Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I’ve been doing a bit of researching on business models and plans for building an online media and entertainment company and stumbled across a few interesting articles about Weblogs, Inc.’s early days when Jason Calacanis was a pie in the sky dreamer it seems like.

The article was found from this reporting and deals with the critique of Weblogs, Inc.’s business plan. The critique was done way back in 2003 by Nick Denton when Weblogs, Inc was first starting out and Jason had big plans for how he was going pay bloggers with revenue share. (Nick Denton is the publisher behind Gawker Media.)

The article sites an early wired news article about the beginnings of weblog empires and how Calacanis want[ed] to take the industry (which was just starting and what he knew little about) and turn it into a money making machine.)

The articles are filled with doubts and rightly so. It appears Calacanis knew little about the blog world. However, as I’ve said in many conversations outside of this blog, a blog is just a fancy name for a newspaper or magazine which is just a media reporting medium and entertainment delivery system. Jason had been around for a while, through the bubble of the late nineties, starting Silicon Alley Reporter, and involved with the media and entertainment businesses and bringing them online.

Very interesting reads about all the early talk of what blogs could someday become. Even Jeff Jarvis of the great buzz machine had in on the talks of a weblog network when he spoke of Calacanis, Bubble Boy, and a crazy idea.

Some of you familiar with Microsoft Office Applications know of the flow chart and process mapping program called Microsoft Visio. It’s a great program that has a lot of standards, templates, and useability options that make it useful in a lot of situations.

I use it in my biotech position to map engineering processes and actual fluid flow. I’ve heard of others who use Visio in “mind mapping” and brainstorming processes to build ideas into projects and product development cycles.

The only problem is that Visio costs a bit of money. For those of you addicted to free web applications, forking over the money to buy a Microsoft product probably isn’t on your top priority. You need other solutions.

Well I did a little hunting around and found two free web applications for just those purposes, flow charts and brain storming.

The first one is called Gliffy and I really hope this application gets picked up by Google in the near future. It’d be a great addition to the Google Free Web Apps. (Although I really hope Google builds more connectivity into their apps and allows users to cut and paste their favorite portions from each app) Anyway, Gliffy is just like Visio and has a lot of built in capabilities to help you diagram flow processes. Try it out.

The next web app that I think you should try out is Bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming web application, also free that gives users another interactive ability to create brainstorming on the fly, also would be a nice tool to add to Google and allow collaboration through Google Talk to have easy web conferences. Although I haven’t tried the sharing action in Bubbl.us I’m not sure it has real-time sharing like Google Documents does.

Either of these applications can be a big help to those of you who are visual planners and need to see the way things connect together to get a real sense for how they work. These two web applications should be in your toolbox if you’re making the switch to all online medium of communication.

It seems like everyone these days considers themselves an entrepreneur. Take me for example, am I an entrepreneur? I’d like to think I have the entrepreneur mindset. But most “businesses” I’ve built over the years I would consider small businesses, not entrepreneurial endeavors.

If I wasn’t there, they would cease to make money. That’s more a definition for a small business owner. Also, nothing I’ve done has been really innovative. Sure, I was the first in my elementary to buy a tub of candy from Sam’s Club and sell it on the bus. But that’s nothing more innovative than the local dime store. And if I wasn’t there, I sure wasn’t making money!

I’m not writing this to call anyone out. I merely trying to get people to see that they may not be entrepreneur’s in the traditional sense but rather small business owners trying to make a living working for themselves.

To become an entrepreneur, it’s my opinion that you have to utilize a business system or change the way a current system works, or create a completely new system, or, do all of the above.

In my opinion a true entrepreneur is creating money from other peoples work as well as thinking of something that is new an original. If you have a network of sites, that if you left for a year, would cease to run and make you no money, you might not be an entrepreneur.

Just some food for thought to keep you going towards financial freedom.

I’m definitely not the first to say that google analytics is new and improved. The word has been spreading about them taking urchin site tracker to the next level.

My Google Analytics account has just been switched over to the new look and feel and I have to say that it is Googlefied to the max. It gives you more information right at login that it ever did so you don’t have to go digging through all the crazy sidebar items. Speaking of which, the sidebar options have been majorly trimmed which is great!

The nice thing about the streamlined version is that it’s not really streamlined at all. I still see all the information it used to have just now it’s much easier to find and know it’s there (I even found stuff that I didn’t know analytics tracked.)

Here’s a pic of the new look. What do you all think of the new look?

I have recently been writing about volumetrics as a legit dieting plan and the different low energy density foods that you can enjoy while on the diet. Writing about it and really trying to stick with it has made me google happy for the term “volumetrics”.

From there I found out that Consumer reports has named volumetrics it’s top diet plan for this year.

“Recent clinical trials show the best overall weight loss of any diet evaluated. Based on research at Penn State, the diet aims to maximize the amount of food available per calories, mainly by use of reduced-fat products, liberal addition of vegetables and low-fat cooking techniques.”

For those of you who don’t know, the idea is really simple. Eat foods that weigh a lot and have a lot of volume with relatively low calories. This way you feel full while still eating less calories. It doesn’t take a nutritional degree to know that if you eat less calories than you burn throughout the day you’ll loose weight over time. The only problem, which volumetrics claims to solve, is you don’t feel full.

I for one hate being hungry so going from eating whenever, whatever, to trying to “diet” for the first time in my life has been difficult. Eating apples, salads, tomatoes, and other low energy density foods gives me the right balance of foods, and allows me to eat a lot, while lowering my calories.

