Sunday, June 24th, 2007
What is an idea worth?
What is the value of consulting services?
If you say nothing and everything - you'd be exactly right.
One of Paul Graham's startup essays explains the difference:
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.
The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.
On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.
Or had Google put the right people on their project - Google Video - they could have stolen YouTube's fire before it lit.
Unfortunately normally we don't know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven't used it before - we run our entire office schedule on it, and it's a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).
So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year - the dilemma with consulting services, is that it's still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.
Obviously startups are the way to go. But it's damn hard work.
Creating a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it's cost me dearly.
Am I ready to give up?
No.
When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
There are lots of ways to build incoming links.
For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.
Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.
On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.
And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.
Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.
With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.
The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:
Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.
The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.
What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.
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By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Like everybody in search we are having to get more involved in Social Bookmarking than we used to be.
Like most people in search, normally we don't have a lot of time for social bookmarking. It's a pretty busy year.
On this weblog, we've implemented Denis de Bernardy Bookmark Me plugin which gives direct access to 25 services (del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Ask, BlinkList, blogmarks, Blogg-Buzz, Google, Ma.gnolia, muti, Netscape, ppnow, Rojo, Shadows, Simpy, Socializer, Spurl, StumbleUpon, Tailrank, Technorati, Windows Live, Wists, Yahoo!).
We've selected del.icio.us, Digg, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon and Technorati for now. I would really hate to see more than five icons at the bottom of my posts. Even that's a bit of a stretch. The PR drain would be terrible but Denis de Bernardy very sensibly allows us to automatically put no-follow tags on all bookmarking services with a single checkbox.
Boomarkme-Icon
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By Alec
WordPress |
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Just put up an extended post on how to create and hide identifiers in WordPress template files.
This way you can see what PHP files generate the page you are looking at on the front end. It's a big help when you have a large design editing project - you can see right away which PHP file you are working on.
That post is in the pages section, as I am working on putting together a guide for WordPress users who are not PHP coders on how to hack a WordPress template.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
Some well-known SEOs are advocating using rel="no-follow" on all outbound links. Aaron Wall has unearthed this gem in Dan Thies's updated SEO Fast Start (free content flypaper for StomperNet membership which is $800/month):
Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason.
This is the most narrow-minded tripe I've ever heard. Google will rank websites higher who don't link to anyone else? Such a strategy makes a mockery of the whole essence of hypertext and the WWW (world wide web).
This school of thought has its origins with Leslie Rohde from his Optilink/Optispider cult days (circa 2002-2003). The clunky and overpriced Optilink has since been superceded by Brad Callen's Link Proctor, later renamed SEO Elite. Aaron Wall has some free tools (alas some of them broken now - SEO Elite is more reliably updated) and there are lots of other pay tools out there now which track your backlinks.
What is valuable advice is not hoarding PR, but channeling Page Rank. I mean really - you don't increase your wealth by putting your money under your mattress. You increase your wealth by reinvesting your money wisely. And the same thing applies to Page Rank on the internet.
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By Alec
SEO |
