Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

This one is for the newbies that have no idea what RSS, XML and syndication are…whoa, confusing already isn’t it!

Definitions

It wasn’t much longer then six months ago that I had no idea what these terms were. I understood what XML was because I had read a book about it but I had no idea how it all worked with syndication of content. Just as I learnt how trackbacks work by actually using them I did the same with syndication. I also took the time to read the definitions of the terms and as usual the Wikipedia entries on XML, RSS, Web Syndication and Web Feed are a good place to start.

The Basics

In a nutshell you use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog or almost any media content online (not just articles, it can be music, video or almost any digital media). By syndicating you subscribe to the feed of the site which means you do not have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead you use feed reading software or a website to read the latest articles. Instead of going to each of your favourite sites individually you can collect all the feeds of the sites (provided they make them available) in one place. The purpose of syndication is to therefore make it more efficient for you to consume your favourite content.

If you are not into the technical side of the Internet your don’t need to know much about XML. It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader. If you know nothing about HTML then you probably don’t really need to know much about XML either. Just understand that behind syndication is the language XML.

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you exactly how I use RSS.

Feed Reading Software

At the moment I use RSSOwl which is software you install on to your computer. Like all software there is a learning curve to using RSSOwl however once you have subscribed to your first feed it becomes very easy. If you get really stuck try the help menu or check the website out for guidelines.

There are other feed reading software programs out there and a Google search for RSS reader will bring up many options. I tried three different programs and stuck with RSSOwl because it was free, light weight and functional for what I wanted. There are prettier and more functional feed readers out there and I’ll leave it up to you to choose your favourite.

Web Based Feed Reading

With a standalone software feed reader like RSSOwl you have to be on the computer you installed the software to in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader and the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except because it is entirely based on the Internet you can access your syndicated feeds online from any computer connected to the web. You can also share your feeds with other people or search other people’s feed lists to see what is popular.

Subscribing to a Blog

To continue with my example…of course I subscribe to my own feed, the RSS of this blog. At the top right corner you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. You may also have to name the feed and strangely enough this feed is called “Entrepreneur’s Journey”. The RSS feed link for this site looks like this - http://feeds.feedburner.com/EntrepreneursJourney - and if you click it you will get the XML output of this blog. That’s the stuff I told you about that you don’t really need to understand, but take a look by clicking the link if you are interested. Note that I use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to my feed output and most importantly it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. The reason there are so many names is because there are different standards to create web syndication services (much like the old BETA vs VHS video format competition). At the moment it appears that RSS is certainly winning the standards war so you will mostly see the orange RSS links everywhere.

Syndication is for More than Just Blogs

Blogs certainly started the syndication craze but it is well and truly breaking out now. I wouldn’t call it mainstream just yet since not many people know how to use it but most of the big web companies are making subscription feeds available for almost any content. Chances are if you are reading an article from a big site you can subscribe to a feed that distributes those articles. Just look for that RSS symbol.

Besides article distribution a new craze has launched called Podcasting. I’m not going to go into Podcasting in this article since it is a subject that deserves its own article. For the purposes of understanding how Podcasting is related to syndication all you need to know is that a Podcast is an audio show, like radio but usually focused on voice because music is copyrighted. Unless you have the rights to the music you may get into trouble if you broadcast it in a podcast. People use syndication to subscribe to a Podcast audio show which they can listen to on their computer or download to an mp3 player.

Update: If you want to learn about podcasts please read - What is a Podcast and How Can I Use One?

The Future

RSS is designed to make your Internet life easier. At the moment it’s worthwhile to become familiar with this technology simply because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it. If you can keep abreast of the technology wave you will have less frustration when using the Internet.

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A friend of mine, an economist at the Queensland Treasury, pointed out this article which he called “The greatest thing I have ever read. Period.”. Being an economist of course this sort of article understandably really floats his boat.

Game Theories by Clive Thompson

There are some really interesting points in the article and what I particularly enjoyed was the idea of a virtual economy with a virtual currency that has value in the real world. The game I used to play, Magic: the Gathering also has an online version. When the company that produces the game created the online version I was astounded to see that they priced the virtual product at the same rate as the real world product. This meant that a pack of virtual cards cost the same price as a pack of real cards.

The online version of Magic functions much the same as real life Magic, with card tournaments and players trading cards except of course you do it all sitting at your computer and an opponent is available 24/7. From a business point of view I thought this was genius because to produce virtual cards costs the company next to nothing (once the software was developed). In essence as long as their is a demand for the card game they have a license to print money. Not a bad business model.

Ultima Online’s virtual economy created an opportunity for individuals to create a business in the real world, flipping virtual goods for profit like a stock trader.

