Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

A while ago I came across a forum post by Eric Locken looking for start-up business entrepreneurs to interview. Eric had recently completed his first book, Net Success Interviews, which probed various entrepreneurs and CEOs from some very interesting businesses, including Half.com, Slashdot and Cheapflights.co.uk. His next book was to do the same but this time for new aspiring start-up businesses rather than established success stories. I eagerly stuck my hand up to complete an interview for the book to focus on BetterEdit.com

The book has just launched and you can find the details and buy the book here - Start-Up Chat. What’s even better is that my interview was chosen for the free preview download PDF so you can read it here. Things have changed since I did the interview so I’m not 100% happy with the content (for example the first question about my mission statement needs to change since it quotes BetterEdit’s old mantra which isn’t a very good positioning statement - it’s since changed to “Get Better Grades!”), however it’s still an interesting enough read. I’d appreciate any feedback so please tell me what you think.

Of course I recommend reading the full book if you want to learn about some interesting businesses and entrepreneurs. I’ve ordered a copy of both this book and Eric’s previous book. Once I finish them I’ll have reviews up on Entrepreneur’s Journey as per usual.

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At the moment only geeks and savvy net users are utilising RSS. There is a fairly significant technical wall stopping RSS penetrating the mainstream. While the click-n-shoot subscription options (ala bloglines subscription button on this blog as an example) offer a reasonably simple method to subscribe to feeds it’s still not good enough. If my parents can’t get the hang of it then it’s not going to catch on. (My dad is starting to blog though.)

The Social Customer Manifesto: RSS is going to be the one that is going to have the greatest challenge slogging through the trough to true mass-market (i.e. not early-adopter) usage. Until there is a truly “zero-training” method of publishing, finding, and subscribing to RSS feeds (which might not even be called RSS feeds in a couple of years), RSS will have a challenge crossing the chasm, to use Geoffrey Moore’s terminology.

RSS just doesn’t mean anything, although neither does Podcast, or Blog, or Wiki or Googling or, or, yes well the Internet has it’s own language and, as demonstrated with Googling, netspeak can become mainstream, there is hope for RSS yet. Although I’d like to see “Feed” being thrown around a lot more for this technology. It works better because you can subscribe to a feed from anything and that’s what will happen in the future. People can more easily grasp the concept of feeding content by subscribing to it.

Regardless of the terminology, the technology needs to be simplified. Subscribing to feeds is okay. Creating feeds is possible if your blog software does it for you and blogs are very adaptable, but if you want to feed something else, say headlines from your news site, forum entries, recipes from your newsletter, latest odds from your betting site or new member sign ups at your highschool reunion database, it becomes complex. Can you say you know how to create a feed for your content without using a blog? I don’t know how to, but I know I could do some Googling for it and find the answers, maybe install some software or similar that will create feeds for me. But that process is just too long winded for the everyday. It’s okay for web developers, people that know the difference from FTP and HTTP, but for the layman web guy, that’s not realistic. RSS feeding needs to become as simple as browsing.

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Australian IT: THE publisher of a US men’s magazine has sued Google, alleging that the internet search giant is infringing on copyright by displaying thousands of pictures of nude women.

The magazine said it had already filed a complaint against Google in November 2004 claiming the web giant “is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue”.

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Copyright on the web has always been a contentious issue given that you can easily copy and make use of other people’s logos, graphics, photographs, videos, music and text. There are billions of webpages so the chances of you being singled out for infringement is small (until you get popular that is) and often webmasters simply choose to take the risk. I’ve seen many a site that features photography reproduced without permission and the owner stands behind a weak disclaimer along the lines of “if you own the rights to the media and you don’t want us to publish them, contact us and we will take them down“. Generally that’s good enough, until of course you start to profit from it, which clearly Google does now, at least indirectly, and that’s when the trouble starts brewing. Of course when your profits are fat and the public knows it companies are that much more eager to go after you. To stay safe - don’t make money!

I remember running my first few hobby sites on video games and trading cards and talking to friends who also managed hobby websites. We often made use of the official logos from the producers of the games, used screenshots and imagery which were all copyrighted and technically, should not have been using. But how can a fan site, a site that provides great free promotion for the products, operate without making use of media about the hobby the owners are so passionate about. I’d love for someone to make a fan site for any products I was selling (groupies!) and certainly would encourage the use of my media - it’s free exposure and branding!

Take blogs for example. Every day thousands of bloggers are posting logos and graphics from some of the highest profile companies in the world. These images usually contain links back to the company website and provide free traffic and increased exposure. In return the blogger gets a post that is just a little bit more appealing featuring pictures as well as text. It’s win-win.

Of course there is a fine line between exploitation and promotion and this of course is where things start to get all blurry. As long as the web remains as open as it is now these sorts of legal cases will continue to manifest.

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One of the simplest methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files. Keywords in file names is a good thing. Don’t call your webpages names like “services.html” or “products.html” actually use your keywords. Here is an example for you.

