Today I was reading Skellie’s article on not posting for quite a while and it totally bummed me out. Not necessarily because she’s dealing with some issues regarding her blog and keeping up with it (I’m far too self-centered to worry about that). Instead I was troubled by her claims that she is only giving up $600-$1000 per month by not having ads on her site.

I discovered her blog during one of the periods she was guest blogging for Darren Rowse and I like pretty much everything about her blog. She re-affirmed my hope that you don’t have to make your persona completely public to be successful and she writes very useful articles. She has around 5000 RSS subscribers according to her post, of which I am one.

5000 RSS subscribers is a lot. We have one, me (Annie doesn’t even subscribe). So I find her statement that she could monetize at only about $1000 per month to be a little demoralizing. While I’ve never really wanted to “make money by blogging,” I think her site is indicative of the capabilities of Adsense based revenue. If someone as successful as her could be making a whopping $12,000 per year, what shot do we have?

All of this is validating my fears regarding our Internet Empire. I fear that if we work really hard and apply ourselves, we can make as much as we make now for roughly the same amount of work. Annie and I are both fairly successful people and I enjoy a lot of freedom in my work. It’s troubling to think that a large up-front cost of effort, we can duplicate my current situation.

I know all the super marketing pimps like John Chow will point out that there are way more ways to make money than just advertising. There are of course examples of plenty of people making good money from their websites. As I said we don’t intend our blog to be our sole source of income, or even primary. We’re building an Internet Empire after all. Nevertheless it’s a bit daunting to think that if we scaled the seventy five hundred levels, between our blog and Skellie’s that we would be in the 12k/year range.

Not too long ago we did a quick article on stock photos. I really didn’t have much of a problem with the results we were getting, however I was reading an article on skelliewag.org about how she uses flickr to get pictures and thought we might give it a try here. You should read the article but the the gist is:

• It’s easy to find photos on flickr, which I’ve found to be quite true.
• Only use photos under the Creative Commons license, which you can find here. This license allows you to make changes to the photo, like cropping our putting text over it, as long as you credit the artist.

Obviously the photos themselves are generally very striking. There are a lot of talented photographers on the site. I’m not completely sold on the idea however for a couple of reasons:

• The photos don’t lend themselves as much to our “captions” which I think are sometimes funny.
• Our plug-in that we use for the captions won’t let us credit the photographer in it, so I’m going to have to find a new plug-in
• Most importantly, in another article by skellie on problogger, she was advocating against changing the “style” of your image usage. So I think she would disapprove of me sometimes using stylish flickr photos, and sometimes using silly cartoons. She’s pretty successful so I’m reluctant to ignore her advice, but I’d hate to commit to never using cartoons and such again.

I may have to disregard her advice for the time being and mix pretty flickr photos with the other stock media. I think in many cases they’re a visual draw and more compelling than the art we’ve been using. I just hate to give up my opportunity to try to be pithy. Either way it is definitely something to consider for any blogger.

Stock photos are an Internet entrepreneur’s friend. A surprising number of people are willing to allow you to use their work for free. In a lot of cases site administrators try to capitalize on this and put themselves in as a middle man, but there are still plenty of places on the web where you can get stock photography and graphics for free.

A good starting place is the Wikipedia Page listing a good number of resources on the topic.

If those don’t work for you, here’s an Older List, which has quite a few possibilities as well.

There are of course plenty of ‘scams’ out there, so we have typically found a few that work for us and stuck with them. Some favorites of ours are:

• stock.xchng
• Public Domain Clip Art
• PD Photo

One way you can thank them is by putting a link back to them!

Why do you hurt me so?

In the course of one day I met Drupal, fell madly in love, got married, experienced the end of the honeymoon, nearly got a divorce and finally settled in to a uneasy truce. I’m not yet sure I haven’t made a mistake, but for the time being I’m willing to have an open mind. After all, for a few short hours I was madly in love.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla! or WordPress. It is a way to wrap up your content easily and manage it without having to write scripts or generate lots of pages. Drupal however has several characteristics that make it valuable for someone like me.

Drupal is highly modular

Even the most basic functionality of the CMS is deployed in modules (often user created). This allows you to build in what you want and leave out what you don’t. A nice feature especially when you’re “hacking” around in the code.

Drupal is highly configurable

This is the part that really works for me with Drupal. I really feel like whatever it is I want to do, if I was a skilled Drupal hacker I would be able to do it quickly and efficiently. I sense the potential to be able to “whip up” non-trivial sites without re-inventing the wheel. However…

Drupal is NOT easy to use

I am a fairly tech savvy person and even I spent considerable time figuring out how to do trivial things. Even in their documentation they make the point “who told you Drupal was easy?” Although I found that I was able to do several complex things with ease, the difficulty of several simple things quickly seemed to be offsetting the euphoria.