One of these merchants is Robert Kiblinger, a thirty-three-year-old West Virginian. A commercial chemist by training, he worked for Febreze, the company that invented the popular cleaning agent, for which he still holds a couple of patents. (”I was basically selling perfumed water,” he jokes.) But then he started playing Ultima Online, where he ran into a player who was tired of the game and wanted to sell his entire account. The player owned two houses and towers and oodles of rare items, and only wanted $500, which Kiblinger figured was a steal. He drove to Cincinnati to close the deal. “I met him in a Taco Bell parking lot and I gave him a cheque,” he recalls. The next day, they met inside the game, and the seller handed over the virtual goods. Kiblinger turned around and resold the whole shebang a few days later to another player on eBay for $8,000, producing a tidy profit.

He was hooked. He began buying up items from anyone who was willing to sell, and set up a Web site — UOTreasures — to advertise his inventory. Today the site gets thirty-five thousand visitors a week. Kiblinger employs five hundred people inside the game, paying them a small stipend (in Ultima Gold and cash) to act as virtual couriers, scurrying around inside the game to deliver the goods to the players who’ve paid for them. A few elite customers have bought more than $20,000 of stuff from him. A couple of years ago, business was so good that Kiblinger quit his job as a research associate at Procter & Gamble to work full-time as a virtual vendor, though he won’t tell me his exact income. “It’s in the six figures,” he says. “It’s a decent living.”

Taking this even further…

Now there’s a company rich enough to buy the entire lot. Three years ago, a company called IGE, whose sole function is to buy and sell virtual goods, launched. I met one of the company’s founders, Brock Pierce, at a gaming conference in New York. A fresh-faced, blond twenty-three-year-old who is based in Boca Raton, Florida, he said IGE has “thousands of suppliers” who scout the games all day long to find cut-rate goods. He has a hundred full-time staff members at an office in Hong Kong to handle customer service. On any given day, he says, they handle “several million dollars’” worth of virtual inventory.

And how about trading real life cash for virtual cash — there is a company that let’s you do that too.

An even more intriguing financial institution opened for business a few months ago: the Gaming Open Market. Based in Toronto, it is an on-line service that exists solely for trading the currencies of virtual games — Gold/Silver from Horizons, Linden Dollars from Second Life, Therebucks from There.com. If you’re a player who wants some quick virtual currency for your favourite game, you can buy it there using real-world U.S. cash. Sometimes people who play several different virtual games use the market to transfer money from one world to another, like travellers at an airport exchanging currencies.

And some more…

There.com, for example, is a 3-D world devoted to nothing but chatting and socializing, using avatars that look like seductive, attractive models. You’d probably prefer it to real life, because everything is just so much prettier in There. As in the real world, one of the main activities in There is shopping. The company created a currency, Therebucks, and tied it directly to the value of the American dollar to prevent inflation. Players spend a lot of time customizing their appearance (often for the purposes of flirting), so Nike and Levis have virtual clothes that they sell solely inside the game. Individual players, too, have become designers, creating outfits they sell to other There citizens. “One of the leading clothes designers is making $3,000 to $4,000 a month, which is a full-time job,” says There’s founder, Will Harvey.

It’s nice when you can turn a gaming hobby into a profitable business. I wonder if software developers at these companies are going to start requiring economics degrees on their resumes in order to effectively moderate the virtual world’s they have created. I doubt anyone saw this coming 15 years ago.

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I enjoy writing and I hope one day to write a book. While it’s not quite the same as creating a business, writing a book and publishing it for profit certainly have many similarities. Authors like most creative artists often struggle to make a living from their craft. An author that treats their book like a business person treats a product can leverage the same marketing techniques and tricks to spread the word.

Business author Seth Godin writes,

The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.

which does not paint a good picture for the struggling authors not lucky enough to be J.K. Rawling or Dan Brown. Seth continues by explaining an author should work on personal branding as much as possible in order to spread the personality and ideas of the author.

So, what’s my best advice?

Build an asset. Large numbers of influential people who read your blog or read your emails or watch your TV show or love your restaurant or or or…

Then, put your idea into a format where it will spread fast. That could be an ebook (a free one) or a pamphlet (a cheap one–the Joy of Jello sold millions and millions of copies at a dollar or less).

Then, if your idea catches on, you can sell the souvenir edition. The book. The thing people keep on their shelf or lend out or get from the library. Books are wonderful (I own too many!) but they’re not necessarily the best vessel for spreading your idea.

And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won’t need a publisher. And that’s exactly when a publisher will want you! That’s the sort of author publishers do the best with.

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This article is a bit old and I first spotted it a few months back when I was in Canada. I love stories like these and when I recently stumbled across this article again I thought the readers of Entrepreneur’s Journey would probably enjoy it too.

