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Free Social Media Icons

MediaLoot is a Designer’s Dream and you can browse through thousands of icons, vectors and UI design elements. If your anything like me you’ve scoured the Internet looking for worthy free social media icons that are actually useful and current with today’s design standards. Enter MediaLoot.

You can have the most amazing content and if it’s not paired with awesome visual presentation you will not see the kind of traffic you expect and deserve. People are very visual creatures and this is something you will need to exploit on your blog. Once you’ve set up your website or blog (the overall look and feel) and posted some unique content, you might be wondering what else you can do to take things to the next level, and we’ve got an answer for you: Grab some bad-ass free social media icons!

Medialoot’s free Social media icons and goodies are often just as good as the paid items. They have amazing sets of icons in addition to their premium sets, and they offer them for you to download any time you like. MediaLoot.com is one of the first sites to offer a free social media icon set that includes a Pinterest icon, so if you want to let your readers share your content across a wide range of social networks these are great icons for your blog.

Top Free Social Media Icons on MediaLoot.com

Round Social Media Icons

 Social Postage Stamps Part 1

 30+ New Social Media Icons

MediaLoot.com also offers some great premium social icon sets as well:

 Stone Cold Web Button

 Social Postage Stamps Part 2 

You will be tempted and hard-pressed not to subscribe to MediaLoot.com’s premium membership offers after you see all the free fodder on the website.  Many interesting and useful icons are available on the site ranging from textures and brushes, to Web UI resources. As long as you keep things tasteful (simple & classy versus overly busy) and serve up great content posts to go along with the appealing visuals you are sure to enjoy success with your blog.

SEO Best Practices Checklist

You might be new to internet marketing or finally scored a great domain name. Either way you are probably ready to launch a website and give some real thought to a SEO best practices checklist.

Keyword Research
Now that you’ve got your business up and running, and your website is being built (or maybe you’ve already got one online, good job!) you’re ready to begin your keyword research. You may even want to consider keyword research before you construct your website. Often times keyword opportunities will present themselves that will affect how you structure your website hierarchy. To promote your page(s) effectively you need to know what keywords people are searching for relative to your product or service.

There are numerous free tools in the market place like UberSuggest, Google Trends and Google adwords that will make your job infinitely easier at researching and culling through keywords. For more advanced users you may want to pay for tools like Seomoz and Raven Tools (I’m subscribed to both), well worth the money in my opinion. Both tools will help you identify, utilize, and track the performance of your top keywords easily and effectively. The goal is to find high traffic keywords with low competition organically.

You should also check out other resources like Richard Baxter’s SEOgadget which has the most amazing seo tools just using excel and  api calls. I can’t believe his stuff is free. Also be sure to check out  Inbound a brainchild of Rand Fishkin and Dharmesh Shah.

On-page Optimization
Every good SEO best practices checklist needs to include on-page optimization, also called on-page SEO. Essentially this is the technical side of making sure you’re feeding the search engines exactly what they want to see. There are certain items to pay attention to like:

1. H1 tags
2. Title description
3. Canonical Url tag
4. Avoid keyword stuffing
5. Anchor text

The list above is not comprehensive but certainly covers the highlights. When optimizing your website the first item to look at is your content. Use headings in the right places (titles, H1 tags, sub-titles, etc) along with making important keywords you’re promoting on that page bold, italic, or underlined.  Also, link to other content (your own and other authorities on the web) with anchor text.

Be aware that on-page optimization is important but recent grumblings in the SEO world are pointing to Google releasing an “over optimization penalty” to its’ algorthim that will penalize pages going overboard on over optimizing to the point of being spammy. The rule of thumb should always be write great content, write unique content and always write content for your audience first search engines second. Definitely still optimize your site with the previous tips but keep an eye on the optimization penalty update as it unfolds.

Link-Building
Now that you have identified your keywords and optimized your web pages technically along with great content, it’s time to building your links. This part can be a bit time-consuming and you may find the DIY approach too much for you. If this is the case Raven Tools will go a long way here. The link manager in Raven Tools is worth the price of admission alone. If you don’t want to pay for tools, SEOgadget will have a few filler tools.  Always remember great content will create organic link-building all by itself from other blogs and the social media community. It’s best practice to proactively go after links that are relevant to your content as well as generate content that is amazing fodder for inbound links. The popularity of infographics alone is a good example of  organic link-building.

