Watch Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start Online Video

I just spent over an hour online watching this, and thought that it would be worth recommending.  I’ll link directly to his blog post about it, rather than direct to the video.  It’s a lot about how to pitch angel investors, but also some gems about startups in general.  You’ll also learn how he wore his Bozo hat to blow a potential 2 billion dollar deal, though not sure how much of that was a joke.

Rules for protecting yourself when buying a website

I’ve seen several excellent posts about the market in websites recently. This one by Todd Malicoat is very extensive and useful, and also this one by Andy Hagens a few weeks back. One important, even crucial, aspect of the marketplace that didn’t get covered enough is how to protect yourself in a transaction. I thought I’d add a short list of rules I go by when entering a transaction to purchase a site.

Rule #1: Never enter into a transaction over the web for an amount of money that is greater than what you can afford to write off. This is the rule that will save you from bankruptcy, and it applies generally to any transactions not just buying websites. If you can’t afford to lose the money, don’t spend it.

Rule #2: Know who you’re transacting with. Google them. Make sure you have a real name before you proceed, not just a forum handle. Google the name, Google the handle too. Of course you’re going to dig a lot deeper for the $10,000 transaction than you are for the $100 transaction, but a couple minutes of research can save you from pulling your hair out later.

Rule #3: Use an escrow service. Escrow.com, Sedo.com, or whatever, use it. Set a rule for yourself, that any transaction over $X you won’t do it without using escrow. My personal rule is when it gets into four figures, I use escrow. I do make exceptions to that, with people I’ve known and dealt with extensively in the past, of course, but when you’re dealing with someone for the first time, use escrow. A good deal of the fraudsters will back off from you just at the mention of escrow.

Rule #4: Don’t expect Paypal to bail you out. If you file a fraud report, Paypal might find in your favor. If they find in your favor, they will only give you the money back if the money is still in the fraudsters Paypal account. What do you suppose the chances are that the fraudster still has the cash in his Paypal account? Paypal won’t protect you above themselves. If you funded the transaction with credit card, you can charge it back, but expect Paypal to close your account and you won’t be able to use Paypal again.

Rule #5: Don’t expect the forum staff to protect you. I get this a lot as a moderator at Sitepoint. People get ripped off and expect the moderators to help them out. We can’t. I had an interesting exchange a while back with a guy who got ripped off by someone in Germany. He sent me a pm asking for me to help him out. I sent him a tongue-in-cheek reply telling him that I’d be happy to bloody the nose of the fraudster, all he had to do was pay my air fare and hotel expenses to Germany, and ps I don’t like flying coach. I think the message I sent cheered the guy up a bit, as well as explaining to him that the moderators are even more helpless in that situation than he was.

Rule #6: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Someone’s trying to sell you a site they say it has a PageRank 7, and makes $500 a month profits, and they only want you to pay them $1000 for the site? Sounds fishy, right? Take it as a warning sign, why would someone want to give you the site for $1000, when they could probably get ten times that on the open market? Obviously, they want to avoid the scrutiny of the public eye. If they put it up for public sale, facts they might wish to remain hidden will come out. Ask a trusted friend to have a look at the sale for you.

I’d love to hear rules that other people use to protect themselves in transactions too! Please comment below.

Journalistic Integrity and Blogs: Is it important when you’re blogging?

Over the weekend, I was thinking about this, and reading the entry on journalistic integrity at Wikipedia.  Do bloggers consider it ok to make up stuff for their blog posts?  With millions of blogs, how can any of us have any sense of who to trust?  Does popularity, the most common measure of blogs, automatically mean integrity?  Take Technorati’s list of popular blogs, as an example, should we trust every blog on that list, because they’re popular?  Is it even possible for a blogger who violates the rules of journalistic integrity to make a top list like that?  Are the rules for integrity different for bloggers than they are for traditional journalists?

Buying websites based on “potential”

After the 5000th time that someone offered to sell me a website with a lot of potential, I came up with a typically “Peter T Davis” response.  I carry a one dollar bill in my pocket.  That one dollar bill can potentially win this week’s Mega Millions.  This week, the Mega Millions jackpot is estimated at $120 million.  So, this one dollar bill I’m holding is potentially worth $120 million.  But, for you, I’ll sell it at the low, low price of $500,000.  How could you pass up the opportunity, the POTENTIAL, to have $120 million!  So, if you want to pitch your website for sale to me, go ahead, but tell me what the website is today, and save the delusions about potential.

Expertising - Does blogging make you an expert?

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.

Podcast with G. Jarvis Coffin III co-founder of Burst! Media

I just got done listening to this, if you’re interested in any way with advertising on the web it’s worth the listen.
Listen here

Bad News for the Blogosphere

Blog readership is stagnant, according to the Gallup poll. Cheers to Marketingvox for pointing to the survey. With tens of thousands of new blogs starting up every day, and the readership at large not growing. Does that mean we better not invest in that new blog startup?

Key tip about blog networks from the creator of the category

I read something at Jason Calacanis’s blog today that really resonated with me. When asked “What are the key points for success with a blog network?” he replied “Today it is really about focus. When we started we tried a lot of different things, but there was no competition. Now you’ve got a lot more folks involved in creating blogs for profit, so spreading yourself thin is a recipe for disaster.” I think this is true about every small business, not just blog networks. I think that a good way to build a mediocre business is to try to be good at a lot of different things. If you want to build something that will be stellar, focus.

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

A Thanks to Matt Cutts

I just wanted to give a public thanks to Matt Cutts for this post. I know of at least one person that this will mean a lot to, and I think it was very generous of Matt to do it. Kudos.

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