How to make your own podcasts:All the World's A Podcast

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Good to know:15 Common Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers that Violate Terms of Service

SEO Made Easy: "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be at the top of your Web publishing priority list. If Web surfers can't find your site, they can't read it, use it or share it with others."

Interesting perspective:Backyard Filmmakers Are Hollywood's Greatest Fear

According to this article, "You simply need a little creativity to make those blogging dollars flow your way."High Traffic Blogs and Blogging Income

Blogs can cover almost any topic:God blogging

Tutorials - Creating Video for iPod

Blog Network to Sell For $20 Million Plus

Nice reminders:Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

Can Bloggers Strike It Rich?

A blog that really took off:Mini-Microsoft

Mistakes entrepreneurs make

$1M a year in Google Adsense (or why 2,739 is my favorite number)From the article:If back in September when we started playing with Google Adsense someone told me it would turn into a $1M a year business I would have laughed. A million bucks without a sales person? Give me a break!However, yesterday we broke our $2,100 record with a $2,335 day.

Let's you see what people are shopping for:Shopping.com stats

Look at how simple this page is:Strange Things You Likely Didn't KnowHowever, it is an interesting page when you read it. It got picked up by Digg.com and sent a lot of traffic to the site. You can see the spike if you look it up in Alexa.

As discussed in Creating a custom web site, there is a lot to be learned by looking at other web sites for ideas. I found this site interesting: Welcome to The WorldIt is a totally Flash site, which I would not recommend as a general rule because of indexing problems and (in many cases) cost issues. However, it has an unusual but helpful navigation tool that may be useful in other projects, and

Look at these sites for ideas on the "look" of your site: css thesis

A nice set of tips to keep in mind if you are starting a blog:7 Mistakes for your First Week Blogging

Let's say that you have a new idea that you would like to promote. You want to introduce people to your idea, get comments and see how much the idea spreads. It could be something totally normal (a new way to save the whales) or totally outlandish (a new way to create a perpetual motion machine). If so, then one way to promote the idea is to use the Web.One of the best examples of a

Fun, interesting idea for a web site:FLIPBOOK!

There was the post several weeks ago entitled Creating a billion dollar idea. It asked the question, "Is there a new franchise that you could start and publish on the Web?" This article shows that one possible answer to that question is penguins: 'Penguins' film poised to be No. 2 U.S. documentaryFrom the article: "Warner Independent Pictures on Friday more than doubled the number of theaters

This started with one of those uncomfortable airport "experiences", where you end up spending 12 hours on the ground because the airport system is not working. In this case, the problem was a huge line of thunderstorms that stood between where I was and where I was heading.So I was trapped in the airport, and fortunately it had a used book store. One of the books on the shelf was "The Millionaire

Interesting article:How To Build A Popular and Profitable Forum CommunityFrom the article:You may have heard that having a web community is a great way to increase sales, customer loyalty and word of mouth for your web business. In fact a web community itself, if large enough and targeting an affluent demographic (or one that advertisers like to target), has the potential to bring in revenue.

Let's say that you have looked through Lessons 1 through 14. You have chosen an idea and you have created a site. You have called in every favor you have to get some friends to link to your site. Now what?Now it is time to find out if your site resonates or not. You need to know this BEFORE you start trying to get links on large sites like Digg, Slashdot, Fark, etc. The reason why you need to

People have started sending in links to blogs and web sites that they are creating. They come to WebKEW, get inspired and get moving. They are excited about getting started.Here is an example of such a web site -- in this case a blog called "Our Technological Future":jwbats.blogspot.comThe blog's first major post is called the Singularity FAQ for Dummies.This is a very simple and straightforward

When you think about different business ideas to work on, there are many different angles of approach. Most people, however, would not neccessarily have "start an airline" on their short list because, mentally, it seems like a lot of work to start an airline. That's what makes this article particularly interesting:British teen launches airline from bedroom.From the article:A British teenager says

Amazon is having a contest to name the best nonprofit web site. They have 10 finalists:Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation AwardThe interesting thing about it from a WebKEW perspective is that these are 10 good web sites. Let's look at the sites and ask some questions. How do they feel? When you first open each site, does your gut say "good" or "bad"? "Interesting" or "boring"? "Cool" or "Uncool"?