The New Yorker: CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Josh and Ricky, who grew up in a suburb of Baltimore called Timonium and have been friends since sixth grade. The site began as a place to collect all the jokes, links, and silly photographs that college students like to e-mail around, and served as a kind of nerdy diversion for Josh, who went to the University of Richmond, and Ricky, who was at Wake Forest. Eventually, they recruited Jakob, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology (whom Ricky and Josh met online, although he also grew up in Timonium), to help manage the site; Zach, a college friend of Ricky’s from Wake Forest, joined later.

The site came to dominate the waking hours of all four collaborators, whose formal educations were neglected. In certain instances, this was probably not a bad thing: the textbook used for one class in e-commerce that Josh took toward his degree, in finance, had been rendered obsolete by the dot-com crash of 2000; according to its calculations CollegeHumor.com should have been bringing in fifteen million dollars a month.

The numbers were nowhere near that good, but they were good enough for the friends to decide that they could attempt to make the site their full-time job. In the year and a half since Josh, Ricky, and Jakob left college, traffic to the site has grown three hundred per cent. In December of 2003, CollegeHumor.com generated $45,400; in December of this year, the revenues were $405,000, nearly half of that coming from sales of faux-vintage T-shirts with slogans— “What Would Ashton Do?”; “I Gave My Word to Stop at Third: 1987 Teen Abstinence Day Suffolk County Public Schools”—which they started marketing last spring under the brand name Busted Tees.

[ Full Article ]

$405,000 in revenue in December 2004, half of that coming from a website selling t-shirts…nice.

The questions is why can’t we all replicate their story? Let’s analyse what exactly it takes to have this kind of success:

1. Traffic, lots and lots of traffic.
2. Sell something that your traffic would buy.

Wow, rocket science it’s not. Okay maybe I’m over simplifying things a bit here.

The hard part is getting the traffic. Now maybe these guys got lucky, maybe they had first mover advantage and a unique understanding of the market they were targeting. They were smart in one way - what CollegeHumor does is capture the pictures and content that millions of students forward to each other every day. What’s another word for email forwarding? - Viral Marketing. So these guys tapped into a topic that naturally lends itself to viral marketing and no doubt their URL was circulated around colleges all over the world.

The site is not pornography but it does have a lot of pictures of girls kissing girls and exposing their breasts. That’s a formula for success if I ever heard it. The nice thing about this is that it’s all classed as humor, not smut. Sure you may not agree with this but when girls are fighting to expose their breasts on the site and guys are scrambling to get a look you have a recipe for a popular site.

If you went ahead and tried to duplicate their idea you would probably be scratching your head wondering why people are not submitting pictures to your site and no one knows about it. It’s just too late, these guys own this marketplace. In CollegeHumor’s case I think it was a combination of viral marketing, first mover advantage, a very sticky website concept (people spend significant time gawking at the photos) and a market that is very lucrative (college kids have ample disposable cash - they may not necessarily be rich but they do not have many expenses yet either). CollegeHumor also manages to remain “cool and funny” which is not easy when you service the 18-24 year old demographic.

The monetisation clincher was when they started the t-shirt business. The product matched their marketplace perfectly. The shirts are funny and unique (well maybe not now that they have sold so many) and no doubt anyone wearing one would have been considered “cool” by their peers. Heck I would buy these shirts myself if I didn’t have to import them from the USA and pay the shipping costs. Without the targeted traffic coming from CollegeHumor the t-shirt sales would not be nearly as good as they are.

Anyone want to start a funny t-shirt business in Australia?
Yaro Starak

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In yet more proof that it is possible to make big money through Google AdSense another blogger, Jason Calacanis, reports that his blog network, Weblogs Inc, is now on track to make $1 million per year in AdSense revenue.

yesterday we broke our $2,100 record with a $2,335 day. That’s an impressive number I know, because if we can take that number to $2,739.72 we’re at—wait for it—$1M a year.

For some perspective, take a look at some averages:

January we did $580 a day on average.
March was a $737 a day average.
May was a $1,585.57 average.

Now, before you get too excited let me tell you we’ve got 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers here at Weblogs, Inc. We’re a big, little company… so to speak. Plus I gotta pay for Peter Rojas’ gadget habit (let’s just say it ain’t pretty)!

However, if you follow those numbers we tripled the average in five months or so. Not sure we can triple every five months, but I think we can get this to a $3,000 to $5,000 per day average by the end of the year.

Weblogs Inc is a great idea that I’m glad to see take off. It’s basically a collection of blogs reporting on a range of topics. This business model allows over 100 bloggers to get paid for writing and as you can see the AdSense revenue, while probably not enough to cover all the expenses, no doubt covers a big chunk of the yearly payroll. The fact that they are also learning how to better leverage AdSense (or are just lucky!) to steadily increase the monthly income quite dramatically shows that AdSense can be used to help fund a business.

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