Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

OK, so I admit, I’ve started to rock a little bit of a tire around the mid section. Nothing big, but noticeable none-the-less.

To try and get in shape in time for my wedding (which is in Hawaii, friends coming out, and I should really look like I actually play out here rather than work on my computer all day long) I’ve decided to cut calories and increase activity. The only problem is, I get way too hungry.

I’m trying and trying, but once 9 pm rolls around, I’m starving! I snack a little, not excessively, as a I used to but I’m still not cutting out as many calories as I’ve wanted to.

That’s when someone in my office, who noticed my disgruntledness (good word) at the candy jar, handed me over this great article from Newsweek titled Filling up with Less. It’s about a little known “diet” called volumetrics.

Volumetrics is essentially watching the amount of calories you take while still remaining full (or as they call it many times in the article, satiated. You eat foods that are not necessarily lower in calories but have higher densities usually as a result from more water in the food. This is called their energy density.

Energy Density = Calories Per Serving / Grams Per Serving

You want to eat foods that have an energy density of less than 1. Foods with energy densities between 1 and 2 are OK but should be limited and over 2, forget about it.

OK, so here we go, time to start eating many more fruits and veggies and get rid of that extra ring around the belly.

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.

I was originally going to put this link I found on paid links in my weekend entrepreneurial links post but then did some digging and decided it needed some separate post attention!

I found an interesting article on one of my semi-regular blog stops OsWorld.biz that glared out at me with the title The Death of Paid Links. Yep you read it right and it isn’t just an eye catcher.

As I dug deeper into what sparked Oli’s post I found a few sites that discussed the topic of Google using others to combat paid links as a way to boost PR and not traffic. (How the hell are they going to do that is beyond me) But the post in question is from Matt Cutt’s blog, the leader of Google’s webspam team, where he casually brings up the fact that there’s an easy way for webmasters to report paid links.

Well that casual blog post sparked a huge uproar that has 523 comments and counting!!!

Comments range from WTF to more sane comments that are really trying to understand how the system won’t be abused and how an algorithm will be able to figure out if the link was bought strictly for boosting PR or for traffic purposes.

I for one am clueless as to how they could possibly trust a reporting system that is utilized by the very people who buy links to take over the spot from other webmasters. Won’t webmasters report links that may not even be paid for links simply to lower the ranking of the both the sites, in turn making their site the higher ranking site.

Does this list go on and on with the flaw in what is being proposed here?

I’d also like to point out the Matt several times says he is just trying to widen the dataset for testing purposes. Although he doesn’t say it isn’t being counted this may mean that they’re just trying out their cracked out idea. Also mentioned, here and responds to a lot of good points here.

The most intriguing comment of the first 150 that I got through was one by Scott Fish (I’m assuming the DP regular) who brings up the clearest thoughts on the subject here discussing how they’re going to know.

Also of interest to a lot of you out there is probably this post at weblog tools collection about sponsoring themes.

I’d like to finish with a little advice. Try and use real SEO techniques noted in this Calacanis challenge update.

What do you all think?

I recently read an article in Business 2.0 about a company that is trying to make it’s own market on the internet.. They’ve cleverly hid the fact that all their trading is web pages by modeling them after real life real estate and people. It’s called Weblo.com.

It’s really an interesting concept. They name and group all their pages by countries, states/provinces, cities/towns, streets, and even buildings. Pages are then created, “owners” add content, make money, pay tax to what those groups they fall under as well as weblo and voila, you have a virtual market contained on one site.

If you really look at the idea it’s nothing more than what people are doing over at SitePoint.com, Digital Point, or a plethora of domain name reseller places out there. Except, they organized it under one place, can monitor it (tax it), and have a concept that is unique. Some of the most searched for things are what to do in city X or what celebrity slept with whom. They just built themselves a whole new organized resellers market.

In Business 2.0 they state the company claims to make $2 million in this quarter alone, which I don’t doubt. If you head over to the site you’ll notice that most of the major cities, even the obscure ones are taken and it costs a few dollars to “own” each one.

However, the long term outlook for earnings on the sites might be a little more suspect. Unless they get a killer format and a ton of webmasters that just love creating content (like wikipedia) the pages created will be useless. Many other webmasters will be able to build sites and take most if not all of the traffic away from Weblo.

But if you look at the concept strictly from an entertainment point of view, theres a million ways the site can go and be profitable, they just have to keep the audience there. Good luck with that.

