| 10 most practical blogs for entrepreneurs |
| Wow, Scott Allen included me in the list of the 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs. Cool. I've better endeavor to match up to the honor. Anyway, it is a fine list:
[ Articles | 26 Oct 2005 @ 02:07 | 469 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Backward Mapping |
From the excellent list of Idea Generation Methods:This highly effective method is missing from most textbooks on problem solving. Yep, I know it well from NLP. That's an effective method. Imagine you're already there, and then look back at how you did it. [ Articles | 26 Oct 2005 @ 01:59 | 434 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Google has been a bit on my mind lately. You know, first, of course, because one of my main sites, Opentopia disappeared without a trace from Google's index a couple of months ago, which opened my eyes to how fragile it is to base any online income on the search engine position of any one particular site. And that cost me a chunk of lost income during that time.
But then, weirdly, surprisingly, somebody contacted me from Google to offer me a job. I'm sure it had nothing to do with my search engine trouble, but just a weird coincidence. The head hunter had afterall found my resume in Google. Luckily it is on a different site. I wasn't really looking for a job, but working for Google sounds somewhat intriguing, so I went along with the process. And over the last month I've had some long phone interviews with various Google people, gone through their tests, etc., all of which seemed to go fine. But, then, back to my search engine trouble. I finally did some better research on what happened. It turned out I was one of the victims of what some people called "The July 28th Massacre". It turned out that a great number of directory sites got wiped out by Google on the same day. They changed something in their algorithms, which suddenly made directories look very bad. You know, sites with lots of outgoing links, or sites that have lots of stuff that is copied from other sites. So, a lot of those sites either were banned from Google, or went to PageRank 0. Most of them still have PageRank zero. A number of e-mails through the proper channels of contacting Google had given no result for me. I didn't even have a PageRank, just altogether banned. I had gotten a response several times, and were several times told that they would pass it on to the engineering department. You know, incidentally, the same department that somebody else wanted to recruit me for. Bizarre. Now, on the job, today they sent me a very brief e-mail, thanking me for my interest in Google, but, sorry, there doesn't seem to be a fit. Doesn't seem based on the tests, which I believe I aced, but maybe the actual decision maker didn't like my background, or my picture, or something. No big deal, it was interesting to talk with them, and find out a bit about how they work. So, this afternoon my wife then says: "If they aren't gonna give you a job, they should at least restore your site". Well, yeah, that would be nice, but I couldn't quite see how I was in a position to tell "them" that, with any kind of professionalism in place, so I told her that was impossible. But, magic wonder, an hour later I notice that my traffic stats to one of my servers suddenly doubled. And when I went and checked Opentopia, indeed, it suddenly was to be found in Google again. I'm not taking anything for granted any longer, though. Diversification would probably be a good strategy. [ Articles | 7 Oct 2005 @ 15:03 | 410 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Big money blogging |
 Darren Rowse is doing it again. Or, rather, he didn't stop doing it. Here he talks about how well he's doing with ads from Chitika eMiniMalls. Together with Google AdSense he's making more than $1,000 per day, just from ads on his blogs. He has a bunch of product-related blogs, and, well, he's busy writing in them. But this is very impressive of course. I better keep paying attention.[ Articles | 6 Oct 2005 @ 21:48 | 394 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| The Million Dollar Homepage |
 When I first saw it, I thought, Damn, I should've thought of that. It is one of those things that probably only will work once, if at all. Here it is. A student got the bright idea to finance his studies by a web business. The idea he got was to make one page, with one million pixels of advertising space, and sell it for a dollar per pixel. It is crazy, but just so bold and crazy it might work. He sells minimum a little 10x10 square, for 100 dollars. That's really very small and you can't put much there. But you might find a good spot, or you might give it a bright color, and some people might click on it. By why on earth would anybody buy such a little square on some scheming student's webpage? Well, when I first saw the page, there wasn't all that much on it, but quite remarkably he had managed to sell $15,000 worth of those ads. At first he had just convinced a few friends to do it, to prime the pump. But then he quickly got a lot of PR, because everybody would mention this crazy idea, and more people jumped onboard. And, now, when I just looked at it again after a few weeks, I was shocked. He has today sold $288,000 worth of those pixels, and the screen (my screen at least) is almost filled with ads. Some of them are big. And, well, loads and loads of people are looking at that page now, so suddenly those advertising dollars are actually quite cheap. I bet some of those sites are getting a good deal more traffic out of this than if they had just bought regular banner ads. And, damn, that guy is going to end up a millionaire. From this simple idea that I or a zillion other people could have implemented in an evening just as well as he could. Or better. He isn't very charismatic or anything, his copy writing isn't great, his arguments for going for this were kind of dumb. But he did it, so he rules. That should be an inspiring example of how anybody can do well in Internet business. Just get the right idea, and if it is original, just go and do it, even if it might seem a little dumb. [ Articles | 6 Oct 2005 @ 21:30 | 401 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Doing business from the bottom up |
