I say 14 months, 3 days.

It’s going to take up too many resources for Google to make a go of it.

It’s going to get spammed to death, like Squidoo.

Even the best pages will be thinly disguised self-promotion (except the ones Google employees do).

What’s your prediction?

We’re getting too many phone calls from these people. Phone number 866-267-9392. Anyone else getting messages like this one?

http://www.zealot.com/blogs/voice-message.wav

We’re on the Federal ‘Do Not Call’ list. These calls are obviously a blatant attempt to skirt around that.

If you’re getting calls from these people as well, please leave a comment. If enough of us come together, perhaps we can get the attention of an Attorney General somewhere.

This thought came from a conversation at our SEO Meetup on Tuesday this week.  I talk to a lot of interesting people who show up at the meetups.  It’s a rare opportunity for me to interact face-to-face with people who are interested in similar topics.  There really aren’t that many of us that think SEO is a fascinating topic!

I think that a lot of the people who are in the SEO industry, who are doing it solo, suffer from a similar affliction.  Heavy on the ideas, light on the implementation.  I know that applies to me.  I can come up with a dozen great ideas in a day.  A great idea for a company isn’t worth much.  To me at least.  The value lies in the implementation.

What good is an idea if you can’t get it off the ground?  I can’t count the number of great ideas that I’ve had over the years.  Sometimes I go as far as registering a domain for the idea.  I have a hundred domains that have a great idea behind it.  When exactly I think I’ll have time to build a hundred businesses, I don’t know.  No answer to that question.  It astonishes me when I meet people who do the same thing.

What’s the solution?  I think for me that there’s a ceiling that I’ve reached.  Working solo has been a lot of fun.  Too much fun. It offers a flexibility that cannot be rivaled.  To get to the next level, though, I think that I need to be part of a team.  I’m not sure what team.  Sometimes I think that it doesn’t even matter what the idea behind the business is, I could add value to anything.  It does though.  Matter, that is.  It has to be something I could be passionate about.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Maine, a favorite professor told me that it isn’t enough to have talent.  You need to have a passion for what you’re doing.  My passion didn’t lie in becoming an academic.  I had a passion for doing research.  I didn’t have a passion for teaching, or the politics in academia.

When I launched the Small Business Forum, I was passionate about it.  It disappoints me that the investor that I sold it to doesn’t have the same passion.  He hasn’t brought it to the next level.  But, I don’t believe I could have brought it to the next level by myself.  Wearing many hats is part of being an entrepeneur.  Wearing many hats stifles passion.

Adam McFarland has a passion for his venture, Sports Lizard.  He also started a venture with some friends, but I think that’s less of a passion, and more of a calculated venture aimed at making money.  Is a passion enough?

I don’t think passion is enough.  Maybe it was for the professor at UMaine.  He has a tenured position; he doesn’t need to worry about where next month’s mortgage is coming from.  Most of us entrepreneurs do worry.

Shared passion, a good idea, and implementation are what lead to entrepreneurial success.

How do I come up with an idea for a niche website?  I get that question once or twice a week.  Others talk about it far more often.  This has been around for a while, but I’ve never mentioned it.  I don’t see too many other people mentioning it either.  Google Current is a frequently published video on Current TV which highlights specific hot topics (ones that are currently being searched for a lot on Google).  It’s a treasure trove for people looking for a popular niche to build a website around.  Some of the topics may be overly competitive, or inappropriate to build a website around, but many of the topics would suit your needs.  Some of the topics are very new, and you could see the potential of becoming a first-mover in the subject.  Happy hunting!

This is an interesting post, giving a couple of examples for a case study on how to choose a niche for your blog.  I wonder if the reason the second blog mentioned is more successful is because it enjoys the benefit of TrustRank on the typepad.com (sub)domain.   Another thought I had about this, which also probably never occurs to many bloggers who read Darren’s blog is that in a way it’s rather absurd to select the topic for your blog based upon what you think will be successful in Adsense.  To me, that’s somewhat like putting the cart before the horse, or even trying to get your cart to go without the horse.  Aren’t blogs supposed to be for people who have something to say?  Well, maybe not, but at least I think it’s a bad trend to see bloggers choosing topics based on what’s going to make them more money.  I do see this “Made for Adsense” trend leading us in the same direction as email.  Are MFA sites the web equivilant to spam in our email?