When you are reviewing other SEO best practices checklists remember the popular saying, “All things in moderation, even moderation itself.” Do your research, set up your site the right way, and build your links in an ethical and honest way. If you do this you’ll stay clear of penalties and be able to watch the traffic to your site increase as you continue to promote yourself.

Page Speed Test for SEO

When Google announced Page speed as a an SEO ranking factor on websites I was a bit skeptical about how much weight was really being placed on the “speed” factor. Google has over 200 ranking factors in its’ algorithm and unless your site is deathly slow does it really make a difference?

I decided to put the question to the test and hopefully speed up this site in tandem. In order to get a baseline I ran a page speed test over at Pingdom to find out how Startup Addict stacked up against the rest of the web.

As you can see above SA was approximately 59% faster than all other tested websites. Not an amazing percentage, but probably not bad enough to be penalized by Google’s page speed test ranking factor. Geoff Kenyon posted over at SEOmoz depicting similar datapoints consistent with Pingdom’s calculations. As a rule of thumb you can count on the following:

• If your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
• If your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
• If your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
• If your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

I clearly had my work cut out for me so I downloaded the W3 Total Cache plugin for wordpress and went to work on this site with a pair of plyers and a blow torch. I optimizated the following categories in w3 Total cache

• Page cache
• Minify Javascript and CSS
• Static Images off-loaded to CDN
• Reduced requests

You may have noticed the CDN as part of the W3 cache configuration. I did some research on killer wordpress hosting like Page.ly and various Content Delivery Networks. From a price vs performance standpoint I narrowed it down to Media Temple’s Pro CDN and MaxCDN (NetDNA). This site is already hosted on Media Temple as a dedicated server but I couldn’t belive the affordability of MaxCDN, so in the end opted with there 39 one-time payment plan for over a 1 Terabyte of bandwidth included.  So let’s see how we did

Tested from New York city (like before) 91%!!!

As you can see after major optimization with the W3 Total Cache plugin and moving all my css, js and static image files to MaxCDN, StartupAddict was now faster than 91% of all tested websites on Pingdom and pulling a load time of less than 1 second at 894ms at a very respectable page size of 549.9kb.

Further optimization could take place if I wanted to reduce some of the 66 requests that Startup Addict makes when loading. However, many of the requests are essential such as social media API calls like Google Plus, Like button, Twitter etc. If you decide to go the CDN route you will have to pick and choose your battles on what requests are necessary. I unfortunately had to kill a few wordpress plugins because of the bloated load time on the call requests.

The beauty of using a Content Delivery Network is having all your files pushed out to edge servers on a global network all over the world so user requests in other states and countries become local for the users requesting your content. As you will see from the next two screen shots from Dallas, Texas and Amsterdam across the pond.

Dallas, Texas Page Speed Test:

Amsterdam, Netherlands Page Speed Test:

Startup Addict was still beating out 90% and 86% of all page load times respectively. It’s important to point out that I am also using CloudFlare. This is another CDN that protects and accelerates any website online. CloudFlare also block threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. So the current configuration is W3 Total Cache optimized with MaxCDN and Cloudflare along with dedicated hosting coming from Media Temple.

I did notice an up tick in traffic within the last 10 days which may or may not have anything to do with Google’s page speed test factor. However, the major benefit for optimizing for speed is usability.  The analytics clearly shown a dramatic difference in increased page views and duration on Startup Addict compared to the previous load times of over 2.5 seconds.  That alone was well worth the effort.

If you have speed optimization success stories or questions please leave us a comment below.

Tips for Unique Article Content

We have all heard the cliche “Content is King” but in the age of content marketing unique content is king! Unique article content is the name of the game when it comes to internet marketing and search engine love. The SERPS and Google’s famous algorithm can spot duplicate content a mile away.

It’s still laughable to see people paying money for nifty spinning programs that mangle the English written language in hopes to automate blog posts. Content marketing is a long-term strategy not the “sugar high” spinner programs offer. If your serious about becoming an authority on a topic and building a loyal readership forget about spinners.

“Unique” is more than just a percentage
Unique article content is more than just a percentage score. Yes, this helps you double-check  your content for uniqueness and technical score with the search engines, but this should not be your focus to generating unique content. Look around and see what other people in your niche are writing about and more importantly in what format? Distributing blog articles, whitepapers, ebooks and directories are all forms of distribution for unique article content that will increase your brand awareness and make for long lasting and content.  Try to think of new ways to make your content stand out from the crowd!

