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I have a rather long podcast today which is generally about choosing an Internet business but I talk a lot around the concept as well. Selecting what project to work towards on the Internet is not a task you should take to lightly but as I mention in the audio it’s not something you should analyse for too long either. It’s so easy to test on the Internet that often the best form of market research is to create a working business and see what happens.

I made one mistake mentioning Ryan Glasgow’s blog, it is actually at http://www.ryanjglasgow.com - I missed the “j” in the middle when I mentioned it in the podcast.

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I was recently contacted by Stephanie Yeh, co-author (with Raymond Yeh) of a brand new book about to be released called The Art of Business. The book is released on Wednesday 27th of July in the USA so hopefully by the time you read this it will be available to you at Amazon.com. I was lucky enough to be offered a pre-release version as a preview - one of the perks of business blogging!

As a special offer for the release of the book Stephanie has gone to a lot of trouble to create quite an amazing array of bonus materials from some very prominent authors and experts available only if you buy the book on release day (today). Here is the blurb about the release:

Do the Right Thing for You and Your Business http://www.theartofbusinessbook.com/specialoffer.html

In just 2 minutes you can get closely-held secrets from the world’s greatest business leaders and experts, and after doing so it may be impossible for you to ever “do business as usual” again.

Michael Gerber, Harvey Mackay, Jay Conrad Levinson, Faith Popcorn, Tom Hopkins, Keith Ferrazzi (plus a few extraordinary authors and experts) are ready to give you their timeless business secrets plus much more if you do one thing today, July 27th!

http://www.theartofbusinessbook.com/specialoffer.html

Here is a excerpt from the book to wet your appetite.

SWA is the envy of every other airline in the industry, but very few have been able to emulate this fun-loving airline’s record performance or deep stability. Kelleher asserts that the spirit of SWA employees is the hardest thing for other airlines to copy or create:

“We recognize that the esprit de corps of your people is the hardest thing for a competitor to imitate. In other words, I always tell our people that the intangibles are much more important than the tangibles because your competitor can buy the tangibles, but they can’t buy and easily create the intangibles.”

That “esprit de corps” is a deliberate strategy that the airline’s founding members cultivated since the beginning. SWA has always hired people with the right attitude and values that fit easily into the culture of accountability, initiative, and caring. Colleen Barrett speaks of hiring for attitude and training for aptitude. At SWA, no amount of training or aptitude can make up for a lack of attitude. She tells every new group of pilots:

“You could have come to us with 22 letters of recommendation from top gun pilots, from the President of the United States, the generals, and all of that. We still wouldn’t hire you if your attitude or behavior turned us off during the interview.”

Jim Wimberly, Executive Vice President of Operations, adds that SWA hires people who put the needs of others in front of their own. In other words, the airline hires only those with a service mentality and fun-loving attitude, and trains them with additional professional skills.

New recruits at SWA are constantly indoctrinated into the SWA way–history, philosophy, the Golden Rule,
accountability, discipline, operations, and more. Barrett points out that the SWA culture is so strong that peer
pressure is a significant training influence on new hires. To emphasize the SWA way of life, she tells every new hire,

“If you are looking to become tremendously wealthy at Southwest, probably this is not the place that you want to be. But if you are looking for a cause to join versus just a company to work for, then we have got something that will set you afire.”

From the early days, the company’s officers worked hard to acknowledge and stay in touch with field employees. In fact, Kelleher instituted what he called a “Day in the Field,” a concept he learned reading about China, in which executive officers spend the day out in the field working alongside regular employees. At 72, Kelleher acknowledges that it’s getting harder to haul baggage, but he does it anyway. Such “Days in the Field” keep the SWA spirit alive not just in the field, but in the executive offices as well.

From Raymond Yeh’s “The Art of Business”
http://www.theartofbusinessbook.com/specialoffer.html

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It takes guts to go after marketshare when a giant such as eBay is your competition but new auction website Quty has decided to give it a go. There unique twist on online auctions - 5% of the profits go direct to charity.

