While we see the headlines about thousands of new internet sites being launched each and every day of the year, it seems that more and more would be online entrepreneurs are calling it a day. The news that some are struggling will not surprise those who follow the industry but why are people calling it a day? What is the problem?
The problem with many new entrants to the online world is the fact that they see the headlines, they see the multi-millionaires driving about in their new Ferrari’s and they want it – tomorrow!
There is no other business environment which can match the internet for building up your hopes only to scupper them and leave you feeling helpless – but is it really that bad. The sad fact is that many people who join the online revolution come to the party with some great ideas, fresh thoughts and a will to win. However, too many get disappointed and leave the scene before they have given their site and business a chance to breath. It does not happen over night for 99.999999% of people, so give it time and give your new business time to breath. Make sure you don’t give you site and your early start business away for buttons!
More and more people are set to feel real pain and guilt in the future with more and more savvy online business people picking up good sites, good domains and great business ideas for “buttons”. A little bit more “link juice”, a revamp of the site design and the business you sold for a few dollars may well be the success story of tomorrow. Don’t regret it, don’t give it away and don’t lose the faith!
The chance to make a living online is there for all of us, we all just need to take a little more time and work, work, work…..the chance is yours, don’t miss it!
I don’t know if you have heard about AboutUs.org before but it’s a wiki similar to Wikipedia.org, but it’s only for web sites. You can look up any domain name you like in AboutUs.org by typing aboutus.org/sampleaddress.com in your web browser.
There are three ways to get your domain name listed in AboutUs.org:
Wait until the AboutUs.org bot has spidered your site
To find out if it’s a good deal to pay for a page at AboutUs.org I pulled out my credit card and paid. To be honest I didn’t only pay just to be able to do this review, I really really wanted a better AboutUs.org page too . A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better
At their site they offer you the following for a flat fee of $197:
Position yourself in front of more than 5,000,000 unique readers each month.
Increase your results in the search engines.
Point more traffic to your website.
Create an amazing article that will tell the world about your business.
Build strong relationships with the community.
Develop ongoing dialog about you and your business.
Generate another way for clients to find you.
I’m happy with the coach I got to help me build the page, but what I don’t like is that most of the stuff at my AboutUs.org page is copied directly from my site. Hey it’s a page about my site so it actually doesn’t matter…. Or?
The traffic they mention is not something I’ve noticed at all , but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.
So, was it worth $197?
My opinion is that it’s not worth the money, but on the other hand people spend $100 for a page at MillionDollarWiki and then you don’t get any help building the page at all. At Aboutus.org I got a coach helping me at least.
If you can build your page yourself (i.e. you know the syntax) and have the time to do it then do that instead of paying $197. If you don’t know how to do your own page and really really really really want a better AboutUs.org page, then buy this service.
In the last few days I’ve noticed some weird blog spam in some of my blogs. The thing with this spam is that Akismet is not reacting and marking the comments as spam. They go directly to the approve comment queue.
It’s easy to see that the comment is a spam comment, but it’s a little bit annoying that Akismet can’t see it’s spam
Anyway, the weird part of these spam comments are the URL field because it’s just http://url as web site and not a wokring web site Since the comments don’t contain any links or other contact information these spam comments are completely useless if they somehow should get approved and not marked as spam. They are simply just words Since the spam is coming from everywhere (different networks, IPs and users) it must be some kind of trojan infecting peoples computers and sending the spam.
As you can see on this sample comment, it’s just words and a non-working URL:
I get a feeling that someone did a poor job programming this spam bot/trojan
Have you also seen this kind of poor spam comments lately?
When we moved this blog to a new IP address (so we host all our blogs on the same Wordpress installation) we also added Gravatars. If you post a comment in this blog and got a Gravatar you’ll see your avatar next to your comment (otherwise you’ll see the standard Gravatar).
Gravatars are globally recognized avatars connected to your email address. Whenever you post or comment on a site using the free Gravatar plugin you will see your avatar. This way you only have to upload your avatar once. It’s reminding me of OpenID since you only have to register once
Blog owners
Gravatars make if possible for your visitors to have their avatar next to their comment making comments more personal. Gravatars are really easy to install. Just download the plugin from the gravatar web site and use it. They got instructions for how to install Gravatars on must blog platforms (even a Blogger hack ).
If you like us are using Wordpress you can set a default gravatar in case the user hasn’t uploaded an avatar yet. So far you have to survive with the standard Gravatar avatar since we haven’t designed a default gravatar for our users just yet.
Visitors and people posting comments
Now you only have to register your email address and upload your avatar once to have your avatar next to posts in any blog anywhere as long as they’re Gravatar enabled. Post a comment in this post to try it. If you have registered and uploaded your avatar at gravatar.com you will see it next to your comment . If not point your web browser to www.gravatar.com and register. It’s free and the registration is really easy.
If you want to have multiple gravatars, you simply just register more then one email address on your account and you can have for example one “sad” avatar, one “happy” avatar and one “angry” avatar. This way you can show the readers your mod when you posted. Or you can register one avatar for each one of your sites depending on which site or blog you wish to promote by posting a comment.
At the moment Gravatars have been activated on this blog, Entrecard contests and Finding Public Information. As soon as we’ve tested the plugin we will activate it on all our blogs (same as for OpenID). Let us know if you like Gravatars or not.
As more and more people look to work from home, setting up their very own empire online, does a successful site mean that you can have no social life at all? Or is it all down to how you plan your day?
The vast majority of websites will not require cover 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and while many webmasters may look to offer this as much as possible, other areas of their lives can suffer. A non-existent social life can cause problems not only with relationships with your nearest and dearest, but if taken too far there can be health issues. It is not healthy to be sitting in front of your machine 24 hours a day 7 days a week!
In the early days of any business, and the internet is no different, there will be times when you need to spend more time on your computer or more time thinking about strategies, etc, but this should not last forever. Once your business is up and running you also need to weigh up the income that it is creating against the time that your are spending – if your hourly rate is too low then perhaps you need to look elsewhere, cut down your hours, or think of a different angle.
Do not work for hourly rates which you would be embarrassed to ask someone else to work for, it is not fair on you and the long term benefits to you will be minimal.
The bottom line is that there are businesses out there which are perfect for the internet, business which will give you a decent return on your time and investment, but you need to plan your strategy and make sure it is viable. If you are working yourself to the bone now, with no social life, low hourly rates, what would happen if a competitor tried to hit your market and pushed prices even lower?
Just because you are working online does not mean that you have to forget all of the basic rules of life and business – it is good to make money, but do not work yourself into an early grave!
. A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better 
, but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.
