Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I don’t follow many conferences that go on. I live out here in Hawaii and getting back to the mainland for work (at my “real job”) and lately, for friends weddings is usually all I see, so following conferences is kinda pointless. But this one got my attention.

I am a regular reader of Jason Calacanis’ blog. i love his controversial writing style. He writes things that spark conversation and ultimately more creative thinking. So when I recently read that he and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch were doing a conference together, I had to check it out.

It’s called the TechCrunch20 and it’s going to bring together the 20 newest and most intriguing (to them I assume) new companies to show their products to the “press, VCs, investors, and bloggers.”

The best part is, it won’t cost these companies squat. It appears the conference is going to be setup so these companies can present their goods and get immediate feedback from these groups of people.

Even if your product gets ripped to shreds by some of the biggest names in the Web2.0 world, you’ll still more than likely get some amazing coverage in some of the biggest blogs and newspapers there are. Plus VCs like to invest, and 20 isn’t a large number. My guess is most of these are pre-picked winners and will likely get some primo funding.

Tickets to the event aren’t cheap…
$1,995 if you register by July 15 and $2,495 up til September 10, 2007.

Yikes. I guess if you gotta go it’s worth it. Maybe Blogtown Press will have the budget available by then?

Here are a few links to wet your entrepreneurial appetite and keep you going at those website empires that most of you are building.

1. The first link is a list of the 10 most successful web 2.0 startups to date. The requirement is that the sites be web 2.0 in nature (kind of a fuzzy requirement) but the list is great and shows some very organized data; Founders, date founded, monthly pageviews, and valuation. Some of the craziest numbers are…

Myspace gets 40 billion pageviews per month
Wikipedia’s target audience is 10-80
Digg was rumored to be in negotiations for $150 million

2. Here’s some great advice for a successful blog launch. I’m thinking of launching a few new blogs for the Blogtown Press Blog Network and this post was a great refresher course. It also obviously got dugg to the front page too. Some good points that I’m sure to follow this time around.

Don’t launch your blog without at least 5 posts… I’m going for more like 20 posts, or 30-50 posts in the saved post pile. I need to have consistent posting from the get go.
Include outbound links. I don’t really do this enough and it’s one of the great things about blogs. Especially when linking to a wordpress blog, who doesn’t look at their inbound links dashboard?

3. Here’s a sweet idea generator blog with fresh news about new business ventures. It’s called SpringWise.com. They have a ton ideas, not all really applicable to the low investment types. Some of the companies they profile would take a real investment team. But knowing what’s out there and what’s new can get you more in touch with your creative side!

4. I’m including this one because I wanted a good place to reference it besides my bookmarks section. It’s called the Startup Venture Toolbox and basically has a list with resources and an explanation about why should think about looking at those links. It’s like a startup checklist!

I was tipped off to an interesting article over at Forbes about the concept of Google and Apple joining forces to form a super power of tech goodness. Talk about monopoly!
It seemed cracked out at first, would the world let this happen? Would Microsoft let this happen? If everyone under the sun has been suing Microsoft due to bad business practices which include bundling software wouldn’t they naturally do the same with Google and Apple?

But then I got to thinking, the nice thing about Google is that most of it’s services are given away for free and are open source or semi-open source. Who the heck would anyone sue?

What if Google actually did team up with Apple? Could they then give away the iPhone infinity, a super powered iPod, iTV, Browser, life organizer phone. It would be in the spirit of Google and with the tech sexiness of Apple, all funded by you and I buying music from GooTunes and spreading the advertising love around the world.

What a utopia!

If the iPhone Infinity were to actually exist I would like to be a bunch of things.

Be Apple Sexy
Have a regular sweet scratch resistant screen
Paper thin fold out screen
Option bluetooth wireless mouse
Solar and Motion rechargeable (Think of those watches)
Phone
iPod
Projector
Browser Based Desktop with all the “office like” capabilities
Automatic 411 with GPS
And just be sexy!

Please?