Final Analysis

At the end of the day I continue my involvement with Drupal because of the potential. Like so many young women lured in by a “bad boy” they think they can fix, I am settled in for a long period of heartbreak, but I do not want to walk away until I’m sure the promise I’ve seen cannot be fulfilled…oh dear what a disturbing metaphor.

One difficult component in doing this is it’s hard to find people who are motivated and promising, but not so big that they get no benefit out of working with you. If you just go and search for your keywords, you will basically find the people who have already “made it.” We’re looking for people who are going to “make it,” but are still climbing the ladder.

Enter Google Alerts

With Google Alerts, we can put in search terms and Google will let us know when something new appears for that search. While this will sometimes just show new posts in the “blue chip” sites, very often you will get results in up-and-comers. Quite honestly new blogs tend to post more often than established ones, so we’ve generally found that we get a higher percentage of new than old.

I recommend going ahead and creating a Google account to manage your alerts if you don’t already have one. While you can receive alerts without having an account, they are easier to manage and remember if you have an account from which to manage them. Especially since there are so many uses for Google Alerts. You will eventually have so many it will be nice to have a list you can reference.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Live Search Webmaster Center
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

Number 42 for "strap on"…oh dear.

In a not-surprising turn of events, Google’s is by far the most useful. Although its utility diminishes somewhat when it is “punishing” you. Both Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s have fewer features and Yahoo!’s even has a 24 hour “pending” period when you join. I have no idea why they can’t just validate you immediately like everyone else; that’s part of the purpose of me putting an otherwise useless file on my server.

Anyway, if you’re not using these I recommend them. They can help you analyze what’s going on with your website, which can be a difficult thing to determine at times. For example, with Google’s tools, you can:

• Check when your site was spidered last
• See what errors the bot encountered on your site
• Find “problem content’ like duplicate titles”
• See what searches you rank best for (VERY useful)
• Determine the most frequent keywords in your site and links to your site

…and of course more. These features can really help identify problems on your site and even, in some cases, strengths. I would definitely put these tools on my “must have” list. Also check out the relevant blogs for the tools:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog
• Live Search Blog

I love Google Analytics

In fact I may love it too much. I often spend far too much of my day sitting in front of the screen checking to see if and how our visitation numbers have changed. It’s really quite a waste of time. That being said I feel like anyone running a website should have Google Analytics or some kind of tracking software installed.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service that allows a webmaster to see who is viewing their website, where they came from and what they are viewing. It also allows you to track things like how people navigate through your site and allows you to define goals and see what factors are contributing to people who satisfy those goals.

Why You Should Install It Now

I recommend putting Google Analytics on your site as soon as possible. I actually intended to write this blog right when I started the site, but…I didn’t. You’re probably thinking that since you will be pretty much the only one going there for a while, there’s no rush. There’s a possibility however that people will just “drop by.” All of our sites have been spidered without us submitting them to Google and before we had an inbound link. When people “wander in” by certain search terms you get a feel for what you should be focusing your content on.

Installing Google Analytics also helps you quickly come to the realization that you need some kind of Content Management System (CMS), even if it’s a DIY one. In the course of developing your site you will have all kinds of site-wide changes like adding analytics that you will need to do, and some kind of content management is a must to make that simple. Even if it’s just using Smarty templates, you need to make these kind of changes easy.

Quick Tips

A couple of quick tips that would have saved me some time:

Use a Cookie to Exclude Yourself

You want to exclude yourself and anyone who works on your site from inflating your stats. You can do this with a filter as described here. Most people tend to exclude themselves by IP address. I may be unique, but I travel a lot and use my laptop from many different locations. I also have semi-frequent changes in IP due to my ISP, so IP seems like a fairly inexact way to exclude myself. If I set a cookie on my browser, then I know that I will be excluded regardless of where I log in from.

Important: You need to do this on every browser on your machine as it is set via cookie. If you rune IE and Firefox both for example, both need to have the cookie set.

The “Referrer” To Your Site Sticks

I found the documentation on this subject to be unclear but finally found confirmation here. If someone comes to you from a certain link or search and then returns to your site directly in the future, it will still show as being “referred” from the original site. This makes sense as it helps you calculate how “useful” that source was.

Read the Google Analytics Blog

The Google Analytics Blog oftentimes has great insight and information. I recommend reading the archived content as soon as possible and then keeping up with new posts.

I sometimes think that everyone has read this book. It’s featured prominently on sites like 43 folders. In fact “personal productivity” or “life hacking” is an entire genre of blogs out there, and a useful one at that.

