Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?
And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the actual email I sent out to the members of our meetup:
Video of Rand Fishkin's presentation, Gaining Traction: Inbound Marketing for Startups is live. One of the best presentations I've been at in a long time. I'll be watching it a couple of times.
Slides of the presentation are here.
I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up?
I'd love to give Rand and SEOMoz.org some press, to boost their sales. He's an amazing guy, and SEOMoz is killer.
Help H&F help you...
The more views we get on those videos, the BizSpark team prove to their bosses that's it's worth buying all of you pizza and beer and wine, and renting out the "Fancy Pants" auditorium for us. It costs them about $20k every time we host an event there. ( Laura and I don't get anything out of it. )
So, if you'd like us to host more of those presentations...
Facebookify, Tweetify, Quorify, social newsif-y, etc...
Thanks
And, for helping out with that, you get:
Two free months of SEOMoz.
Seriously, it kicks ass. Try it out on your site.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Poorly worded, and I apologize for the confusion. See my other reply...
"I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up? ....
And, for helping out with that, you get:
Two free months of SEOMoz."
Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email.
That's not at _all_ what I meant, and I didn't mean to game the system at all. I apologize about the confusion.
For various reasons, I'm not really active on this community any more. So, I asked H&F members if they would be kind enough to do if for me.
I asked H&F members to submit and upvote, tweet, like and Google Plus to give Rand some press.
Rand flew down to SV on his own dime to talk to our H&F members for free. He didn't ask us to promote SEOMoz, and never required anything out of us. He was truly one of the most delightful, genuine and kind speakers that we've had at H&F. I'm more than happy to do whatever I can to help him and his company out.
BizSpark sponsored the event by buying everyone pizza and beer. H&F doesn't get a dime out of this. Hackers & Founders is completely boot strapped ourselves, and do a lot of this for love of the game. And, we're pursuing becoming a for benefit corporation.
When Rand and I first started talking, about speaking to our people a few months ago. I arranged for SEOMoz to give H&F members two free months of SEOMoz for free. I emailed that offer to our people last month, but no one signed up. I figured that after Rand spoke, people would be a bit more interested in trying the SEOMoz service out.
I emailed the link to the free trial out with the link to the video to our Meetup, because I'd received about 20 emails asking for both the video as well as the free trial in the past 24 hours.
I apologize if people thought that I was trying to game the system. I'm not. I'm trying to give a friend, and a great entrepreneur a boost. He helped out community out a great deal. His writing has helped me out a great deal in the past.
And, for what it's worth, SEOMOz has an affiliate program. If people sign up for a one month trial, the referrers get $25. It's not really worth that effort for me, and that's not what H&F does. So, we chose to waive the affiliate fee and SEOMoz chipped in the extra month to help everybody out.
Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote) probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz as a prize for the upvote.