A Salon article has some insight into new ways of doing business, if one is in software development. It talks about the people behind 37 Signals, which makes Basecamp, a project management system, and Backpack, a personal organizer. Both of which were developed really quickly, but have quite a dedicated following. Jason Fried who started the company has a certain philosophy on how to do things, which the author of the article compares to an American Indian principle of "using all parts of the buffalo".Only five people work there. There's no ad-sales department, no marketing team, no H.R. department, no tech support crew (Fried handles all customer questions himself), and no receptionist (there is an office in Chicago, but only Fried and another employee, Ryan Singer, work there; the other three people are in Utah, New York and Denmark). That's what I mean about using every part of the buffalo. The company created all it did in a short time with very little start-up money -- Fried eschews venture capitalists -- and other resources. Instead, it put a premium on its experience, constantly looking for creative new ways to spin what it learned on one project into another one. The M.O. has paid off. Today, 37 Signals owes no money to early investors. Because the company is a private firm, its exact financials are unclear. But the picture is appealing. First of all, the company makes money from its Web applications. To use Basecamp, customers pay a monthly fee of either $24, $49 or $99, depending on the number of projects they manage, and $19 a month for Backpack (there are free versions as well). The firm also does occasional Web design projects and hosts design conferences. Fried says the company is making a profit.I can certainly learn something from those guys. I develop software too, but tend to often be too ambitious and try do everything at once, and spend months developing complex software that ends up not quite being released and used. Whereas in comparison, 37 Signals did the initial Basecamp in 5 weeks, and released it with rather few features. But the features that were there worked really well, and they quickly brought out new updates. [ Articles | 18 Aug 2005 @ 11:04 | 501 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Google and non-existence. |
 Google suddenly dropped my Opentopia website. Which makes me realize how fragile it is to base an online business on good Google placement. The site had been well indexed by Google, and quite a bit of traffic came from there, until, suddenly, the 1st of August it completely disappeared from the index. According to Google, opentopia doesn't exist at all. Now, that's normally when one has done something bad. Like, if I'm using some "black" search engine optimization techniques. Like fake webpages or bogus keywords. Or when one associates too closely with bogus link farms. I don't think I'm doing any such thing. But, apparently, Googles's spider seems to have concluded so.
The site had gotten up to bringing in a little more than $1000 per month from Google AdSense the last couple of months. A little more than $30 per day on the average. And, well, they didn't drop me from that, but the traffic went down right away, so now it is only around $5 per day. My guess is that they somehow have choked on the large number of pages, so I will produce a SiteMap for them, which hopefully will make a difference. There is really no reliable recourse, so one can not be sure one ever gets their attention. It has happened to me once before with another site. I filled in their form, which just produced an automatic answer. Then I wrote an e-mail in response to that. I had heard that the best of way of doing it is to briefly explain that one possibly might have had some problems in the past, but one has taken specific steps to solve the ones one is aware of, and would they please take another look. After a couple of weeks I actually got a human answer. And the site re-appeared the next time the month changed. So, it is possible. They don't explain in either case what the problem is or was. They just say they will pass it on to "engineering" to re-evaluate. Anyway, the possibility of this happening speaks for diversification. Don't put everything on one domain. That domain might become devaluated in an instant. Better to have several. [ Articles | 13 Aug 2005 @ 13:06 | 448 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Blogging while you go bankrupt |
| Via BoingBoing. Read the blog of iFullFill. It is the CEO of an internet fulfillment company, blogging away about running a business in a fun and upbeat way. Until, suddenly, he blogs about how the company has failed, and they're closing, and how the customers might want their stuff back, etc. It is interesting both in how he doesn't mention anything about the company failing, before, well, it already failed. Until the last second, everything is rosey. But it is also interesting in that after that point he uses the blog as a main contact point with his former customers. Telling them what is going on, where else they might want to take their business, etc. It isn't good that he didn't give his customers any notice or warning, but, well, he tries to explain that too. He has comments turned on, and clearly his former customers are pissed. But I'd say he scores a few points for having the guts to blog it. [ Articles | 12 Aug 2005 @ 21:48 | 396 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Think Big |
Curt Rosengren mentions the Think Big Manifesto. Excellent stuff. These are the main headlines: 1. Have A Mad Passionate Love Affair With Yourself Go read the details too, for explanation. [ Articles | 9 Aug 2005 @ 13:27 | 422 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| MLM |
| When I started this blog, one reason I kept it separate from my main blog was that I would be exploring subjects I normally found a bit distasteful, like MLM, and I thought that maybe I'd find that they could work for me, if I tried them on for size. Or maybe not, but at least I wanted to look at that in a separate space.