The Quty 5 Percent Initiative

From the very early stages of Quty’s development, our co-founders have believed that one of the responsibilities of a successful company is to give back to the communities that help them become successful. We decided the most consistent way of achieving this is to permanently dedicate 5% of our topline company revenues to helping the folks who are most in need in the local areas where our users live. That’s why we created what we call “the Quty 5 Percent Initiative” or “5i”.

We examined some of each individual’s basic needs such as food, a roof over our head and the clothes on our back, a lot of things most of us don’t even think about on a daily basis.

We then looked at Ebay.com as an obvious example of an auction site. With 2004 revenues in excess in $3 billion dollars, 5% would be about $150 million that could be donated to local humanitarian initiatives right in the same state where users live. It may take a while before we get to the size of our competition, but we like to think big. And the bigger we grow, the more we’ll be able to give.

[ Visit Quty ]

In a market such as online auctions it’s very difficult to reach critical mass because of the network effects already enjoyed by the incumbent. EBay has the sellers therefore eBay has the buyers and vice versa. The switching costs to move away from eBay are significant- less selection for buyers and lower prices for sellers because of reduced competition keeping auction prices down.

Kudos to Quty for coming up with a morally friendly auction model and I hope they can establish enough traction to at least stay in operation. The reality of course is that they will not challenge eBay. No company will ever likely challenge eBay’s position in online auctions unless the whole system changes or something better comes along and people no longer use online auctions to conduct commerce.

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I’ve been touting the brilliance of blogging as a great way to get content indexed into search engines quickly. I’ve told people how I set up my first blog (which is now a PageRank 5), how Google ate up the pages and consequently I had top ranking for phrases I had merely mentioned in a blog post or two. For example I twice mentioned the phrase iTunes Australia when the music service was about to launch down under and then was stopped at the last minute because one of the record labels pulled out. Due to my two entries including the phrase iTunes Australia in the title my blog received a first page result for a search on iTunes Australia in Google Australia. This happened fast too, only days after adding the blog articles.

There was one thing in particular that I was convinced made blogging more powerful than your standard website, the trackback or pingback.

Before I go on let me explain what a trackback is. Not too long ago I was just starting to blog and the whole trackback system had me very confused. I read the instructions and it said a trackback was a way for bloggers to talk to each other and easily refer to other blogs. I still didn’t get it. Of course as with anything once I experienced initiating and receiving a trackback ping I had a better understanding of how it worked. I also spent a bit of time reading other blogs and learned the different ways blogs ping each other.

Now let me see if I can explain it to you in simple terms and pass on this wonderful knowledge I have gained.

Most blogs allow trackbacks and you will see a link in every blog entry with a trackback URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that other blogs can use in entries they make. At the bottom of this entry you will find a link to the URI to trackback this blog post. Now if another blogger read this article and decided to reference to it on their blog they would insert the trackback URI into a special box on the input form where they create new blog entries (see the image as an example of the trackback entry box in Wordpress, the blogging software I’m using to run this blog). When they publish the entry their blog will send a ping to this blog and provided I approve the trackback (I have all comments and pings set to be manually approved if the person has never commented or pinged before at Entrepreneur’s Journey) then in the comments section a trackback entry will be made to this post. The trackback ping is usually a truncation taking the first few lines of the post from the source blog along with a link to the blog entry. See this entry in my blog that was trackbacked for an example.

Chances are you still don’t get trackbacks and to be honest you may never understand it until you try it. I didn’t. In a nutshell a trackback is a simple way to create a reciprocal link between two entries in two blogs. They encourage bloggers to reference to each other and exchange links easily.

Now we all know how good reciprocal links are for search engine optimisation. My thoughts were if you trackbacked to other blogs, especially blogs with high PageRank and relevancy to your own blog that you were creating this awesome system of backlinks. The same went for making comments on other blogs because if you choose to you can leave a link to your site whenever you make a comment on a blog. You could pick and choose which blogs to swap links with simply by creating new entries trackbacking to other blogs and making comments in other blogs. You couldn’t go too crazy with this idea, abusing other blogs by effectively spamming, but as long as you kept on topic and contributed something relevant it didn’t take much to manipulate the system. So I was out there telling everyone how great this blogging thing was.