Write human-optimized content
In many cases people just generate content that is unique but geared towards search engines instead of people. If your outsourcing article writing services make sure they are work their salt. Your material needs to be created with human readers in mind; write something educational, thought-provoking, or informative to ensure it reads well. Then put in your keyword(s) in a few strategic places. This is one of many tactics our team of bloggers employs for our blog writing services.  This way you can keep the search engines on your trail but still create interesting and unique article content for your readers.

Stick to a niche
Write articles about topics that you are familiar with rather than something that you don’t know much about. If you are writing from experience or possess a wealth of knowledge you will have a better chance of creating truly unique and interesting content than if you were having to do research and pull from various sources around the web. Believe it or not, using the web as a research tool can lead you to create less original content simply because what you have read leaves an impression on your mind that remains as you begin to write your own articles.

Keep things simple
When you are writing unique article content, you might think that the more you put into your article, the more unique it will be. While this is technically true, why create one giant article when you could take your idea and create a series of smaller articles? This takes your original idea and makes it even more compelling by transforming it into multiple pieces of content that will generate more link juice from the search engines and create long-tail content for your readership.

There are many elements to creating truly unique article content for your websites, blogs, and other marketing outlets and hopefully you will keep some of these suggestions in mind.

MEGA Startup Weekend 2012

Last weekend (April 13 – 15) the 2nd annual MEGA Startup Weekend got underway and was a big success in Silicon Valley with technology innovation coming out of the Mircrosoft office in Mountain View, CA. Yes, that is correct…I said the Microsoft office. MEGA Startup Weekend had a great lineup of speakers including Dave McClure from 500 Startups, Scott Case from Startup America, John Cabrera writer for the Warner Brother’s H+: The Digital Series and last but not least Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics.

Photo/image credit © Erica Kawamoto Hsu

There was also a slew of mentors to ensure the entrepreneurs were effectively using their time. You can find a full list of speakers and mentors here. Ahmed Siddiqui was the organizer of the event who also contributed a great post here on Startup Addict last month on how to guarantee a tech startup competition win.

The event focused on three tracks: mobile, gaming and robotics. The winners have a chance to recieve the  following:

• A chance to attend and pitch at DEMO. (We covered the DEMO competition last year)
• An offer for free co-working space at Ground Floor in Santa Clara
• Full scholarships at the Founder’s Institute
• A free software package from Microsoft BizSpark
• One lucky winner will be granted $25,000 in seed funding from Istanta Group

Startup Weekend brought together 28 teams all vying to win their respective categories. People from different walks of life and skillsets like software developers, graphics designers and business professionals had only 54 hours to build a startup that could become a viable commerical application in the real world. Gotta love the Startup Weekend concept.  The judges had their work cut of for them but narrowed it down to the following 3 winners:

Robotics:
Eyes on Demand had the vision to win this category with a device that utilizes sensors, a server and a app to detect objects for the visually impaired.

Photo/image credit © Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Mobile Winner:
Predict Gaze is helping companies better understand their customers through facial recongination on mobile devices

Photo/image credit © Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Gaming Winner:
Stinky Da Vinci competitive photo sharing mobile app game

Photo/image credit © Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Congrats to the winners on a great Mega Startup Weekend!

Why Most Start-Ups Don’t Get Funded

Would you join in and play a game when you didn’t know the rules?  The biggest reason most entrepreneurs don’t get start-up funding is they don’t know or understand the rules of the start-up game.

Imagine … You arrive at a friend’s house and everyone is playing a new game. It looks like fun. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.  So you ask to play too, only no one bothers to fully explain the rules. You just start playing. You lose. You couldn’t figure out the rules fast enough to play effectively against the players who knew what they were doing.

One more question … if it wasn’t a party and the outcome of the game was your career or future, would you just start playing without knowing the rules? When put this way, you wouldn’t, but this is exactly how most entrepreneurs start their new companies. Sometimes, they are fortunate and beginner’s luck shines upon them, but if doesn’t happen often.

The unfortunate truth is only one percent of the business proposals receive funding from angel investors or venture capitalists or private equity.  It’s really a self-filtering process.  Any seasoned investor is like the seasoned game player – they quickly recognize a new player that doesn’t know the rules of the game – and don’t invest.

If you have a brilliant idea for new product or service, and the next thought that flashes into your mind is getting funding, ask yourself if you know the rules of the start-up game.

