If Jelsoft thought like this, I might still like vBulletin

I used to evangelize for their brand. Now, I’m trying to get rid of that bitter taste they’ve left in my mouth by dumping my vBulletin licenses, and moving on to other services that compete with them.

Blogs are not a business

I wanted to follow up on my earlier point, about bloggers who are missing the point. It seems to me that the reason I’m thinking about this in such different terms is because I just don’t see blogging as a business. Sure, it’s very possible to make money with your blog, but the simple fact of making money doesn’t make you a business (even if the IRS want’s to tax you as one).

A business is something that becomes an entity upon its own. Small or large, the businesses we grow, if successful, will continue whether we’re present or not. The best businesses are the ones that develop to the point where the people that operate them are interchangable. If a business depends on any one person, it will fail as soon as that one person is no longer available. Blogs are the complete opposite of a business. A blog is all about the person who does the blogging. This is why I think that having your blog on your own domain, as opposed to a subdomain of a blogging service is not a major issue.

It’s not an issue that just occurred to me yesterday either. Over a year ago, I thought it would be a novel idea to buy someone’s blog. It was a novel idea. Maybe too novel of an idea. I think people still struggle with the idea, even when the blog isn’t as personal as the one I bought. After a couple of months, the blogger of the blog I bought and I decided the best thing for both of us was to transfer ownership of the blog back to him. The lesson learned was the blog is such a personal thing it’s difficult to separate it from yourself. In other words, it’s about the blogger, not the domain.

Moving a blog from a service’s subdomain to a domain of your own need not be a major undertaking either. Even with thousands of blog posts, with modern day technology the content can be readily enough moved. Naturally, I always recommend keeping current backups in case anything should go awry. If the people who read your blog don’t follow along to the new url, they really weren’t paying attention anyway. That leaves only the SEO questions. Those are the questions you should be asking when you want to move from a subdomain to your own domain. How long will you be in the sandbox? How will you get all those backlinks to switch over to your new url? But, really, how much were you depending on search engine traffic anyway?

That brings me back to is it a business? The search engine traffic may be very valuable to you if you depend on your blog for your source of income. In that case, a slower transition to your new url is in order. But, I’d urge you to take time to reflect on the vulnerability of your income source at this point. If you think that moving your url might compromise your ability to earn revenue on your blog, how would a major illness hit it? A true business would continue to operate while you’re in the hospital, or even if your on the beach on a tropical island. For those of you with successful blogs, what pace do you make yourself sustain to maintain that success? How long do you envision yourself working at that pace? And what do you plan to do when you’re done blogging?

On a side note, I do think that the success of a blog network has inspired some others to begin the transition from blogging to running a business. Good luck guys!

A few links to blogs that discuss making money with your blog, worth a look anyway.
Problogger.net
Bloglogic.net
Blogkits.com
Masternewmedia.org

Read this article about risk aversion

Read this article about risk aversion. Using Microsoft as an example, it’s a great point of view on the subject. I’ve never seen a blogger do so well with illustrations also. Worth a few minutes to look it over.

Yahoo Gives Up?

I saw this noted at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion Blog. According to an article syndicated by Bloomberg, Yahoo’s CFO Susan Decker said that Yahoo does not have a goal of being the number one search engine.

I just have to say, it’s a stupid thing to say. Even if they believed that they could not match Google in terms of market share, Yahoo should still strive to be number one in terms of quality. To just give up like that really doesn’t make sense. What makes it even more stupid is that Decker stated that they’d be happy to stay at their current level of market share. Well, how do they expect to maintain market share now that they’ve admitted they suck and that they don’t even have any plans of trying to do as well as Google? Why would they expect people to come back to their site when they’re searching for something when that’s their attitude?

Exactly what business is Yahoo! in anyway? It makes me wonder. Clearly they don’t consider themselves a search company. They do a lot more than that. Google is going that direction as well. I think it’s easy for a giant like Yahoo! to get lost, to lose its personality. What are they good at? Anything? They try to do so many things that perhaps they suck at everything. It’s just the massive amounts of traffic to their site keeping them alive at all. When you’re a small business, on the other hand, it’s absolutely critical to be able to effectively define yourself. A small business could never afford to let it be known that they do not aspire to be the best in category. Time will show how will it effect Yahoo!.

The Fix is In

If you believe Steelers linebacker Joey Porter, the NFL is about as legit as professional wrestling. According to Porter, the world wanted the Colts to win so the refs tried to rig the game by making bad calls. It reminds me of something I read in Freakonomics.

In Freakonomics, the authors write about an entrepreneur who starts up a bagel delivery service. The idea of the company is to deliver bagels to business offices so the employees don’t need to go out to buy their snacks. The owner of the service received payment on the honor system, leaving a collection box for people to put in a dollar for each bagel taken. The owner of the delivery service kept meticulous records of how many bagels were eaten versus how many dollars were put into the collections box.