Just recently I noticed this little bit of code in some of the comments made on my blog rel="nofollow". It’s contained in any comment or trackback link. I saw it and then went out and checked some of the other blogging software such as Movable Type and TypePad and saw the same code in any outbound link in a comment or ping. In Wordpress it’s an automatic setting for any comments made that include links.

The code rel="nofollow" is a relatively new piece of code created for search engine spiders or bots. Basically it instructs search engines not to follow the link. There went the idea that trackbacks and comments were good for SEO. I had been spreading lies.

It make sense though. You don’t want to encourage PageRank leakage from comment and trackback spammers hitting your blog. By including this code it means that people will leave comments and complete trackbacks purely to add some value and not “steal” PageRank. Well in theory at least.

The good (and bad) thing is that trackbacks and comments are being noticed by humans (they have humans using the Internet now? Wow!) and those humans might just follow the links and discover your website. You shouldn’t expect any PageRank jumps because you have been trackbacking every PR 6 blog you could find but you will get some traffic. Unfortunately spammers realised this and went to work to take advantage of the blog commenting system and steal eyeball traffic using automated trackbacking systems.

Trackback spam is a real problem for the blogosphere. It’s become a common thorn in the side for many bloggers much like email spam is for the everyday Internet user. Blog software is getting much better at stopping trackback spam, but like email spam all you can do is filter and control, it adds yet another chore to your Internet day. One of the features I love about Wordpress is that out of the box the software comes with some great tools for blocking spam. Yet another good reason I had for switching away from Movable Type.

I won’t be telling everyone how amazing trackbacks are anymore as part of an SEO strategy but they still play a very important role in the development of a blog. I will never stop pitching blogs as a great way to run a website. The evidence still shows that blog articles are being indexed really well by the search engines, in particular Google, so I have no problems strongly recommending a blog as part of almost any online business strategy.

Yaro Starak
Blogger

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A guy I know just launched a website for his poker coaching business. He gets $100 an hour. He also makes money from affiliate marketing for a paid poker site, something that the big online ad networks have been warned against by the FCC. Given the size of this market, the amount of money that these poker sites are minting, and the fact that bigger media is hesitant to take their advertising money, there is quite a sweet spot for good poker players to make some money through coaching and affilliate programs. Will this be the next big career move? “Daddy, I want to be a poker website affiliate when I grow up.”

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Every now and then I ponder these markets. Gambling and porn are industries famous for being very profitable online way before anything else. How well would a gambling or pornography blog do? Think about the affiliate programs, the commissions and easy sell to the target market. Then I remind myself that I don’t really want to associated with these industries and go back to work on the cleaner ideas.

Poker though is another story. It’s fair to say that at the moment Poker is enjoying a fad-like run ala the hula-hoop, yo-yo and even dare I say it, the Macarena. Though maybe it’s something more. Poker has been around for a while and maybe this new found popularity is here to stay. Either way there is a lot of money around this game, with Poker stars earning as much as professional golf or tennis players and a lot of everyday people are getting hooked chasing the cash. It doesn’t feel as dirty as other forms of gambling. Most people would have played some Poker late at night at a friends house once or twice. Good clean fun, though taking your mate’s money makes it that much sweeter…hmm.

I love gaming. Gaming for money is even better. I used to play Magic: the Gathering competitively, going to tournaments most weekends in my home town of Brisbane and occasionally travelling overseas for tournaments in Singapore, Japan, and my claim to fame, the World Championships in Seattle, USA in 1998. A gaming tournament is like going to a movie, it’s escapism for a full day where you immerse yourself in a game and surround yourself with others sharing the same escape. Those that can make a living playing a card game are lucky indeed.

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