Famous for its niche and constantly going down, Twitter still continues to be big news. Today Techcrunch has a post about Twitter and how it might become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, etc.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but they could be right. Which of course leads to the next question then, where are the big competitors? Certainly venture capitalists think there is money to be had there even though Twitter doesn’t monetize their site yet, so there has got to be room for a competitor to nudge in and take some of that market. I think this will become more of a reality if Twitter continues to have their scalability issues, but that is a side issue.
So the question again is, can Twitter be overtaken? I think yes. What do you think?
Hmm… maybe there is an opportunity to build that competitor myself
TechCrunch has launched a new site called Elevator Pitches. The idea is as simple as it is neat, you submit a 60 second video giving your ‘elevator pitch’ for your startup. They then put the videos up on you tube and via their site allow users to rate the pitch and comment on them. The highest rated pitches will then get a mention on TechCrunch itself.
The benefit is twofold here. First you get a chance to see what a lot of people think of your startup as well as your pitching technique. The critiquing itself can be a huge benefit, as long you don’t take it too personal of course, allowing you to improve your delivery.
The second is of the exposure and if you get on the main site even more exposure.
Currently they only take pitches from existing startups but will eventually open it up to those who are still at the concept stage.
I recently started a couple web site projects for a client and needed an invoicing solution. I didn’t put much thought into it at first as I was more focused on the actual projects, then I needed to send an invoice and realized I didn’t have one!
The quick and dirty approach
The first thing did was fire up Open Office Writer and create a simple invoice. Nothing fancy. No logo, no colors or fancy fonts, just a simple table with the work done and cost.
While not the most professional looking invoice, it served its purpose and Open Office has a nice export to PDF for me to send it off to the client. Given that, I started looking for online solutions to my invoicing needs.
Lots of Choices!
A simple Google search revealed that there are quite a few online invoicing solutions with a variety of features and costs. I started looking at a few of them and liked what I saw. Then I came across a post on FreelanceSwitch that has a quick summary of seven online invoicing sites.
A couple such as Blinksale and SimplyBill I had seen already so I focused more on the others. Most of them have the modern ‘Web 2.0′ look and feel as far as colors and layouts. Some also have modern web application features like AJAX functionality, making the application more pleasing to use.
Features
My feature requirements were fairly straightforward. I wanted invoicing (duh), PDF export of an invoice and fairly inexpensive. The PDF requirement was a given in that I wanted to be able to send a document to a client for easy printing and distribution on their end. Unfortunately not all the invoice companies provide this capability and a couple said “just have them print the page to a PDF driver”. Uh, yea. Not everyone is savvy enough to even have a clue as to what that means and web pages don’t always print nicely as it is. PDF export is a must.
The more I looked at the offerings the more features I started to want. I liked the idea of a time tracker even though I don’t normally charge by the hour. I would still like to use it to keep an internal record of my time for each project. This kind of information will help in providing estimates for similar projects in the future.
Customization
Customization is a definite plus. Beyond a simple logo upload, the better solutions allow a lot of control over the look of your invoice. This allows you to really personalize your invoice to your company or brand. A quick thought here would to customize your invoice to match the look and feel of your website. Very handy.
Proposals
A few allow you to write up a proposal to send to a client, and then turn that proposal into an invoice with a simple click or two. May not be helpful to me for most of my work but it couldn’t hurt.
Misc. Features
A few of the offerings have the capability to integrate with Basecamp, which is an online project management and collaboration application, for importing clients. Very handy if you are going to use Basecamp for that functionality.
Cost
Most of the invoicing solutions I found are very reasonably priced, with plans well under $50 a month. Most of the offerings that I found had a plan in the under $20 range that suited me quite well. For the most part cost goes up as project counts go up or by invoices sent, etc.
Most also have a free version or at least a 30 day trial so you can try them out.
Which did I choose?
I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I’m leaning towards Cashboard. It seems to have more features that the others for a comparable or lower cost. They have Basecamp integration, great customization capabilities, a nicely time tracker widget and for my needs would only cost me a whopping $12 a month. Not too shabby.
Whatever your requirements are, you are sure to find a nice solution with the variety of online solutions.
There is wide speculation that we are in another internet bubble. With companies like Facebook having valuations of 15 billion, Digg not selling for a reported $100 million last year because they allegedly wanted $150+ million, it certainly looks like it.
However I believe the primary difference between today’s big internet companies and the 1999-2001 era was today these companies have revenue coming in. In the past vast number of venture capitalists jumped on any and every internet idea whether it could make money or not. So many of these companies bombed and the bubble burst. The majority of the newer companies started out without big money backing and showed real revenue before getting funding.
