Making tough decisions

This year has been the worse for tough decisions.
For a few years I ran an online news publishing arm of my business, but from April this year Google effectively killed it, along with all the other small news publishers.
All because Google wanted to send Google News visitors to brand websites for news.
While I do have [...]

Learning from failure

Now here’s a really nice section on a website - gaming developers detailing their successes anf failures when developing games.
Generally it reveals a lot about the planning process, setting up goals, and trying to meet them - even still there are some interesting stories on how different companies appraised their success or failure.
GamaSutra: Postmortem

Murdering my darlings

Writers are sometimes faced with the task of having to remove sections of their work and characters from a book. No matter how much they love these sections, they must be removed or changed as demanded by the publisher, to make it ready for publishing.
The process is called “murdering your darlings”.
I’m going through a similar [...]

Keeping up with emails

I’ve always had a problem keeping up with my emails - it’s an organisational problem that’s being building up for a long time.
I prioritise client emails to respond to and always deal with those - but then there are all the other, non-client, emails I receive.
I usually end up opening a string of these other [...]

The Farce of easy A Levels

What a surprise - A Level results continue to show record improvements, with record pass rates and record A grades awarded.
A Levels have become a farce - they are absolutely getting easier, and I know because I have 9 A Level passes over a 4 year period, and saw them getting easier as a student [...]

Important Notice - please read

I’m now blogging my secrets away at Internet Business.
More explained here: Everything now changes on InternetBusiness.co.uk

I work with small businesses you have never heard of - I work with massive corporations whose brands you walk past routinely on the high street.
I’ve been interviewed by national media, national press, and spoken at international conferences.
It’s time to [...]

Hardest lesson in business: Managing growth

I’m at something of a business crisis point at present - managing growth.
Simply put, my workload is far too large for me to handle.
This is a big part of trying to expand my business - not so much client side, but general services side.
Because I’ve always been a hands-on person, I used to do everything [...]

Intel CEO’s amazing risk quote

I was amazed to see this quote from Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, on the BBC today:

Our business model is one of very high risk: We dig a very big hole in the ground, spend three billion dollars to build a factory in it, which takes three years, to produce technology we haven’t invented yet, to [...]

Lawyers: Eat My Shorts

It is a sad fact of the world that some companies and people use the legal system for intimidation purposes.
It is a sad fact of the world that those companies and individuals most likely to use the legal system to intimidate, are those more likely to be involved in unethical, or potentially illegal practices.
Nearly two [...]

How to complain

In business and domestic life I’ve repeatedly encountered issues where I’ve felt as though a product/service has either been not satisfactorily delivered, or delivered at all.
In raising complaints, I’ve learned a few key pointers on how to ensure a reasonably swift resolution of such issues:
1. Ask, don’t threaten
Don’t threaten anything. We don’t know there is [...]

20 Lessons I’ve Learned in Business

I never trained nor studied in business - getting involved in SEO and then running a SEO company was all pretty much an accidental process, and an interesting learning curve to boot.
However, I have learned a number of principles of business which I think have kept me in good stead.
I’ve already posted them in the [...]

Using Adsense stats as a business development tool

This afternoon I decided to set up historical records of Adsense earnings for my top performing websites over 2007.
I’m not a high-flyer in SEO - I spend all my time working on development projects rather than posturing - and while I’m certainly not a top Adsense earner, the revenues are enough to make Google my [...]

Tips for buying sites/domains

I’ve been buying sites/domains of late, and already wasted money doing this, so I thought I’d pass on a few tips with regards to buying a website or domain name.
The reason for buying sites and domains should be obvious: asset development.
There are so many reasons why asset development can be useful:
- capturing mindshare
- lead generation
- [...]

TV - the internet endgame

Bored by people worrying about how big their little green bar is, as if it’s some kind of objective measurement of penis size? Thinking about the real future of the internet?
Read on, then…
Here’s the endgame of the internet laid out in a simple acronym: TV.
Not TV as we currently know it, but an information-rich multi-media [...]

Good staff are hard to find

Good staff are hard to find.
I’ve got some good staff on my team - my writers are especially of a good standard, namely because I never went on price, but instead, on quality, hiring experienced writers already working in the UK press industry.
However, writing requires a particular skill - what’s more difficult is when [...]

Learning from experience and turning failure into success

A lot of business/marketing/webmaster blogs are filled with speculation - sales-speak which defines success with a subject in generic terms.
Success is nothing more than working hard and focusing on your subject. Apparently.
I disagree - success with anything comes from experience, and a big part of that experience comes from doing things *wrong*.
That means wasting [...]

10 reasons why my sites suck - do yours?

It gets just a little intimidating when I read of publishers earning over $1000 a day for a single site, and other sites generating hundreds of thousands of visits per day.
Especially as I’m doing nowhere near either with any of my sites.
So what am I doing wrong?
Just a cursory examination of some similar sites in [...]

Tips for brainstorming for a brand

If there’s one thing I’ve really gotten wrong in the past, it’s registering domains on a keyword basis.
I don’t mean anything obviously spammy, and I’ve only ever registered a single domain with more than one hyphen in it.
But otherwise, while the domains have been good for getting a keyword in there, they really suck as [...]

Consolidation vs Niche Targeting: Pros and Cons

I’m currently in a conundrum, so I’m going to think aloud for this post.
The problem is one of Generic vs Niche targeting - especially with regards to consolidating a number of niche sites into a larger generic one.
If you have multiple sites in the same generic vertical covering different niche elements, should you consolidate them [...]

Revenue Share - the next webmaster economy?

Recently I’ve noticed an emerging new trend online - revenue share as a business model applied to forums, blogs, and news communities.
The idea is simple - whatever advertising revenues the site earns is split with the active community members.
The most common way this is set up is via contextual advertising accounts, such as Google Adsense, [...]