To summerize the results, the important part of them anyway, the larger the corporation and the higher up the corporate ladder the customer was, the more likely they were to cheat the delivery service out of that dollar. I think this is astonishing. Who could better afford that dollar for a bagel than a corporate executive? The authors of Freakonomics make some interesting speculations based on the data, that these dishonest corporate execs perhaps rose up the ladder as a result of their dishonesty. That they felt a certain sense of entitlement, as powerful corporate executives, that they deserved the free bagel. Also, that cheating is far more acceptible in larger corporations than in small business.

Another interesting thing I’ve read in a few places recently is moanings from small business owners about how slow large corporations are with paying, and how large corporations often quibble over the bill. The remarkable point that several of those complainers made was that they were afraid to complain or stand up to justify increased charges because they feared that the large corporate customer would take their business elsewhere.

How do I draw a line between these bits of information? When you’re a small business servicing a large corporation, you should be even more vigilent about standing up for yourself than with other customers. I can easily believe that people in larger corporations are more likely to cheat. I’ve seen it enough times, with my own eyes. When you let them take the first liberty, perhaps they’re slow with paying a bill, paying after 90 days when your contract said net 30. When you let them do that, you’ve lost the war. They know they have the upper hand, that you need them more than they need you. If that’s the case, get out of the business.

Yep, you heard me, get out of the business. You have a faulty business plan. You should aspire to be in the position of providing a service that your clients need. Not on that, but that they get a better value from you than they could get elsewhere. There’s the key. Value. When your corporate clients play games with you like slow payments and shorting your bills, they’re telling you that they don’t value your services very highly. They may as well get the same service somewhere else. That’s too weak of a position to be in, for any business owner. Sell your business now. Close it down while you still have a shirt to wear. Move on.

Do you understand the difference between outsourcing and offshoring?

Everybody outsources. If you eat food that you didn’t grow yourself, you outsourced. Seriously, people need to get an understanding of what the word means. Take your clothes to the dry cleaners, it’s outsourcing. Need some legal work done? You hire the law firm down the street to do it instead of becoming a lawyer yourself, it’s outsourcing. If you’re talking about a business doing outsourcing, same idea. Does your web design firm use a hosting company to host the website? Woops, you’ve outsourced that! When you have a pizza party, do you make your own dough? No? You got it, you outsourced. Outsourcing isn’t the same thing as “offshoring”, okay?

Yes, PageRank isn’t Showing in Google’s Toolbar

Just so everyone understands

Toolbar isn’t real PageRank

Okay?

Now, let me explain in easy terms. Do you recall the last time someone took a photo of you? Maybe last week, a couple months ago, or whenever? Is that photo you or just an image of you? An image, right? Well, think of what the toolbar says (or used to say) as a snapshot photo of what real PageRank used to be, just like a photo shows what you used to look like at a specific point in history.

Now, tell me, would it make logical sense that if someone took away that recent photo of you, that you would then determine that you no longer exist?

What NOT to do with Your Website

I’ve seen this again and again. People thowing money into their website without a good sensible idea how it’s going to benefit their company. Recently, I saw one guy who spent $10,000 to have a marketing company set them up accounts with Adwords and Overture. Not for the clicks themselves, just for setting up the campaign. It’s something I could have done in an hour and a half. Another one spent over $5000 to have someone build his brochure style site.

I’m not saying that all money spent on a website is down the drain. What surprises me is the amount of money put into a project with no clear goals set, and how high prices people are willing to pay for such easy work. Maybe I should start doing more in this business!

How VoIP is Helping to Make Location Obsolete

Yea, I know, VoIP is a hot “buzz” topic now, but there’s some value I’m seeing in it for my future. I can sign on with a company like Vonage, and have them transfer my current phone number. I can also select any phone number in any area code in the USA I want, if I wanted a new number. Then, I can take that and move wherever. So, for example, I could move to a city in central Europe, and have people phone me as if I were still in the USA, and I can phone them as well. As long as I have a strong, broadband internet connection that is. Services such as Vonage offer a significant savings over traditional phone service as well. Another step in the direction of making locating obsolete.

2005 Mileage Rate to be 40.5 Cents

Milage Rate Increase – from a press release from the IRS

The Internal Revenue Service today released the optional standard mileage rates to use for 2005 in computing the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving expense purposes. The Internal Revenue Service today released the optional standard mileage rates to use for 2005 in computing the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving expense purposes.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2005, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (including vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:

40.5 cents a mile for all business miles driven, up from 37.5 cents a mile in 2004;
15 cents a mile when computing deductible medical or moving expenses, up from 14 cents a mile in 2004; and
14 cents a mile when giving services to a charitable organization.
The 3-cent increase in the business mileage rate was the largest one-year rise ever. The primary reasons were higher prices for vehicles and fuel during the year ending in September. The charitable standard mileage rate is set by law.

The standard mileage rates for business, medical and moving purposes are based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile. An independent contractor, Runzheimer International, conducted the study for the IRS.
A taxpayer may not use the business standard mileage rate for a vehicle after using any depreciation method under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS), after claiming a Section 179 deduction for that vehicle, for any vehicle used for hire, or for more than four vehicles used simultaneously. Revenue Procedure 2004-64 contains additional information on these standard mileage rates.

Next Page »