About two months ago I wrote about feeling the digg effect where I talked about the great feeling of getting your article to the front page of digg and then quickly seeing your shared server plan crash to ground.

The residual effect of getting to the top of digg is immense. Although if you feel the effect and your server crashes that is a bummer in the short term, but all the links you get will help your page rank, your site promotion, and boost your readership (so long as you keep up the writing.)
Based on what the surrounding hours were receiving, the time I was down cost me about 30K visitors for the 3 articles I had dugg to the front page. Ouch!!!

It even prompted me to switch servers and plans.

I recently came across a interesting niche hosting idea started by this guy and another called SurviveDigg.com. A great idea, especially if they can keep up with staying true to their name and get to the top of Google’s search results for hosting plan that can survive digg (that should help ).

I don’t know how many times I searched for that on Google as well as all the forums I could find. It’s a tough subject because it seems like everyone has different answers about the same hosts and the same hosting plans. (ie it’s a crapshoot)

But the idea is definitely a great niche to go after and a product that I would have thought about trying had it been launched back when I was mulling over the decision to switch hosting plans because of the digg effect.

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.

One comparison that is so obvious but often needs to be explained is that SEO can be thought of as free advertising.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which for those who don’t know means that you use techniques to optimize your website and the links coming in to rocket yourself to the top of search engines. The main one used to model techniques after is Google. Get to the top of search results and traffic comes.

Now if you have all the money in the world or connections to some of the top blogs, then who cares about SEO. You have other means to get your traffic to your blog. You can pay to advertise on the big blogs or you can get your buddy to help you out by mentioning your site once or twice a week.

But if you’re not working with a large budget you can think of SEO as free advertising. You don’t need to go to TLA and buy links. You can hang out in a number of forums, contact site owners, and trade trade trade like crazy as many links as you can muster.

Think of Google as your best friends site but the only way to get to the top is not by walking them home in a drunken stuper, but getting others to link to you, a lot.

Like advertising, your site might not always be at the top of the page in the best spot. But if you keep after your SEO techniques, you’re more likely to get to the top more often. Once you get a few more visitors coming you are more likely to get more links and feel the snowball effect.

SEO should be viewed as the poor mans advertising. If you have the money, spend it on advertising and build content.

The upside to SEO over advertising is that SEO can last a long time where as advertising is only good for that contract period (we’re talking banner space.) You’re SEO campaign could payoff by keeping you at the top of Google for a while. Now if you’re smart you’ll buy a link or banner that also helps you with SEO, but that’s a whole nother post altogether.

In response to my previous article asking should I go to business school I’ve jumped full force into researching what it takes to start a legitimate business in the eyes of investors. True, if you’re making money hand over fist who cares if you have a well defined structure.

But if you want to truly learn about business and how they function and also learn a lot about the market you’re trying to corner, a business plan can be invaluable. So why the heck haven’t I written on for the 4 business ideas I’m currently involved in? Laziness.

Business plans take time. Even though I feel I have a good grasp of what I’m doing or want to do, I feel a business plan would rocket me way ahead of where I am right now. Not just cause you have this document but because of the steps it take you to create the document. The research it brings you into to make the document.

So with that, I’ve begun a little bit of research myself and have found several resources that I think would interest a lot of you internet entrepreneurs out there.

For starters here are the main things a solid business plan consists of:

1. Executive Summary - It’s the general overview of the business you are planning to run and the history of it and it’s founders and main employees.
2. Market Analysis - You gotta know if you can make money in the market before you can ask others to invest in your business (that includes bank loans)
3. Company Description - How your business jives and why you think doing one thing will help the others
4. Organization & Management - Who are the key players in your business and how are you going to organize the flow of work
5. Marketing & Sales Management - Who and How are you going to get your product in front of people and who’s gonna sell it?
6. Service or Product Line - What are you selling or offering and why is it better than whats out there?
7. Funding Request - How much money do you need and why?
8. Financials - Where are your financials right now and should you be trusted with money?
9. Appendix - All the nitty gritty details of the numbers listed above.

You can find out info about this outline and tons more at:

SBA .gov How to Write a Business Plan - Obviously a resource on how to write a business plan
Sample Business Plans for Internet Related - Lot’s of plans deal with restaurants, these deal with applicable plans to my readers.
Hundreds of Business Plan Examples - Huge resource of example plans
Online Startup School - Some good free resources especially the 101 tips .pdf file
A List Apart Small Business Advice - Mainly geared at freelance designers but good info for all.

Hope these links keep you all busy for a while. They are definitely keeping me busy.