Every entrepreneur has heard the terms seed stage start-up, early stage start-up, series A, Series B, and on and on.  Ignore all those terms, not many new entrepreneurs understand them and they are meant for the investment community.  Right now, with just a pie in the sky idea, your new business is an experimental start-up.  It’s a business experiment and just like a scientific experiment, you’ll probably need to try a few different approaches or test different hypotheses before you find out what works. And yes, it requires patience to work through the process.

What investors want is simple. They want to maximize profit with the least amount of risk. If they are equity investors, they want to buy into the new company at a low price, and sell it at a higher price. They want to flip their investment as soon as possible. Debt investors want assurances that they’ll get their money back plus a great return.  It’s your responsibility as an entrepreneur to make the would-be investor believe that your start-up can achieve their expectations of return.  So how do you do this?

As much as start-up investors have an image of being care-free and risk takers, they’re not. They are quite conservative.  They want the proposition to be obvious. They want to be able to connect the dots. Above all, what they want is proof of a viable business. The first equation is simple: startup = product + customers + revenue.  Now, most entrepreneurs come from a technical or skilled background. As such, when ‘proof of concept’ is mentioned, they immediately think of building a prototype of the product. But investors want proof of concept of the business.

Now, you may be thinking that you’ve heard of start-ups funded on just an idea. It’s rare and only becomes common during boom times such as the dot-com era – and there’s usually more to it than just the idea. Start-up funds are managed funds, similar to mutual funds. Most venture capitalists and the ilk are fund managers. They are investing other people’s money. They have an obligation to invest the money, not keep it on the sidelines.  In boom times, it’s difficult to place the money in start-ups and so they are willing to fund ideas. We aren’t in boom times now and it’s back to the basics.

As a side point, entrepreneurs should realize that as a funded or venture-backed start-up, they are a portfolio company in the fund – not any different than when a mutual fund holds stocks in Coca-Cola, IBM, Motorola, or General Electric.  A mutual fund manager may sell their holdings in IBM and divert the funds to GE because they believe they will get a better return for their shareholders. IBM may not be a poor performer; it’s just that GE may be a better performer at that moment in time.  Likewise, a start-up fund may shutdown a start-up to divert funds ear marked for later rounds into another portfolio start-up with greater return potential.

Most of the start-ups that get funded know these rules. To get the attention of investors, you first have to prove the simple equation of product, revenue and customers before seeking funding. And once you obtain funding, most entrepreneurs must realize that they now have an obligation to the investors and start-up fund to perform.

Post contributed by Cynthia Kocialski, who has founded three start-ups and has worked with numerous other start-ups and entrepreneurs, and also is the author of the books Startup from the Ground Up and Out of the Classroom Lessons in Success. She can be reached through her website www.cynthiakocialski.com

Equity Crowdfunding legalized via JOBS Act

Earlier today President Barrack Obama signed the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act . The bill is a compliation of all things great for entrepreneurs raising capital. The crowdfunding component of the bill has huge implications right here at Startup Addict as we migrate our platform from a donation based model with rewards to an equity based model where investors can see possible monetary returns on their investment.

When I first launched Startup Addict in 2007 I was so excited to bring this very concept to the masses only to be stimied by current SEC regulation. We became a destination community where startups could garner resources, tips,advice and donation based crowdfunding.  Two years after our launch Kickstarter emerged with a well executed crowdfunding model. To see how far StartupAddict.com was ahead of the crowdfunding curve take a look the Google Insights graph below.

Well I am ecstatic to say my original vision of crowdfunding startups has finally arrived. SA can finally be the haven for entrepreneurial superheros thwarting the forces of mediocrity, where no good idea is left behind.  Now for the first time in the United States the average Joe Investor (non-accredited) can make investments up to $2,000 or 5% of their income (if you make under a$100,000 in income or net worth). They will also be able to raise up to $1 million in a 365 day period.

For those of you unfamiliar with  “accredited investors,” the term is for individuals that have a net worth of over $1 million, primary residence excluded or make more than $200,000 in annual income.

The skeptics of the equity crowdfunding bill are concerned with entrepreneurs dealing with hundreds of inexperienced investors funding startups. A valid point which could potentially be a disclosure and communication nightmare for startups looking for funding. It could also lead to problems in later rounds of funding from institutional or accredited investors. Although the skeptics have valid points I believe the burden of an effective and transparent system needs to be implemented by the crowdfunding portals themselves. We need to have well crafted terms of service and investor tools along with an ecosystem that eliminates hucksters and brings the much needed capital to startups.