These days it is much simpler for a couple of people to bring a web startup to fruition with very little cash, grow it out before needing any funding. Digg is a classic example, having been started with $1000 or so. Today’s entrepreneurs also have far more options for developing sites more rapidly and the infrastructure is also a lot less expensive. Combined with more widely available scaling techniques for when they hit it big, it isn’t quite as hard anymore.
Of course that doesn’t mean every startup succeeds. A quick look through Techcrunch’s Deadpool will show that. It seems that the companies that do fail either spend too much too fast, or like the old days don’t have a sound business strategy. Some venture capital companies are also more cautious than they were before. Techcrunch has a good article about this.
Given all of that, it is funny to see people making fun of it all:
Last week I read about Amazon’s Startup Challenge on Techcrunch and today I submitted my entry. At the moment I’m not going to divulge what exactly my solution is, but needless to say I’m pretty excited about it and I’ve been sitting on it for about a year or so and just didn’t have the motivation to move forward with it. Well, now I do.
Regardless of how far I get in the challenge I’m fully going to build this thing and give a go. I have a good portion of the code written for it so I just need to dust it off, polish it up a bit here and there and then somehow market the hell out of it. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a Techcrunch feature
With less than a week of being live, Google and Yahoo have both sent organic search results to the site. This is wonderful news, as I’m banking on organic searches to really find the site and drive traffic as opposed to other marketing options. As I mentioned in a previous post my other blog has sent the vast majority of the 239 visitors and 359 page views, but with the search engines starting to give it some acceptance I’m looking forward to see what the next couple of weeks will bring.
While I am glad that Google has sent a couple visitors, I’m not as surprised as I am with Yahoo. For Google I used their webmaster tools to tell it about my sitemap file. I’m not sure how Yahoo found me so quickly though. One thing you can do however is tell all the search engines about your sitemap file by adding the URL to your robots.txt file like:
That way when a search engine (or any bot for that matter) finds your site, it will look at your robots.txt file and it will see that there is a sitemap file and use that for indexing your site.
Of course it doesn’t hurt to manually submit your site to search engines either
I’ve decided to give the niche mini-site idea a go. My idea is slightly different than the one described by the Net Business blog and that I mentioned in building a business around niche minisites.
Mine is a purely passive site that relies on RSS aggregation to supply content. I’ve take the core of my Luxor project and slightly repurposed it for my needs. The site is called CelebrityBlender.com and aggregates the feeds from a dozen or so celebrity gossip and news sites.
I launched the site last week and wrote about the design an technology behind the site in my other blog. Due to that blog I’ve gotten a couple hundred visitors to the site and Google has finally started indexing it.
Promoting CelebrityBlender
The real key to making this site work, at least initially, is Google searches. Celebrity sites and searches are growing at a dramatic rate according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which is good news to me. I thought about doing a few AdSense ads, but the competition is pretty high for celebrity keywords and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money.
Monetizing CelebrityBlender
I am primarily using ads from Commission Junction for monetization. A couple of reasons for this were Google ads only kept showing ads for celebrity cruises. I wanted something that would appeal more to the demographic of the readers so I signed up for a bunch of advertisers with CJ with the idea of having multiple ads rotate, using phpAdNews for the banner rotation software. I also threw in some AuctionAds for variety but not sure how well they will do on this particular site.
Next Steps
Once this site is making enough to pay for itself — the server is $25 a month — and enough to cover one other niche site, I will probably start another site in another niche area. I have a couple of ideas already but don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.
In this post I will cover the SEO (search engine optimization) aspects of building my friend’s fantasy sports site. If you haven’t read part 1, you can now.
Search Engine Friendly URLs
The first step to setting up the SEO for the site was getting the search engine friendly URLs configured. Joomla! has a built in way of doing this but the generated URLs are not human readable and leave out the words from page titles and such. This is important since search engines see these words as keywords and rank accordingly. For example, look at the URL of this post. You will see the title in the URL structure. That is what we mean by search engine friendly URLs.
For accomplishing this in Joomla! there are many extensions available; some free and some not. I ended up choosing the extension from ARTIO. Before you make your choice be sure that whichever extension you choose is compatible with any other extensions that you plan on installing now and in the future. This is important since these SEF plugins rewrite the URLs that the CMS naturally uses and this can cause problems with other extensions that gather data from the URL, such as forums.