Picture came from Forbes and a dude named Dave Klug who I think is this guy.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned in building my blog network is that I should really listen to what I read. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve browsed a blog post that says “Follow these steps to sure fire win SEO,” or something like that. Even if these bloggers were just writing what they read somewhere else I should have listened.

Over the past three months I’ve begun to organize and focus my efforts of SEO and you might not be surprised but, it worked. Not only do I have time working on my side (older domains do better) but I am actually seeing results with the keywords that I’m targeting. Some of my blogs are the number 1 Google search result for those keywords. Even blogs where all I was doing was link building instead of content creation. Tops!

Then one day I happened across a manual being freely distributed over a Digital Point. This isn’t a new eBook (at least I don’t think) but it’s a very detailed look at several methods to SEO. It gives tons of information that I wish someone would have printed out back when I started building blogs online and smacked me over the head with it.

I’ve written a little blurb similar to this over at Blogging on Empty and instead of redirecting you there to read the post I’ll just give you the direct link.

SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

If I had to make a list of things that I would suggest you do with your SEO plan it would be the following.

Then just hammer on this. The book talks about determining where the top sites in Google search results have their links to but I found this to be difficult at first. I focused on good sites with a high PR that have been around a little while and seemed to do just fine.

Give r’ a whirl.

I’d like to start out by saying IMHO, real-life anything experience is more valuable than what you can learn in schools. With that being said. I’d like to follow that quickly up with saying going to school, whatever it is, can help you in ways real-life experience can’t.

So which one is it?

I’ve already gone through the undergraduate degree learning all the world of biomedical engineering had to offer. Now I’m working at a start-up company in Hawaii, learning about product development, both the business side and the engineering side, as well as learning the workings of a company trying to create value in anothers investment.

On the side I’m also working to try and build legitimate businesses, mainly through the internet. The reason for building businesses on the internet is that you can more easily build assets with little to no money, just using time.

In doing all of this business building I’ve been contemplating what the potential plus side would be to going back and getting a Business Degree, possibly and MBA, through a night masters program here in Hawaii. I would continue to work at the current startup I’m at while also going to classes but would most likely need to stop building my own businesses. I do most of my business building at night, when I’d be going to class and doing homework.

So I ask you this? Would I learn more trying to setup my own businesses, learning a more organized approach, teaching myself. Or would I be better off learning those approaches through schooling?

So the Blogtown Press blog network isn’t quite where I had hoped it would be 6 months after it’s launch back in November. But it has taught me a lot.

One of the main things it has taught me is that you have to be a go getter when it comes to the world of building a network of sites. You can’t sit around and wait for advertisers to come to you, wait for Google to make you rise in the ranks or make visitors visit your blogs. You have to do the steps to get them.

The steps that you read every single day from every other entrepreneurial blog regurgitating the same rhetoric, “link exchange, mind your PR, post regularly, stick to one niche.” You’d think I would have learned by now. But it’s taken me a year of learning from experience.

I know spend most of my free time at night and in the morning paging through Digital Point Forums looking for exchanges and deals to sell links on all the blogs in the network. It’s a lot of work and now I’m working at streamlining that process so people can find all the information at once.

In doing this I started to realize that I haven’t done that bad. I could have done worse. In my last earnings report I reported that Blogtown Press, including this blog, made roughly $350.00, showing that we’re making progress!

Also I began to work on a network page for advertisers to go to that makes it easier for them to see all the important stats about the blog network. Things like, PR, indexed pages, backlinks, uniques, RSS, etc. It’s all over at out new Blogtown Press Blog Network Advertising Page. Most of it is automated and as I work along I’ll figure out a way to automate everything.

But it gives advertisers a great snap shot of the network to see where they’d best fit their brands or products.

As I was doing this I noticed that the network now gets over 1800 unique visitors per day, has over 340 RSS subscribers (OK this is really low) and has over 1200 posts!

Here are some links to keep you busy this weekend and a sweet video of someone who is a little crazy.

