This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they’re starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

Sponsor

Discuss

If you ever thought startup life would be about champagne toasts and million dollar term sheets then you need to get back in your time machine and set the dial for the nineties. If there’s one thing we learned in the latter half of this decade, it’s discipline. To say that it was a tough year, would be an understatement. But those of us who stayed lean will be back for 2010. While the below concepts weren’t invented this year, they certainly hit their stride in 2009.

Sponsor

1. Outsourced Labor: Rather than hiring onsite staff, more companies flocked to services like Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower to fulfill simple tasks. Companies listed their jobs and thankfully, a temporary workforce was there to get it done.

2. Cloud Scalability: Rather than paying for a slew of dedicated servers, startups took advantage of elastic workload tools like Amazon Web Services and Heroku. These services kept our site running during huge traffic spikes, but they ensured we weren’t burning cash in the downtime.

3. Web-Based Project Services: Google Apps made huge headway in 2009 as companies migrated from Microsoft to the cloud. Many startups began using real-time cloud collaboration tools to organize their projects, while others looked to customer service sites like Get Satisfaction and Zendesk to manage complaints.

4. Monetization: While consumers will settle for free products, premium services demand a certain level of competence. According to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, “the most intimate transaction between people is money”. In other words, if you put a price on your product and users paid it, you got your feedback. From paid iPhone apps to subscription music services, businesses in 2009 got the feedback they needed to find out if their products made the cut with consumers.

5. The New PR: From soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his Twitter empire to fast talking Gary Vaynerchuk and his wine podcasts, startup leaders opened the kimono and engaged with stakeholders. Communities don’t get built on autopilot or by a ghostwriting marketing intern. To grow social capital, we learned that we need to put ourselves out there (flaws and all) and treat our audience members like the intelligent beings they are.

Thanks for reading ReadWriteStart in 2009. We look forward to a great 2010 with you and would like to wish you a Happy New Year.

Photo Credit: Windell H. Oskay, Optical Illusion

Discuss

Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener. What use can Twiitter be for link building? Link building Eric Ward says the site is perfect for finding niche experts.

It’s not about huge amounts of followers or traffic spikes. You can get that kind of traffic from Digg. But the advantage of Twitter, says Ward, is that people specific to an industry are out there, findable on Twitter.

So if you specialize in little plastic doohickeys they put on shoestrings, irrelevant traffic is not what you’re after. At Search Engine Land, Ward explains how a message that begins as a tweet ends up as a link from a highly trusted website:

A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

 

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.

What’s even better about that is that earned link was a free, organic one, the best kind. No manipulation, no buying, no trading. And that one very trusted link is likely to outweigh many links (however they’re gotten) from not-so-trusted websites.

Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener. What use can Twiitter be for link building? Link building Eric Ward says the site is perfect for finding niche experts.

It’s not about huge amounts of followers or traffic spikes. You can get that kind of traffic from Digg. But the advantage of Twitter, says Ward, is that people specific to an industry are out there, findable on Twitter.

So if you specialize in little plastic doohickeys they put on shoestrings, irrelevant traffic is not what you’re after. At Search Engine Land, Ward explains how a message that begins as a tweet ends up as a link from a highly trusted website:

A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

 

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.

What’s even better about that is that earned link was a free, organic one, the best kind. No manipulation, no buying, no trading. And that one very trusted link is likely to outweigh many links (however they’re gotten) from not-so-trusted websites.

Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener. What use can Twiitter be for link building? Link building Eric Ward says the site is perfect for finding niche experts.

It’s not about huge amounts of followers or traffic spikes. You can get that kind of traffic from Digg. But the advantage of Twitter, says Ward, is that people specific to an industry are out there, findable on Twitter.

So if you specialize in little plastic doohickeys they put on shoestrings, irrelevant traffic is not what you’re after. At Search Engine Land, Ward explains how a message that begins as a tweet ends up as a link from a highly trusted website:

A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

 

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.

What’s even better about that is that earned link was a free, organic one, the best kind. No manipulation, no buying, no trading. And that one very trusted link is likely to outweigh many links (however they’re gotten) from not-so-trusted websites.