I logged out and tried again:

	count	latest	median	avg
empty cache with memcache	4	1449	1449	1759
primed cache with memcache	4	1277	1186	1184
empty cache without memcache	4	1239	1283	1483
primed cache without memcache	4	1014	900	950

It could be that I'd have to tweak some memcache settings, or run longer tests, but I think these numbers are clear enough: memcache made my site slower instead of faster!

Underscores to dashes in MediaWiki (not yet)

Guaka — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:54:07 +0000

tag:

It's clear that dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) for search engine optimization. So people have looked for ways to make MediaWiki use -. Wikihow is one of the few MediaWiki sites that behaves this way, but unfortunately even they don't seem to be running an extension for this. I tried my luck at changing the MediaWiki core (Title.php) but I'll leave this for now. I can just tell that replacing all occurrances of '_' with '-' doesn't cut it - but probably only because this also changes the way wiki articles are stored in the database. One or two extended MySQL queries might fix that. I'll try that another day.