While I don’t consider Protoscopic to necessarily be one of those sites, I think improving your productivity is one of the best ways to improve the returns of “You, Inc.” If you can waste less time and let others waste less of your time, you will be able to devote more time to side projects and possibly bring your “hourly rate” up. For those of us who keep our “day job” and still try to build an Internet Empire, increasing productivity is often a must.

Given all the attention already given to David Allen’s method, why am I still bothering to post a review? Well to some degree I want to reach out to the skeptical, like myself, and explain why I think that this book is a must-read even with all the hype. It’s not rocket-science, but it is fundamentally sound. So allow me to add to the chorus of praise.

Lists, lists and more lists

As I started reading Getting Things Done I became quickly annoyed. I am a list-maker by nature and his advice largely seemed to boil down to “make a bunch of lists and put stuff on them and periodically check them over.” I didn’t need a book to tell me that!

Despite my skepticism I followed his plan as I read. I didn’t wait until I got to the end to start his method, and as I proceeded through the book I found that the system was working. After this I decided to try to identify what it was about his lists that was so much better than mine.

I quickly came to the conclusion that his methods aren’t nearly as important as his goals. I think everyone who reads this book implements things a little differently, but his fundamental tenets sink into your mind and color how you do things. I think for me the key piece of advice that made the difference was (paraphrased):

Get everything on lists so you know what you have to do and don’t have nebulous worries floating around in your psyche.

If you keep up with your lists and manage them correctly you know what you’re supposed to be doing, have done and what’s behind. I so often find myself feeling “behind” without having enumerated exactly what I’m behind on. As I implemented the system I found that I easily knew what I was behind on, so even if I was behind I didn’t just have a vague feeling of dread. I knew what needed to be done and it seemed much more manageable with it all in front of me.

Required Reading

This book joins the exclusive club of books I would recommend for just about anyone. I suppose if you aren’t feeling like you don’t have enough time, then productivity concerns can wait. But I think that most of us are feeling a time crunch and a quick dose of Getting Things Done, can help alleviate things.

You’ve heard us talk about our link-building frustrations and about how tempting it is to bring in loads of traffic through temporary links. But we continue to put our collective nose to the grindstone, because, as Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall at SEOBook say in the archived 2006 gem,101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website, links “for the forseeable future [are] going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.”

Yes, things have changed since 2006. But we haven’t seen anything out there that discourages solid link-building as one of the best ways to establish a site on the web. As long as that’s the case, we’re going to put some of that grindstone energy behind few of these ideas—the ones we deem to be particularly timeless—and show take you through our trial and error. Stay tuned as we explore specific experiments in implementing many of these 101 tips.

Rarely can I give an unabashedly positive review of a book. In this case I can unequivocally say that I recommend The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law to anyone who wants to be an Entrepreneur.

What It Isn’t

Lest I too badly disturb anyone used to my usual cynicism, let me first warn potential buyers what this book is not. This book is not a guide to trying to conduct certain legal matters without a lawyer. There are tons of books out there on “Incorporating Your Own Business,” and this is not one of them. The value of this book is in limiting how much time and money you spend with your lawyer and having an understanding of your options and what your lawyer is advocating.

What It Is

Ultimately The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law is simply a high-level guide to the subset of the law that most affects entrepreneurs. The language is very easy to follow and concepts are presented in a logical order. In an excellent choice, the subject matter is presented in the order that it will usually be relevant to people. So for example, it first focuses on “quitting your day job” with rights to all of your work and proceeds all the way to IPO law.

One complaint that many may lodge is that so much is covered that none of it will apply to everyone. I think this is an illogical complaint for several reasons. First, the book is quite long, so even if you don’t use all of the information you still probably got plenty of value out of the book. Second, and more importantly, is that you can’t really know which of these sections does or does not apply to you without reading them. Information, even if not applicable now, may indeed be as your business progresses.

While you may never have an IPO, after reading about what it entails you might have a better idea of when it might be feasible. Even if it wasn’t your intent, you may find out that it’s more realistic than you thought. Or the book may recommend small changes you can make to make an IPO more feasible even if it’s not really in your plans. Even if you think that pollution may never be a concern for your business, the book makes some valid points about why you should be concerned about it, even if you aren’t in manufacturing.

Strong Points

The strongest points of the book are:

• Easy to understand language.
• A ‘case study’ at the end of each chapter that follows the progress of a fictitious startup to illustrate certain points.
• An appropriate amount of detail on most subjects. Enough to be useful, but not too much to make it not worth reading.

In summary I would recommend this book to anyone who plans on starting any kind of entrepreneurial venture. A few dollars spent on it could save you thousands in legal fees. Even if you never hire a lawyer, your improved knowledge of the law can make you more astute and informed when dealing with other parties.

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