For those of you who are bar goers this link will hit home and amuse the crap out of you. It’s from a site called Modern Drunkard Magazine and list 86 Rules of Boozing. My favorite on the list is number 30 Never complain about the quality or brand of a free drink.

For those of you getting into the wide world of ajax you should really check out this site, Miniajax.com. It has tons of great little gadgets to make your site wonderfully interactive.

Probably the best color scheme generator on the web, better than colorschemer online due to it’s layout. Check it out over at the well-styled color scheme generator. You can drag your mouse over the color wheel and see the outcome in the mock website setup.

And now on to the flying squirrel!

March was a decent month once again in terms of earnings. Although I’m still closer to a break even stage in my Blogtown Press blog network, due to paying bloggers and hosting fees, I feel as though it was a good month for me. I’m progressing towards a more realistic goal of a money earning business.

I’m making progress towards a more organized business plan approach and learning as I go along. I’ve been much more active in seeking out buyers of both text links, ad space, and posts for the blog network which has helped in the short term. I’d like to build a presence on (gasp) Text-Link-Ads so I don’t have to spend time tracking down potential advertisers right now.

Earnings for the month of March were:

Adsense: $182.88
TLA: $ 35.28
Posts Sold at Forums: $ 57.66
Links Sold at Forums: $ 80.67

NameDrive Domains: $102.38

Total Earnings: $458.87

Some of you may notice that my namedrive totals have increased since my last earnings report. That’s because I’m working on determining the scale-ability of my domain name investing method. So far so good although I would have liked to see a little higher earnings due to the investment. Still on track to make 100%(ish) return in a year.

Some others who divulge their earnings so you can be inspired…

Yaro Starak recently discussed earning money online and gave us a detailed analysis of his earnings, $6000+. He’s not a regular at doing this but these are the ones that really get you going! Thanks Yaro.

The Internet Cashflow Guy keeps moving up, great to see the progress. $485.40 last month

And that’s it!!! Looking through my blogroll showed me that I have to update it and get rid of some links from people who either don’t have blogs anymore, or don’t update them at all. I think 3 months is a good time period to go by.

I’ve been told personally by several prominent bloggers, as well as read countless times that the easiest way to launch another blog or website is to have an audience. Of course this is quite obvious, and of course I didn’t follow the advice.

Launching Blogtown Press would have been much easier had I really focused on building the traffic to this blog first. Instead, I decided to spread myself thin write on 5-10 blogs at a time and get mediocre traffic to all of them, then launch the blog network, then get minimal traffic to all blogs in the network.

Since then I’ve revamped my thought process and along the way built several of the blogs in the network to good traffic. I’ve followed good SEO technique to rank higher in the search engines, hired bloggers to increase content generation and allow me to spend time on promotion, and I’ve slowed down on launching new blogs.

Next launch I’ll have an audience!

The proper way to launch a website can be seen from the video I have embedded below. It’s a clip from some tech show, The Screen Savers, that Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com co-hosted (or have a spot on or something).

In this short little clip you’ll see Kevin Rose use his current position at this TV show to weave into the show a little segment about social news and bookmarking websites out there at the time (2004 the video says) and their shortcomings. He then goes on to talk about this new social bookmarking site that solves some of these shortcomings.

The website he mentions just happens to be digg.com which he leaves out the part that he founded. Now whether or not that was semi-shady to use his position of what looks like all knowing geek power or not. It’s a pretty slick move and no doubt helped him get the word out. Pretty sweet move Kevin

Found this gem about a month ago and decided I needed to share it with everyone cause it’s just that cool.

For those of you that are MTV junkies, like myself, you might remember the sweet TV show, that I hope they bring back for season two, Rob and Big. They had a bull dog that they found out could ride a skateboard pretty well.

This dog is ten times better than the one they saw originally do it, and their dog. Although I do think Rob could produce the best skating dog ever, just give him some time. But here it is, this dog leans to turn, kicks and pushes (lupe would be proud) and coasts around the parking lot.