The next step is for the SEC to craft guidelines and rules for the law that crowdfunding portals, investors and entrepreneurs can work with. Stay tune because this is going to be a Startup Revolution America. Let’s get busy!

Understanding Social Media in Google Analytics

Image via CrunchBase

When PostRank joined the Google family in July 2011 the combined teams have been working hard at integrating the value of PostRank into a cohesive social reporting feature within Google Analytics.  Once you understand social media in Google Analytics it will help you identify the full value of socially referred traffic and see how the social channel contributes to your goals, conversions, and ecommerce transactions. This is boon for marketers that continue to struggle with ROI and trackability of social media efforts.  We will go five really cool features below but the new reports will help measure some otherwise untrackable user behavior, such as off-site conversations with your content.

1. Overview Report: Social Performance over the short-term and long-term

This report gives a quick look at the impact of user conversions and displays an associated monteary value of social referrals. Google is calling this the “social value visualization” This allows you to deterimine which social channcels are performing well and which ones need work. The dark blue circle is called the “last interaction” and references conversions that happen immediately after a social media referral. As the circles widen in the report dertermines if a user was referred to your site but leaves and converts at a later date.

2. Conversions Report: Goal conversion impacted by social media

Goals are surprising underutilized in Google Analtyics and this is one report that ensures you do not forget to set Goals. This is a great report for determining which pieces of content you published to your social media channels has effectively made traffic increase or users convert. This will allow you to determine if a blog post, newsletter, video post or tweet is showing a user impact.

3. Social Sources:  How visitors from different social media sources behave

 The Social Sources report is all about engagement and conversion metrics for each individual social network. This report will allow you to see how people interactive with your content and if your desired conversion goal is being achieved.

4. Social Plugins: Sharable content

 The Social Plugin report indicates which content on your site is receiving the most engagement and which social buttons are the most successful.  If you are using a platform like wordpress you have probably already figured out which buttons are succeeding but you may not know for which piece of content specifically. This will allow you to have both in an easy tab within Google Analytics. 

Finding out the popularity of your content with your visitors and specifically what type is paramount in testing different layouts of social sharing buttons.

affiliate marketing success

Making money from your website or blog through affiliate marketing can seem daunting at first but is a fully achievable goal. While some articles may make you feel as though you’re late to the party that’s not the case at all. Through carefully curated ads and good content marketing, you will able to celebrate your affiliate marketing success.

So let’s jump in and consider these 5 steps: 

1. Good Content. In order to make money through affiliate marketing, you first need an audience. Once you have a steady flow of new or repeat readers that are eager to see your daily postings or content updates, you’ll be able to attract better affiliate partners and products to sell. You can achieve good content through a website, blog, newsletter and groups on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Identifying your channels to build good organic content is your first goal and integrating relevant affiliate partners will benefit your audience. This is a win/win/win, your audience is being served relevant product and services, your affiliate partner makes a sale and you get paid. There is a fine line between being too spammy and being relevant so focus on your audience with good content.

2. Promotion. Promote your product or service in your ads to incite readers to click through. With some affiliate marketing programs, you only make money when someone clicks on your ad, goes to the promoted site and makes a purchase. Writing posts or creating content to subtly promote what’s reflected in your sidebar will give your readers some incentive to follow through and actually buy something from your affiliated sites. The result? More money in your pocket. Be sure you abide by the FTC guidelines and disclosures about how your website or blog makes money.

3. Pick your Affiliates. Choose your affiliates wisely. This sounds like common sense, but it needs to be said. For example, if your blog is all about your devotion to your doll collection, the last things that you want to advertise are guns. Well, you could, if you wanted to, but your success rate would be extremely low. Stick to what you know and love, and view your affiliate marketing partners as extensions of both your personality and your website. Your readers are there because of you; sell them “parts” of yourself and you’ll be successful.

4. A/B Testing. Use more than one type of ad and more than one type of affiliate program. While you don’t want to turn your site into one giant blinking pop-up ad, by diversifying the programs that you participate in and the types of ads that you adorn your site with, you have a better chance of creating sales. Some of your readers absolutely will not click on a sidebar ad, but those same readers may fall for a link placed within a blog entry or other copy. The same goes for the various affiliate programs – each one may offer different incentives, so it’s wise to sign up with two or three of them.

