OnStartups

For those of you that have not heard yet, yesterday (February 24^th) was the big kick-off for Entrepreneurship Week USA.

I had not really heard about this event before, but it has been brought up on a number of blogs that I read, so I thought I’d go check it out.  As a passionate, but introverted advocate of entrepreneurship, I thought I’d look into the event and what it means.

Please note that the below observations are not a criticism of the organizers or sponsors of the event.  From what I can tell, this is a great event and many people are working hard to promote what is an important concept.

Thoughts On Entrepreneurship Week USA

1. Cross-Country Promotion:  Seems that there are some related activities and events going on elsewhere (like Entrepreneurship Week India).  Given that entrepreneurship is a world-wide phenomenon, this is not surprising.  However, I don’t see any “cross promotion” going on between the USA and other sites.  Seems that it would have been useful to at least have a page on each of the independent sites called “Entrepreneurship Week Around The World” which pointed to the other sites.

2. Online Community:  They’ve done a great thing by making an online community available for those interested in the event (and interacting with fellow entrepreneurs).  This is cool.  Seems they’ve had 500+ people signup for the community as of this writing.  Not bad.  It’s hard to build an active community.

3. Mediocre SEO (Search Engine Optimization):  I ran the website entrepreneurshipweekusa.com through the Website Grader tool.  It reported a number of issues with the site which could be easily fixed.  But the ones that leaped out at me are:  ineffective use of meta-keywords (too many of them, most of which are “fluff”).  Meta-keywords aren’t that widely used, but if you’re going to use them, might as well do it right.  Also, proper 301 redirects have not been defined.  Another problem is that the main site automatically redirects to a different URL.  This fragments some of their inbound links as some users will just cut-paste the “final” URL in for their home page when linking to them.  Others (like me) will link to the primary domain.  This fragments their link-love and reduces SEO.

4. No RSS Feed:  There’s no RSS feed for the site.  Not even on the newsroom page.  It would be really useful to be able to subscribe and get updates on things that are going on around the country related to the event.  If nothing else, the organizers would likely get some value out of it themselves.  Bonus points if they could have setup custom feeds per state (like Massachusetts).  They already have a database, and a feature on their website that shows events by State, so this wouldn’t have been that hard.

5. No Transparent Pricing For Sponsorship:  They have some really big-name sponsors, but for them to attract a smaller pool of sponsors on the lower-end (which couldn’t hurt), they should have disclosed the pricing for sponsorship.  In this day and age, few people like me will make the effort to actually inquire about the approximate price range of a sponsorship.  They tell you about the various tiers of sponsorship in a PDF file (platinum, gold, silver, bronze), but don’t tell you what it costs.  I think they missed an opportunity here.

In any case, congratulations to everyone this putting so much hard work into the event.  Happy Entrepreneurship Week!