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I’ll let you know when I get an invite if this site is worth it. Sounds intriguing and beyond social network aggregation. Part of my incubator products review series.

ShareMeme : About

Between email, IM, your mobile phone, and Facebook, are you overwhelmed with too many ways to stay in touch? Would you like a service that connects you with your friends, with invites, polls, and links, simply and easily no matter how you communicate with them?

With ShareMeme, you can send invites, polls, and links quickly and easily from a text message or the web through email, IM, text message, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Facebook. ShareMeme organizes and communicates with all your friends, no matter where they are. Organize going out tonight with your friends without thinking too much! You’ll know who’s coming in a text message from ShareMeme

How to Build a Community of Twitter Followers for Your Company

The first thing you absolutely have to do once you sign up for a Twitter account (though you can do this before signing up for Twitter, but you won’t be able to do much beyond this), start monitoring who and what people are saying about your company. Go to Search.Twitter or Tweetscan (it may be worth it to use both, or even additional Twitter search engines, as they don’t all pick up on everything) and search for your company name, your executives’ names, perhaps your competitors’ names. You’ll see all the recent tweets that mention that name or phrase. What’s also great about these services is you can subscribe by RSS to this thread so you’ll be able to keep tabs on new posts about your company. When someone does talk about your company - respond, favorite the tweet perhaps if it’s favorable, and start following the person.

I can definitely agree with most of these points. If there is a way for you to gain revenue without funding of any kind, then I would recommend doing it. I understand all the reasons to take funding, including needing to pay the mortgage and eat, but once you have it, you have it and they have you.

7 Reasons Startups Should Not Take VC Funding - Advice from a Serial Entrepreneur

-If you start by selling your concept to potential prospects (rather than stock to VCs), you will either end up with initial customers or a conviction that your idea won’t work. Why raise money and then find out which one it will be?

-Raising money takes time away from understanding your market and potential customers. Often more time than it would take to just go sell something to a customer. Let your customers fund your business through product orders.

-Adding VCs to the mix early gives you an additional set of masters you must serve in addition to your customers. It is always hard to serve two masters, especially in a startup.

-With no money you can’t make a fatal mistake. This is a blessing. Without VC money, you are forced to figure out how to extract funds from your customers for value you deliver. Ultimately that is the only thing that really matters.

The advice in this is fantastic. I am applying it to mine.

How To Demo Your Startup

The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million.

…………

The greatest tech products over the past 10 years would take no more than five minutes each to demo. For example:

a) Larry and Sergey could demo Google search in less than five minutes. Here’s a box, type something in and you get a huge reward.

……….

Weak startups and their leaders seem to immediately start talk about “what’s next,” as opposed to focusing on the core product. Anyone can say we’re going to add: a mobile version, collaborative filtering, an advertising network, visualizations, a marketplace, a browser plugin, a browser and a social network to their product.

Read the entire article. It is fantastic advice. While some may seem like common sense I can reflect back on numerous times in the past when I’ve broken every rule listes.

Live optimization of PPC landing pages

The current page is trying to do too many things at once. The objective of this page is most likely to get someone to “search” for the phone number. And the results page (if they find an available number) should be trying to get them to “start their free trial”.

Some of the obstacles and problems I see include:

* Ad copy starts with 800 numbers and a 15 day free trial and landing page starts with “unmatched reliability” and no “real” headline.

* Design does not flow properly and has multiple competing elements and objectives that are not in the proper sequence. Currently visitors are asked to “order” … then to learn “more” … then to “search for 800 numbers” … then to compare plans… but why are there contracts with a free trial?

There are so many good things that come out of Marketing Experiments and I am never disappointed when I return to read, listen, and watch. This lesson is no exception. Read the blog post, but then listen to the seminar.

Clarity trumps persuasion — and lifts conversions

The principle: Clarity trumps persuasion.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe even too elementary? Perhaps you’re thinking, “My CEO and six-figure marketing budget don’t need catchy maxims. Give me something I can use.”

Don’t be fooled. There’s a powerful idea hiding in those three little words. But it’s easy to miss because we’ve been trained to persuade. To sell the sizzle, not the steak.

We try to entice prospects into our sales funnels with peppy copy, splashy offers and incentives that don’t cost too much. Meanwhile, behind the curtain of our clever creative, we’re not concerned about connecting with people. We’re chasing sales numbers and revenue goals. So we ignore the fact that our prospects hate being pitched and sold to — just like us, when we’re in their shoes.