5. Be your own affiliate. Becoming your own affiliate may sound a little crazy but spending a little money (after initial success of course) in order to make some may be necessary. If you decide to go with a prepacked solution as opposed to a custom built program be sure to pick the right technology. The software should have easy link building & tracking capabilities for your product or service. Your goal is to build affiliate sales not figure out how to build your affiliate program. Lastly, be sure to offer great rewards for all your hard working affiliates.

While it will take some time to achieve affiliate marketing success, these 5 steps will hopefully give you some food for thought.

How to Guarantee a Tech Startup Competition Win

As a self-proclaimed “startup junkie,” I’ve been to just about every major tech conference that hosts their own unique version of a “startup competition.”  TechCrunch, has “Disrupt Winner,” while VentureBeat’s “MobileBeat” has the Tesla Award (no, you don’t win a car), and Web 2.0 has the “Startup Showcase” winner.  For many entrepreneurs, being accepted to participate in one of these competitions is a dream come true, and they often arrive with hopes of winning the top prize, garnering media attention, and catching the eye of an investor who will swoop in and write them a 10 million dollar check.

Pinch me.  Back to reality.

Having been invited to participate in many of these conferences over the past few years myself, I have come to the [hard and fast] realization that certain “types” of startup concepts always do well, while others just don’t. The key thing to consider is that these are tech conferences, so you should have something inherently “techie”.  The majority of the audience members are engineers; or (my personal favorite) marketing and sales professionals pretending to be engineers.

From my observations, stemming from the times I haven’t made a “splash”, here are 3 concepts that typically do well at tech conference startup competitions:

1. Programming made easy

Last year’s Web 2.0 Launchpad audience choice winner was RhoMobile, which essentially is a platform where you code once using the Rhodes framework, and you can deploy native apps to Blackberry, iPhone, and Android.  Similarly, Roar Engine, won the top prize at MobileBeat 2011 in San Francisco, where they showcased how to build a social game in 4 minutes that could be deployed on the web and multiple mobile platforms.  Many of these “build once, deploy many” tools do really well because most tech conferences attract engineers and “sales guys” looking for ways to cut down on programming time while getting on as many platforms as possible.

2. Mashups

A mashup is something that brings a variety of different services together.  For example, the audience choice winner at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York was Social Passport: a platform that basically combines your Facebook, Twitter, Four Square and other social media accounts.  Another example of this is Shaker, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.  Shaker is part mashup, part second life, part turntable.fm – pulled together using your Facebook profile. These ideas do well because people can easily relate to it, and because the vast majority of people use one or more of these “mashed together” tools.

3. Fancy algorithms

Through statistical analysis and some logic, your product is able to tell you something interesting based on some simple inputs from your users.  Elect Next, one of the Web 2.0 Startup Showcase winners in New York does just this.  Based on information you provide about your location, stand on taxes, healthcare, foreign policy to the Elect Next website, it will help you choose the right the right political candidate. Similarly, the winner of the MobileBeat crowd favorite back in 2008 was AdMob (later acquired by Google for $750 Million) which uses an algorithm to determine the best ad placement in mobile apps.  These ideas do really well because it because they simplify the decision making process.

Just for “fun” here are a few concepts that are sure not-to-win, so avoid these if you’re truly hell bent on snagging that coveted first prize:

1. Anything related to health or education
2. Concepts that claim to be the next Facebook
3. Concepts that don’t have a social component: social media, social networking, social innovation, social good

Don’t be discouraged based on my “qualitative not quantitative” data analysis. If you don’t fall into the 3 categories previously listed you can still compete, and you may get selected to present, but chances are much smaller at winning the top prize.

Keep in mind, there are plenty of “startup success stories” that don’t revolve around winning a startup competition. For example, in 2008 VentureBeat held its first MobileBeat Startup Tesla Award.  The audience choice was AdMob, which was acquired for $750 Million by Google, but one of the “losers” was Greystripe, which also does in-app Ads.  Subsequently, Greystripe was acquired in April 2011 for $75 Million.

In the end, these competitions don’t necessarily have anything to do with the future success of your company – they are merely one more opportunity to practice your pitch, build mindshare, and gain insights into how to make your concept even better!

Post contributed by Ahmed Siddiqui, who coordinates the Startup Weekend events in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also founder of Go Go Mongo!, a game company that inspires kids to eat healthier.  He can be reached through twitter: @siddiquiahmed