We all get caught up in our own lives.  I know I do.  Too much sometimes.  Focused on my own success, and how to get more.  It’s important to me to remember to stop for a moment, and think of those less fortunate, and give.  People who know me know that I have a real soft spot for kids.  I’m making a substantial donation to SOS Children’s Villages.  Sure, I could use the money to buy another website, or hire a developer to build something that would impress you.  I also realize that I do need to do those things, to reinvest in my own business, or I will not have the ability to give.  I’m not going to tell you that it will make you feel good, or that giving produces good kharma that will revisit you in the form of future successes, I don’t believe in that.  I won’t tell you an amount, or what to give, because a beggar sharing half of his meal with a hungry child may mean more than all the billions that Bill Gates could give, it’s not for me to judge.  Be the Samaritan, Luke 10:30-34.

Well, to my surprise Matt Cutts did take the time to answer my question to him.  His answer to my question was about half way down the list in this post.  I’ll quote the full answer here along with the question.

Q: “Why do you focus your attention so much on SEOs and not at webmasters who make actual quality websites?”
A: I think that’s an issue I have personally, because I spend so much of my time looking at spam. Lots of other people focus on helping general webmasters, like the Sitemaps team, for example. I have started to do “SEO Advice” posts instead of just “SEO Mistakes” posts, but you’re right: I personally could use a reminder to keep focusing on the sites that make quality content and how to pull those sites up, not just how to counter sites that cheat. Thanks for bringing that up.

I noticed at least one other person has taken interest in this.

Matt Cutts requested questions today on his blog.  I think my question will make him uncomfortable, and he’ll ignore it, but heck he made himself a public figure and sometimes that’s not meant to be comfortable.  This is something that’s always bugged me about him.  My question?  Matt, why do you focus all of your energy (in public) on working with SEOs and don’t pay any much attention at all to the wider webmaster community?

Matt seems to enjoy going to events like Pubcon and SES, and rubbing elbows with people like Barry Schwartz and Jim Boykin,
give interviews to people like Aaron Wall and the SEO Rockstars.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those guys, they’re all top of the line.  But, it begs the question, do you have to be a top of the line SEO to get Matt’s attention?

I do have a point, other than picking on Matt.  I do suppose that spending time with SEO folks does help him stay up to date on the latest tricks, if that’s really his goal.  However, it seems to me that much of what he’s trying to do is to help educate webmasters on how to build their websites to be successful in Google’s search results.  Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, but I’m thinking that a little bit of effort outside of the SEO community would go a long way.  I see far more potential from novice webmasters putting great content out on the web, but blundering when it comes to SEO.  These types are far more receptive to direction and guidence from someone like Mr. Cutts than are the hardened SEOs.

So, how about it Matt?  Why not spend some time with real webmasters at a place like Sitepoint’s Forums.

No!  Not at all.  Not in the least!  Anyone can setup a blog, and call themselves an expert.  It’s so easy to make a blog.  Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, you can have any of them, and many others, setup within a few minutes.  You can have your own domain for less than ten bucks.  The bar of entry is so low that we shouldn’t even consider it a bar of entry at all.

How do you evaluate someone’s expertise on something then?  That’s an incredibly difficult question.  Firstly, I look at what they write.  Does what they write make sense?  Sometimes you can gain invaluable knowledge from someone who is unknown in the industry.  But, the old saying that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing is particularly true in the blogosphere.  Just because you see someone spit out a couple of golden nuggets of wisedom, doesn’t make them an expert.

What’s their background?  Generally, people acquire expertise through experience and knowledge.  Be it the school of hard knocks, or the ivory tower, the best experts generally got there by making a major investment of their time into a subject.  That doesn’t mean that someone who popped up on the web with a blog yesterday is not an expert, but I would be looking at their motivation for blogging.

Having said that, I’m removing the “Small Business Blog” from the title of my blog.  My small business is moderately successful, and I’ve only been at it a couple of years, and I do not consider that enough to crown myself with the title “expert”.  What I write here is from my own experience, and from the many books I’ve read (I go through several a week), and from what I’ve learned from others.