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.

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.

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!!!

For those of you not aware I have been paying several bloggers to blog for my blog network Blogtown Press over the past 5 months to see where it can take blogs. The writers have been doing great, building content, and building a readership at each blog.

Out of the 5 blogs I have writers writing for only one of those blogs has been able to sustain itself and pay for the writer. We even had a few months where that one blog went over straight pay and into percentage partner. With that said, I am sad to report that I have had to discontinue contracts for three of the blogs and keep one of the writers as a single post by post contract blogger.

I feel this is in no way a reflection on their writing but more a reflection on how well I have run Blogtown Press. From a hobby standpoint. I still make money off it, and without having those writers on those three blogs, yes I will make more. But calling myself an entrepreneur I have to realize when I’m just foolishly spending money without a plan, which this was doing. More as an experiment.

Although I still think of the content they’ve produced as an investment, that content is unique and will always be there, it wasn’t building to anything. I didn’t have a plan.

My number one problem was:
1. I was spread too thin from the beginning. None of the blogs had a cohesive tie to one another and no one blog was focused on as the pillar blog of the network. Therefore, we didn’t have a large audience to launch new blogs to and we didn’t have a reason for readers to come back.

Also:
2. I wasn’t spending nearly enough time promoting and getting links. I had writers but wasn’t spreading the word about what they were producing.

Now don’t get me wrong, traffic and revenue have both risen, but not on the blogs that I was paying people to blog on. (Except One) Just building articles, PR, and SE presence allows me to gain more advertisers and gain more readers, and thus, gain more money. But I wasn’t building a business system.

So I’ve cut back on spending and I’m regaining a focus on a new venture that has 10 times more promise, 10 times more focus, and 10 times more people involved! (You knew I was going somewhere with this, more to come in the near future, but be prepared.)

Moral of the story, cut your losses so you can refocus and build back up. Oh yeah, and don’t get defeated.

From his bio it says “Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer.” He co-developed the “first web-based application, ViaWeb.” He also sold that web-based application to Yahoo, described the spam filter basics used by most filters today, is writing a new programing language, and also helps run a venture capital firm specializing in seeding small web tech companies.

What you have to focus on from all that is that he is an essayist. For a guy with that much programming experience I wouldn’t have expected wonderful essays to spill forth on his web page but I would have been wrong. Using his obvious experience he has written and published to his webpage many essays, most notably for this blogs audience are his essay’s on startups.

One that jumped out at me that everyone could stand to read that claims to be heading down the road of startup is his article titled 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups. I’ll list them below and give why I think they’re important but it’s a long long article that you should surely read. Some pertain just to programming application startups but most are applicable across all startups.

1. Single Founder - This one is currently the most interesting me. Although I wouldn’t really call what I’ve done so far a startup, as I have no set business plan, no real budgetary spending and I lack direction, I have learned that there just isn’t enough time in the day to do it all on your own.
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early - Most “entrepreneurs” are starting content based startups these days and the biggest problem is launching a site without enough content. If you have an audience in place to launch a site to and you have no content, what’s going to make them come back to your site?
10. Having No Specific User in Mind - Find a Niche and Hammer It!
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money - Makes sense after you read it
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders - Makes you worry about number 1
18. A Half-Hearted Effort - You have to put in the time and effort, which is a lot, no matter what the startup or it’s just gonna fizzle away.

It’s a great list and a great read. Now you just have to re-read the list 100 times so it’s burned into your mind and you can avoid the potential pitfalls of startups.

It’s Aloha Friday again and I for one can say thank goodness. The week has been uber busy and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anywhere!

I’m in the midst of a restructuring of sorts over at Blogtown Press as well as working on building new ventures and revisiting old contacts. During this process, I feel like of course there’s too much to do and thus I’m getting no where.

With all that jumble said here’s some links for you Entrepreneur Types out there.

The first one is just a funky little when will I be a millionaire calculator done nicely in AJAX I assume due to it’s no refresh graph adjustment. Put in some variables and see when you’ll be a millionaire. It’s a basic calculator geared towards savers. If only there was a calculator for entrepreneurs…

Here’s something from the Wall Street Journal called Startup Journal. It’s a WSJ online publication for entrepreneurs. I’ve never been nor knew it existed but in a brief poke around it looked like it could help out in some regards.

Lastly I’d like to say congrats to Josh Buckley who this week announced the formation of his network of sites called 2slice Media. Always great to see more people building networks and discussing their paths openly for all to learn and grow. Good luck Josh, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the new site design and the network growth.

All for the weekend,
Aloha,
Erik

I just read an interesting article about over at Tyler Cruz’s blog about a domain sale he brokered. He made a pretty penny at it too. You could call it right place at the right time, but it was definitely an opportunity that most might not see and very very few would actually have gone after.

The short of it is Tyler heard that someone in his hometown had a pretty nice domain they thought was worth a lot of money. Tyler offered the owner $10,000 for the name and was rejected. He then mentioned to the owner he has dealt with domains before and would be able to use his contacts online to broker a nice deal for the domain.

Presto, Tyler was able to sell the domain and make a killer commission of just under $23,000. Yikes! Not bad for noticing an opportunity and having the balls to go for it. Congrats on that one.

I would be great if I could take my knowledge and skills of buying and selling domain names and turn it into crazy profit like this. I’ve thought about bringing on some outside investors to help build my portfolio and make myself and others even more money using the methods I’ve been trying but never about brokering a domain deal.

I guess I always thought it was something for the big boys and professionals. Just another idea about a way to make some cash on the side. If you have knowledge of the internet workings and feel you can price a domain moderately well, don’t let an opportunity like this fall through your fingers.