December 24, 2006

Top Five Secrets of Small Business Success

Anita Campbell gives us a concise breakdown of a report done by Six Disciplines (PDF) on the top five traits of successful small businesses. These traits were collected by surveying 314 businesses, each with between 10 and 100 employees. A graph is included to demonstrate the point.

Many of these “secrets” are fairly obvious – it’s a no brainer that a strong business needs traits such as strong leadership, quality talent, and a disciplined approach to their business. One that did catch me off guard, however, was “effective use of trusted relationships.” Read Anita’s summary or the report to see what that means.

Regardless of whether or not these traits are obvious, the Six Disciplines report provides some tips for increasing your performance in these areas. Perhaps some of these tips can help improve the way you do business.

December 18, 2006

Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups

Aviva has a guide on branding a startup. I have not seen an article on Aviva before, but I have read through the guide and it does offer up some gems for any online entrepreneur. Most of it revolves around developing an online personality for your web site and extending it across the web (and in real life) in various clever ways. Don’t expect this to be a quick solution. There are 99 tips for a reason – hard work is required to properly brand your startup and get it out there. But this isn’t a bad starting point.

December 10, 2006

Advertising 2.0

These days, it seems that every Internet entrepreneur is trying to form a business around the explosive growth of Internet advertising. There is continued debate about the sustainability of such a business model, with the real life outcome having dire consequences. After all, let’s not forget that companies like Google form the majority of their business (and profit) around online advertising.

To extend the debate, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP recently published a study of Internet advertising revenue. Sprinkled about this study are words of optimism. For instance:

Interactive advertising, with its eighth consecutive quarter of growth and the largest single quarter ever, is on pace for its biggest year.

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc., probably bases the majority of his business on Internet advertising. He’s had a large amount of success. Weblogs has some of the most successful blogs out there to their credit (Engadget, Joystiq). It’s no surprise that he’s posted a commentary on the study called The real story of Web 2.0: Advertising 2.0. Here is what he believes:

How far will this trend line go? Think 20 more years of similar growth.

Will it get steeper? Absolutely.

Why? Video and audio advertising hasn’t even started to move to the Internet in a major way.

There are a multitude of ways to get involved in and to benefit from this growth, but don’t let it lure you away from your core business. In other words, if you aren’t an advertising company, don’t let ads dictate how you run your business. As a web entrepreneur, the temptation to slap ads all over your page may be irresistible, but don’t lose site of what it is you are really trying to accomplish.

Case in point: Massive makes a business out of putting subtle advertising into games, but you don’t see the game developers they work with churning out games purely to convey ads (most of the time). The developers recognize that their purpose is to produce fun, entertaining games. Advertising complements their business, but it isn’t their core business. Learn from that, and you are well on your way to becoming a part of Advertising 2.0.

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Grabbing Expiring Domain Names

I’ve already described the domain name business, some of the history, and a strategy involving expiring domain names to build your portfolio (with background on how a domain name expires). Now let’s go over methods for obtaining expiring domains.

Note: This is also relevant if you are not a domainer, but you are trying to obtain a great domain name for your business.

In my searching on the net, I found two articles which nicely sum up the methods required. The first and perhaps most informative article I found was by Mike Davidson. In his article entitled How to Snatch an Expiring Domain, Mike goes over the method he used to acquire the domain for his news site, Newsvine.

The second article I found was a guide to tools and services for grabbing expired domains. This guide was contained within an overall guide to expired domain names.

I hope these two articles help you develop a robust plan for snagging the domain names you desire.

There is still one more piece to this puzzle that I have yet to cover. How do we find great domain names? That’ll be the topic of my next (and perhaps final) post on the subject of domainers and domain names as a business.

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November 9, 2006

Youtube’s Limitations

“How do I come up with the next Youtube?” For us technical entrepreuneurs, this is a question you just can’t resist. After a 1.6 billion dollar buyout of Youtube by Google, you just have to want it. However, the real fact of the matter is, many people are still confused about the lasting potential for profit in sites such as Youtube. It just so happens that this was the focus of a recent panelist discussion. The Red Herring offers up some coverage. Here is a quote:

User generated video is the loudest buzz in the industry these days, but can real money be made in it? If so, how will this happen?

Such was the issue that a group of experts in the industry addressed in a panel discussion Wednesday at the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Ventures conference, held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California.

Read Youtube’s Limitations on Red Herring.

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October 9, 2006

Pligg

Pligg is a free, open source content management system bearing similarities to Digg. Now you can have your own hip Web 2.0 site fairly quickly. It’s advertised as being in beta, so I’m not sure how stable it is, then again, everything these days is listed as a beta product.

July 4, 2005

Bruce Campbell

Saw him do a Q&A session at Microsoft last week. He was in such cult classic movies as Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. Really funny guy. Check out his web site.

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