As the first week of February closes out and football fans gather in living rooms and sports bars across the nation for the Super Bowl, for us here at ReadWriteStart its the time of the week when we take a look back at the more popular posts from the past week. In this week's Weekly Wrapup we discuss the debate between freemium and subscription models, the best practices for an effective "sign up" button, running online contests, networking with entrepreneurs online and some tips for public speaking.
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If you want to be a great public speaker, your preparation has to be more than just blasting gangsta rap and shadow boxing in front of the mirror. Whether you have to videotape yourself speaking, join a presentation club, or rewrite your PowerPoint deck 40 times, it's important to be able to tell your own story. Few of us are born with the gift of public speaking but with a little preparation we can learn to persuade, sell and inspire.
As more of the business world flattens with the expansion of online services, social networking is increasingly becoming a critical factor to success in many industries. Whether you're for a small businesses selling art at a craft fair or a Fortune 500 company trading on the stock exchange, social networking has the power to expand your brand among both your audience and fellow business owners. For the latter, entrepreneurs can take advantage of specialized social networks to meet, communicate share and partner with others.
A year ago we launched the ReadWriteWeb Guide on Community Management with the knowledge that "Community Manager" would become an increasingly popular job title. Since then, the requirements of keeping your customers engaged have become more demanding. According to one report, contests are becoming increasingly popular. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Strutta CEO Ben Pickering, to find out what businesses can do to generate more participation from their contests.
In any relationship, business or personal, first impressions are critical to getting off on the right foot. For startups, if a user gets a bad first impression of your website, that same sentiment will carry through to their opinion of your service. A few weeks ago we told you about some pointers to make sure your site's registration process isn't scaring away users. A recent post on web development blog Six Revisions focuses in on this issue by providing some techniques and best practices for creating and designing the perfect registration button.
As an entrepreneur, blogger and the investor in charge of the Founders Fund seed investment program, Dave McClure knows the importance of a proven revenue model. In a recent blog post he makes the assertion that "subscription models are the new black," despite the fact that startup monetization has focussed heavily on cost-per-click advertising. He writes, "This Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness..It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI...We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models." While we might not have chosen this exact phrasing, we cannot agree with McClure more.
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