SEO & Titles
Another extension I installed was JoomSEO. This is a mambot that changes the title of the page based on how you configure it. Like URLs, the title of the page is important in a couple of ways. First it should be unique for each page in your site and contain keywords for the page and/or the page’s title (duh) and not just the title of the site.
This is important for the users of search engines because the title is what Google shows as the link in its search results. The example below is a site that has the same title for every page. As a result the user can’t easily determine what is on each page.
The way RotoTown’s Titles are set up is that it shows the site name first, then an excerpt from the first paragraph.
Too Many Links To A Single Page
Another problem with a CMS (or blog for that matter) is having too many different URLs that all go to the same content. For example, with Wordpress, you have the primary link, a link from the archive —such as /2007/06/post-title—, one from the category —/category/post-title—, etc. Google follows all of these links and ends up seeing them as duplicate content. Not good. Duplicate content gets put into Google’s supplemental index and doesn’t get any Google love.
There are a couple of ways to fix this. The first is with the robots.txt file, which is a simple text file that tells Google and other search engines what do crawl on your site. In the case of a blog, you tell them to not index any URL that contains ‘category’ or ‘2007′, etc. by adding a line like: Disallow: /2007/*
For RotoTown however I didn’t have quite the same problem. The one I did have was with a feature of the CMS that allows the user to email, print or print as a PDF, any story on the site. Each of these little icons represents a URL that all point to the same content. So what I did was modify the file that displays this code and added in the ‘nofollow’ attribute on the links, such as:
<a href=”url-here” rel=”nofollow”>
This tells search engines not to follow that link and thus no index it.
There are other things of course to optimize the site for search engines, but these are the easy to do items.
A good friend of mine is a writer, editor and big fantasy sports aficionado. I recently helped him set up a blog called ThePickToClick, where he posts (more frequently than I do I must say) about his obsession.
One day we were talking about various entrepreneurial things and I asked him if he could do anything he wanted what would be it? Well he quickly said that it would be to write about sports and fantasy leagues. I told him that I could set up the site for him and he could take it from there.
Step One - Work Out A Content Plan
He wrote up a content plan which helped me immensely in setting up the site’s sections and categories and gave me an idea of how the site should look so we didn’t have to do a whole lot of back and forth “take a look at this”. OK, we still did that but it was more for detail stuff than anything else.
Step Two - Install the CMS
There are a good number of open source CMS solutions out there, but I was fairly familiar with Joomla! so that is what I installed for him. I then went and found a good template via RocketTheme and installed that too.
I’ve spent the better part of a couple days getting the menus are set up correctly and doing some of the cool tab-like features for him as well as installing various module and components while he decided on how he wanted it to work and what the sections should look like. Naturally this required me to change things a few times, but so far it is looking pretty good.
Over the next few days and maybe week or two I’ll go into the various things I had to do to get the site running the way I wanted as well as the way he wanted. Covering topics like SEO, SEF, etc.
The site? Oh yea the site is RotoTown.com. If you are into fantasy sports check it out and if you are really into fantasy sports ask him to be a contributor or give us some ideas on what you would like see to improve it.
Ryan Carson of DropSend.com has an article on TechCrunch covering the 3 points to building a successful web application that will be profitable.
The three points really apply to just about any business, but he covers the particulars concerning web applications today such as a free plans that show the value of your product and encourage upgrades to a paid version of your product.
Building a content site
Web businesses that are predominately content based have the tough decision of going completely free or offering a subscription. These businesses are largely content based such as Digg, Netvibes, Flickr, etc. As Ryan points out, to have a service like these become profitable you really need a large amount of traffic in order to sell advertising. Even with advertising it can be pretty difficult to truly become profitable.
Sites like YouTube and Digg for example have a high cost of operation. Bandwidth, server hosting, maintenance and upgrades can get very costly quickly. On the flip side, most of these companies can be started with relatively little capital. The beauty of a web application is that as a general rule they can be scaled up. You can start with a small leased server and as traffic (and hopefully revenue) build up you can grow.
Building a product
The alternate route to take is that of a hosted product. SmugMug, DropSend, 37Signals are all companies that fit into this model. Most of these companies have a free version that they use to allow a user to try out the service and then have 3 or 4 upgraded versions from there. Having a free version can also help to generate awareness of your product. After all, word of mouth is always the best selling mechanism. In today’s blogging world, word can spread quickly as well further driving potential customers to try out your product.
Whichever route you are thinking about taking, read Ryan’s article as he has some other good information like pricing models.
Note: For the software developers out there reading this I know that scalability of an application isn’t always as simple as just plugging in more hardware. There are many other factors to consider however it is easier to scale up software than other types of products.