Let’s say you sell tennis balls online and you have three brands available, Slazenger, Wimbledon and Wilson and your webstore is at www.bigballsintennis.com.

A mistake would be to call your sales page something like this

www.bigballsintennis.com/product1.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/product2.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/product3.html

This just tells search engines that you sell products! What you want to do is use the keywords for the main search terms you want that page to show up for in search engines. Something like this would be better.

www.bigballsintennis.com/slazenger-tennis-balls.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/wimbledon-tennis-balls.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls.html

Note that it would also be a good idea to have a tennis balls homepage that links to all those pages but focuses on the keyword tennis balls only. Something like:

www.bigballsintennis.com/tennis-balls.html

Now remember you probably face a bit of competition for the keywords “tennis balls” since globally you might have a few competitors also selling online. You should conduct some keyword research first and determine which phrases you want to work towards optimizing for. You might notice there is little competition for Slazenger and work towards optimising for sales of that brand. Maybe your research shows that most people are using the phrase “tennis ball shop” so you should optimize for those keywords. Or you might consider working towards a local geographical niche, like “tennis balls Bahamas” or even your home town or state.

Remember you don’t have to get things right the first time. Do some keyword research, choose some keywords and then test to see how high up you can get your pages to rank for certain key phrases. If those phrases don’t bring in traffic keep testing until you find a combination that works. Remember though that file names are only a small part of the overall SEO process and if you only optimize your file names and not the on-page copy, the incoming links, your internal site structure etc. etc, your efforts in file name design will have little impact.

How To Structure Long File Names

Problogger Darren posted an entry resolving whether dashes or underscores are better for file name structure which referenced Matt Cutt’s comments on the topic. The conclusion was that dashes make for better file naming, at least for Google SERPs.

When we say say dashes it’s like this - www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls.html
as opposed to this - www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson_tennis_balls.html

I also endorse this conclusion and have been structuring my files with dashes for a long time now. I made this decision not only for SEO purposes but for human navigation too. Many people don’t know what an underscore is and even have trouble finding it on their keyboard. Dashes look clearer on screen and act as a good divider for keywords.

If you are ever in doubt about which conventions are the best for any aspect of SEO or web design look around the web and see how the most popular websites structure their pages. If you look at the default for software programs such as WordPress, the blog content management system, you will notice that dashes are implemented and you can bet that the people behind WordPress did some research into SEO because they want WordPress to be the blog system of choice.

The only thing to be careful with is to not go over board with file names. Don’t do this -

www.bigballsintennis.com/the-best-cheapest-most-impressive-wilson-tennis-balls-you-will-find-online.html

Clearly this is just silly. You are diluting your keywords, creating a page that is next to impossible to remember or type in manually and are certainly not helping your SEO.

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Many interesting business ideas have popped up aimed at leveraging the efficiencies available when you utilise the Internet as the order point for sales. Given our “global economy” and advanced manufacturing processes the time it takes to go from clicking the order button to shipping a product has made just in time (JIT) manufacturing a real option for many business.

One of the restrictions in the past that stopped most companies from using JIT-M was that it could take time, too much time. You don’t want customers waiting months to receive their goods. Consequently only companies that could tightly control the manufacturing and distribution process could afford to use this method or even hope to make it work efficiently. Obviously it was totally off the radar for the home or small business, that is until now.

The speed of communication makes JIT-M a reality for companies of all sizes. The Internet has made it possible to access JIT at the click of a mouse with products produced and delivered as they are ordered online. Because the web enables manufacturing companies to have a global reach they can offer the benefits of JIT-M to almost any source, including small business and even consumers.

Just recently I came across a site that is an innovative user of JIT on the web providing business to consumer (B2C) product on demand.

Lulu.com offers book authors an outlet to self publish and “create” books using a JIT system. Books are manufactured and shipped as they are purchased by consumers. The author takes a royalty and Ms. Lulu provides everything else, including payment processing, manufacturing and shipping. Best of all the service is completely free for book writers and still gives them complete creative control including design and copyrights. I think Lulu is the self-publisher’s dream.

Lulu.com: Traditional publishers generally print thousands of copies of a given book all at once. This creates a lower cost per copy, but it requires a large publishing company that can foot the bill for all that printing and storage up front. Publishers take most of the money from book sales, and the author gets only a little bit. Lulu gives you financial control by making it possible and profitable to print a single copy.

From a JIT point of view the benefits of producing books as they are purchased are obvious:

• No wasted inventory (except perhaps raw materials - but they can often be reused.)
• Less risk involved for all parties - publishers, printers and authors.
• No start-up costs.
• You profit when each sale is made.

Economies of scale should help Lulu to continue to reduce costs and increase margins as they become more popular and the more popular they become the better the site will be because more books will be available. This will in turn benefit the authors on the site because there will be more traffic coming to potentially buy their books. Even simply as a self-publisher’s manufacturer Lulu offers an affordable way for an author to see his or her book in print.

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