Adam McFarland » Essays

New Essay: SEO & Web Marketing For New Web Ventures

Adam McFarland — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:50:06 +0000

While we’re in the process of consolidating our sites, I decided to do something I’ve long been intending to do: put the final nail in the coffin of Faceup-Sites and create an essay to replace the downloadable e-book that was what remained of the site. That e-book was very exhaustive and had some really good information. The problem was that I hadn’t updated it since July of 2008, and in the web world that’s an eternity.

So I re-wrote it to match the style of the Web Design & Development for Business essay: a quick read that is in a format that’s hopefully easy for people of any level to understand…and is also easy for me to update. I’ve updated that web development essay countless times already with little things here and there, and it takes only a few seconds compared to the total pain of updating a downloadable PDF e-book. Plus now it’s available to everyone to read and reference instead of requiring a form to be filled out to download.

Anyway, the essay is called SEO & Web Marketing For New Web Ventures. Every page of Faceup-Sites.com now redirects to the essay. Check it out and let me know what you guys think and if there’s anything I missed or should improve. Here’s the table of contents:

An Essay on an Essay on Startups

Adam McFarland — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:04:51 +0000

I recently read Paul Graham’s essay entitled What Startups Are Really Like and found it to be so true that I decided to base my second essay off of his essay. An essay about an essay! Below is an excerpt. As always, I welcome as much feedback as you’re willing to give. Happy Holidays everyone!

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, a technology incubator for early stage businesses, surveyed over 100 of his founders to try to determine what surprised them about running a business. The result is a fascinating essay that I suggest every aspiring entrepreneur read. In fact, it’s so good that I decided to comment myself on each of the patterns that Graham noticed. I also included some of my favorite quotes from the essay – things that I just couldn’t say any better myself. The first of which comes from Graham:

When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don’t seem to get how different it is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what? Once you phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Everyone’s model of work is a job. It’s completely pervasive. Even if you’ve never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you’ve met. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises.

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So You Want to Learn How to Program?

Adam McFarland — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:57:58 +0000

When I guest lectured at James Madison a few weeks back I was asked a couple of questions from students interested in learning how to program. I get those questions in various forms all the time. I decided to write a post about how I’d recommend going from nothing to programming a real live web site that can make you money. Well, that “post” became quite lengthy and I decided to start a new section on the blog. You’ll notice an “Essays” tab on the top nav now. I’ll probably put two types of posts in that section – how-to type of guides like this one that I’ll continuously update and maintain over time, and generic essays about entrepreneurship topics that have nothing to do with my current happenings. Essentially, any post that I plan on keeping relevant at all times will now become an “essay”.

The first such essay is Web Design & Development for Business. The table of contents is as follows:

Let me know what you guys think. Is there anything that you think I should add? Do you think this will be helpful for aspiring young entrepreneurs? Too long? Too short?

I think the next one I’ll tackle will be a re-write of the SEO/Web Marketing e-Book available for download on Faceup-Sites. That’s a bit out of date. Plus I’d like to open it up for everyone to read without a download. Then I can just take that entire site down and redirect it all to the article.