But, as it is, I pretty much still think that all MLM programs I've run into are pretty stupid. Oh, there's lots of potential for making money, if one really gets into it, gets really excited about it, and one passes that excitement on to a lot of other people. But the truth of the matter is usually that one gets people into buying some products that aren't really the best value around, in order to finance that their upline gets a nice cut of it. I can imagine programs that would be a win-win all around, but so far I haven't really seen any. My feeling about it is illustrated by a recent experience. A gentleman came by our house to do a presentation. A good friend had recommended him as somebody who had some special insight on financial matters. And, at first, he made quite an impression on us. A South-African fellow who was impeccably dressed and who'd had a very interesting life, living all over the world, and who obviously had gathered some wisdom. At first he had the air of being some kind of multi-millionaire who had developed some kind of secret effortless wisdom which he's now willing to share. I was prepared for something really impressive, and he insisted strongly that what he had to present was something different from what we might know. But gradually the picture changed. He pulled out some charts, explaining how some people live by having a job working for others, some people work hard as independents, and a small percentage have figured out how to make others work for them, living off of residual income. I've seen charts like that before, so I could sort of guess where it probably was going. Which was sort of downhill. Essentially he wanted to sign us up for Amway. Amway has a lot of products for sale, and one pays for a monthly membership, and one gets percentages from people one signs up, and they're better if one buys more oneself, etc. And, actually, we knew about Amway. It is generally good, high quality products. They're just too expensive, marked up in order to make room for the MLM percentages. But, as usual, there would be lots of little points of persuasion one would use to get around that. "Yes, that laundry detergent costs 50% more than what you normally buy, but it is so concentrated so you only use half what you normally use, so you save money." Anyway, our first impression of this mysterious, apparently wise and successful stranger gradually changed to something more pathetic. Really he had a lot of problems in life, with health and relationships and failed businesses, and was stuck in a somewhat boring job of teaching English for a low salary, so now he was trying to escape all of that and be successful. We ended up feeling really sorry for him. He seemed like a fellow with great potential, who could be dynamite if he was running his own business. Instead he was sort of a pathetic case, spending his afternoons trying to trick people into signing up for buying household goods and luxuries at inflated prices, from a limited selection, in order to somehow become financiallly abundant and independent. I guess he could sense that we weren't going to go for it, so he didn't even call back the week after, like he said he would. Anyway, yes, it can be great to have your own business, and to earn residual income from the work of many people. But being in an MLM isn't really "your own business", however they position it. And for most people it isn't going to work. It will work for a few people who're great sales people, who can spread excitement about just about anything, and who're detached from having any honest feelings about what is really going on. And it works in part because a lot of people at some point feel inspired or pressured into signing up, even though it never is going to work for them personally, and they end up financing the residual income for the hot sales guys further up the line. As I mentioned, I can indeed imagine some ways that network marketing possibly could work in a way that's more likely to work for everybody who participates. But I'd probably have to come up with my own system, if that needs to go anywhere. [ Articles | 23 Jul 2005 @ 00:13 | 437 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
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