I now find myself reading labels to do quick calculations based on weight and calories per serving. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this up for the next 20 days until the wedding. Lord knows I could stand to loose a little tire that has inflated around my belly.

A lot of people, and I’m guilty as well, are jumping into the internet without a business plan in mind. They go in and even though they may claim to be an entrepreneur for sake of building clout with others like them (guilty again) they aren’t really building towards anything. They’re cloaking a hobby with words like entrepreneur, business person, start-up, mogul. Most phizzle off because they don’t have a good outlook for their business.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in trying to become an Entrepreneur is to have an outlook for the business you are trying to create. You may not have a set plan, and for those of you who can’t even plan what’s for dinner the next night those words will be like music to your ears.

But you need to a plan for the next month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and then a long term outlook. Of course these can change as you go along. There’s nothing wrong with having a fluid business outlook. You just need to keep to what you write. You need to stick to your plan as best you can.

As an example I’ll apply it to Blogtown Press:

1 month: Work on On-Site Search Engine Optimization and continue to get as many inbound links from directories as possible. (Or as time will allow). Build the internal workings of each page and have a sound backbone for search engines to find the information they’re looking for.

3 month: Continue to build the archives on all the blogs, and launch several new blogs. Within 3 months I see the Blogtown Press Blog Network consisting of at least 20 blogs. As they grow I will continue to try out new writers and possibly have several more writers working of Blogtown Press.

6 month: Although this depends on Google, work on all the factors that increase PageRank and try to achieve a page rank of 5 on at least 8 blogs. Having Page Rank will allow me to have more authority within the blogging community and especially look better for advertisers and increase my traffic. By slowly establishing Blogtown Press, at 6 months from now, I will become more of an authority on the subjects our blogs focus on.

1 year: Have a network of sites focused on Blogtown Press that brings in $5000 a month earnings. This is a bit lofty but you have to shoot for the stars. I say a network of sites because I am thinking about launching a forum shortly. I see Blogtown Press and it’s partners bringing in several network sponsors where I don’t have to go through intermediaries like Google and TLA (although I still love you guys). I would also like to be providing several writers with full-time gigs making several $100 a month.

From this business outlook I can now list at least 10 things I need to do to get me to each of those milestones.

Now you do a business outlook.

Aside from the obvious way of not redirecting them to a site that has some sort of advertising where you get a piece of the action there’s also another way to make sure you don’t make money from domain names.

It’s called “Forgetting to renew your domain names!”

That’s right, I had a domain name that was pulling in $5-$10 a month, clearly paying for it’s renewal fee and more importantly paying off the money that I had initially invested in the domain name when I bought it from a third party. And I had put off those emails from GoDaddy reminding me that I needed to directly renew this domain because it wasn’t able to be auto renewed.

Then I went to check on the domain after noticing the expiration date had passed and it wasn’t there. At first I could have swore I tried to renew the domain name, but I guess there was no such luck and I somehow let it slip through the cracks. I only ended up making back about 50% of what I had initially invested. Not a very good business move.

I’ll keep checking to see if I can blame it on GoDaddy but I don’t think I’ll be able to.

If you want to learn how to make money buying and selling domain names check out my 5 part series on domain located at: How to make money buying and selling domain names.

Some of you might remember a while back when I started bad mouthing Text Link Ads. Ads on this blog weren’t selling while I saw links on other blogs, blogs that didn’t have as high a PR or traffic rankings as I did, selling like hot cakes!

I noticed that my blog wasn’t listed in the correct categories and that my description was never changing even though I had tried to change it many times. I also had a few other blogs listed didn’t even get into the listings. I emailed a few times to the support team and had no response worth anything. I had all but written them off.

But I stuck with them and I’m glad. Although I’ve done a few things differently around my blogs to make them more “advertiser friendly,” Text Link Ads has become a lot more responsive. They’ve drastically decreased their turn-around time for answering emails. I know email them with questions and within a day I get a response.

Also, I contacted them directly about several blogs that hadn’t been accepted yet but had good PR, traffic, and solid back-links, and I was able to get those in. This has increased my exposure on their site, and I’ve been able to really boost my earnings over there.

Thanks for improving your service TLA. It’s always good to see a company respond to complaints.

The last few months have seen steady and increasing income from my blog network. This month, I can already say, I’ve surpassed last months earnings and we’re not even half way through the month.

Adsense: $202.94
Namedrive: $96.51
TLA: $44.10
Direct Link Sales: $130.03

Total: $473.58

Hoping to keep this ball rolling and improve it even more moving it to new methods to expand and focus (do those go together) the blog network.

Here are a few more earnings from around the way…
$474.51 for the Internet Cashflow Guy
$185.75 for a new one on my list Nomar.

and once again that’s it for the blogosphere of earnings that I follow. Not too many reporting what their earnings are these days. (Or maybe I just don’t follow them much anymore.)

For those of you who love to read about what other bloggers out there are making I stumbled across a great list of a lot of prominent bloggers and what their salaries might be.

I for one try to spread the love by updating you with the most recent earnings reports that make it to my reader but this list may be the best yet.

Paula Neal Mooney’s list contains bloggers from the top all the way down to the up and coming. Should you be on the list? Well if you think you should, just drop her a line or comment, I’m sure she’d be glad to add you, especially if you have a link to your earnings.

Speaking of which, maybe I should drop her a line, I should be close to the top 40 this year!!!