Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to best take advantage of these events. Many walk around the room or stand in a corner hoping someone will notice their clever t-shirt and strike up a conversation.

After a few events, I realized that it’s not possible to go to all of them and it’s definitely not a productive activity if you don’t have clear, concise goals for each event. If you’re in gaming, go to gaming events. If you’re in mobile, go to mobile events. You’ll run out of gas quickly if you try to hit them all.

There are many tips on “working the room” and making yourself stand out, but I’ll go into just one tactic I use to make the event work for me:

Do your research.

1-2 days before an event, I visit the site and lookup the attendee list. These are usually made public on Eventbrite and Meetup, but you can also leverage Plancast to see if anyone’s marked their attendance. Browse through the list and jot down 10-20 people that you’re interested in meeting and then track them down online. Most people in SF have some social presence – email, twitter, facebook, etc. Send them a message introducing yourself, letting them know you’ll be at the event, and that you’d like a moment to introduce yourself in person. Ask where you can find them and let them know how they can identify you (red shirt, jeans, black-rimmed glasses, etc).

I average about a 50% response rate on these notes and I walk in with 5-10 people that I’m ready to chat with. This is a huge advantage at a busy event – it both helps you break the ice, giving you more confidence in general, and gives you something to work towards while you’re there.

If you don’t get a chance to meet everyone you planned to, don’t worry – you now have a reason to follow up with them afterwards with notes.

Bullshit. I’m just greedy.

The most successful people always share digestible bits of information. This blog is a personal effort to change my greedy habits. Secrets are coming…

Most recently, we’ve been trying to get intros to the investment community to learn more about investors’ thoughts, processes, investment criteria, trends, and more generally, the SV ecosystem mentality. We read investor blogs regularly (Josh Kopelman, Paul Kedrosky, Jeff Clavier, Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Mark Suster, Bryce Roberts, and many more), but there’s only so much insight that can be gained from these generalized thoughts.

I’ve been asking some of my new friends to make introductions to investors they know. Because we’re working on a new product and are getting ready to start pitching soon, I included a short summary of our new concept in the request email thinking that some context would be helpful. Big mistake. Essentially, what I did was frame the introduction in the context of “these guys are looking for money”, which is partly true, but that’s not why I want the intro. The framing should have been “hey, these guys are smart and doing great work, you should sit down with them”.

Now, my friends are waiting on me to send them our pitch deck so they can forward it to their investor contacts. Here’s the problem: investors don’t make decisions based on a deck. They make the final decision based on the entrepreneurs. A deck does not convey passion, expertise, and dedication – the crucial elements that get people excited. In addition, you’re not able to amply describe our business or the space we’re in. Most investors don’t understand the SMS industry and you don’t have the 6 years’ experience that we do to appropriately address their comments/concerns or accurately describe the trends in the market.

More importantly, cash is not why I want the introduction. I want to network with other smart folks in the area – speak to them about their goals, aspirations, history, and experience. I want to get to know them and why they’ve made the decisions that they have. I want to send them deals if I come across something they might be interested in, and, if I like them, invite them to one of the many dinner and cocktail parties we host.

Mark Suster makes a good point in Invest in Lines, not Dots, where he talks about finding trends in an entrepreneur’s journey. The only way to gather enough data to forecast a trend is to meet and speak with the entrepreneur – plot the dots that make up trends.

Please, make intros based on your personal thoughts of me, not my deck. If you don’t feel comfortable making an intro, you shouldn’t need our deck anyway. For all you know, you might be ending a great relationship before it has a chance to start.

Take a look at this car:

Initial reactions/assumptions:

• Clean
• Maintained
• Well taken care of

Now look at this car:

Yes, it’s the same car. There’s no interior or engine… The car starts and drives, but it sputters around and isn’t really put together all that well.

Here’s my point — you can have a car that looks amazing with a brand new paint job and all the right fixin’s, but if the guts aren’t up to par, you’re going to be driving down the highway at 40 MPH.

Now think of the internet as a highway – the information super highway – and your website is the car racing down it.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site is or how many features it has or how many modules you have installed. If the guts don’t do what they’re supposed to, you’re going to be stuck in 2^nd gear.

Think of an add-on/feature/module/widget as an aftermarket part on a car. You can have dozens of them and they all do neat tricks and intrigue passer-byers. But add enough of them and your webiste starts looking like this:

You’ve got your massive spoiler, widebody modification, and Z rated tires to help you achieve the optimimum aerodynamic downforce and stability at 200+ MPH.

But under the hood you have a standard 4 cylinder SOHC engine with a dirty air filter, knocking valves, and standard oil leaking from from the engine gaskets. How fast is that going to get you?

It is crucial that the website guts are up to par with the rest of the modifications. It is only the simultaneous optimization of these elements that will ensure optimum performance.

How the guts of your site affect SEO

Any car enthusiast will tell you to fix everything that is wrong with the car before you start modifying it. All the add-ons in the world will not make the guts perform any better.

Most people don’t understand much about cars and only see the exterior. They don’t know what to look for when they pop the hood. But when someone that knows what they’re doing (mechanics, dealers, etc.) look at a car, there are distinctive characteristics that they know to look for that will tell them more about a car in 10 seconds than if an inexperienced individual were look over it for 10 minutes.

Search engines are mechanics. While everyone else only sees the shiny exterior, search engine spiders will get their hands dirty by pulling apart your website piece by piece. Search engine algorithms are evolving daily and technology has become advanced enough that search engines can dissect a site at speeds and levels lightyears beyond humans.

What this means is that your site has to be architecturally sound before you start spending money on all the additional widgets and features. The database interaction and code architecture must be stable and functioning at optimal performance. There can be no broken links or images. The servers where you host your site should be up to date with the latest technology and the fastest and redudant throughput connections.

Initial SEO Steps – Tools and Resources

Here’s a quick overview and what I recommend as being the very first steps of SEO – web development optimization and the free tools that correspond to each:

Please Note: as with any automated tool, there may be errors in each of the below resources, but remember that these are only guidelines to help steer you in the right direction. Take the results of these tools with a grain of salt and be sure to consult with a professional.

• No errors in HTML validation
  • http://validator.w3.org/
• No errors in CSS validation
  • http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
• 301 redirects set up
  • Either www or no-www, pick one, otherwise search engines might see it as different sites/duplicate content
  • http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm
• Page file size no more than 150 KB=153,600 bytes (before images, CSS and other attachments)
  • http://webpositionadvisor.com/tools/page_size_cheker.php
• No more than 100 unique links per page & no broken links
  • http://validator.w3.org/checklink
• No more than 4 levels deep in URL
  • Bad Example: http://www.sample.com/topic/subtopic/local/sublocal/danny/car/
  • Good Example:http://www.sample.com/topic/danny/car/
• Robots.txt set up
  • http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360
• No duplicate content
  • http://www.copyscape.com/
• HTTP headers
  • http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what SEO is all about. After the above page architecture and foundation has been established, think of SEO like this — you now have a Ferrari of a website, but it’s sitting in your driveway – who’s going to see your beautiful car?

The rest of SEO takes your ferrari out of your driveway:

And puts it front of the people that actually care to see it (your target audience):

Let me know if you have any questions and good luck with your site!