The tech world is abuzz this week with this:Earning MilestonesFrom the article:I went to the PO Box this morning to grab my mail and found my monthly cheque from Google’s Adsense had arrived for earnings in the month of May. May was my biggest earning month since I started blogging (June was a little lower due to me being away for the full four weeks).The check was for $14,000. The author answers

We have talked about several different sources of visitors in previous lessons: Resonance, Links and Advertising. In this lesson we will talk about the most powerful form of free traffic on a long-term basis: Search engines. If you are creating a typical content web site, perhaps half of your daily traffic will be coming from search engines. In other words, if you have a content web site, about

This site is interesting to me simply because it has taken an idea that is as old as the hills (recipes) and added a new twist to it to create an interesting web site:Visual Recipes - Community of Cooking EnthusiastsIf you are trying to come up with new web site ideas, think about this: Is there something old and familiar that you can do in a different way to make it fresh and unique on the Web?

At the two-month point, we took a look at the progress of WebKEW in this post. At that point, 60 days into this project, WebKEW had 383 links in Google. Here we are about a month later, 90 days into the project, and there are two things to note:The number of links is continuing to grow. On June 17, WebKEW now has 4,940 inbound links according to Google: [Click for larger image]What kind of sites

As I mention in Rocket video, the kids and I have been doing a fair amount with rockets lately. David is interested in this rocket, which has a small lo-res video camera built into the nose cone. That got me wondering what else is out there in the world of rocket video. Going to Google, I typed "rocket video" in as my search term. I didn't really find what I wanted on the left-hand side of the

Top 500 Sites Have All the LuckFrom the article:Every two months Alexa's crawlers go out and scour the web bringing down 100 Terabytes of Web content and over 4 billion URLs into the archive. In the process we discover over 18 million unique sites on the Web. These are e-commerce sites, blogs, news sites and more. Virtually anything you can imagine is on the web spread out among these 18 million

Nine Truths That Can Set You on the Path to Financial FreedomThe article contains several good points that are worth repeating. From the article:The general population has a love / hate relationship with wealth. They resent those who have it, but spend their entire lives attempting to get it for themselves. The reason a vast majority of people never accumulate a substantial nest egg is because

Here is a letter that came in from a reader recently:Hello. I have read your article on "how to make a million dollars" article and I disagree with your article. The "tone" of the article seems to be that it is easy to make it a million dollars, and that we are oblivious to the obvious. As the article suggests, I have read some of the titles listed on your articles. Your article and the books

Here's one way to get a lot of traffic -- launch a satellite that crashes into a comet:Comet collision a historic oneFrom the article: "NASA's Deep Impact Web site registered nearly 1 billion hits when the space probe collided with comet Tempel 1 late Sunday -- about twice as many hits as the twin Mars rovers got when they parachuted to the Red Planet last year."If you look Nasa.gov up in Alexa

The following email came in the other day:Hi Marshall. Love your Blog. I was reading your entry titled "15,000 page views per day". Letter E of 26 steps to 15k a Day says...E) Content:Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggestor and find the core set of keywords for your topic area.

In a comment to Lesson #12, Pat said, "I'm always amazed at the degree to which realtors are willing to buy a stock website with essentially no personalization at all." And this is true. So what could a realtor do if he/she wants to create a great web site? As with the dental sites discussed in Lesson #9 - Creating a custom web site, the first thing I would do is a survey of the best realtor

Of all the ways to attract visitors to your web site, advertising may be the most interesting. The advantage of advertising is the fact that you can directly control it. Unlike resonance and (to a lesser extent) links, advertising is completely under your control. Unfortunately, advertising may also be the least interesting because it can be expensive. There are many, many cases, however, where

Toothpaste for Dinner - A slide-show tour of the most addictive comic on the Web.Further proving that there is no way to tell what will resonate on the Web, we have toothpastefordinner.com. Slate is calling it "the most addictive comic on the Web," which means that it is pretty resonant. Alexa seems to concur, giving it a rank today of 25,000 or so.

Wiki Targets How-To BuffsIf you are thinking about starting a new site, one thing to consider is the Wiki model. From the article:Hannah launched the wiki in February as an extension of eHow.com, another website that he bought last year. EHow had once been a promising internet startup, but the site fell into disrepair following the collapse of the dot-com bubble four years ago. Its database

WSJ.com - Threatening eBay's Dominance, More Online Sellers Go It AloneFrom the article:In 2002, John Wieber started worrying about his business, which sold refurbished computers through Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. Although he was earning $1 million a year in revenue, profits had started to slip as competitors flocked to the site. EBay also raised its fees, further cutting margins, and fraud

If you are building a Web site and you need things like web site design, icons, graphics, animation, Flash graphics, etc., here are three places where you can find people who work on a freelance or contract basis:ContractedWork.comElance.comGuru.com

Wanting to get your own business off the ground? This article shows you the steps:12 Months to StartupThe steps are:Understand yourselfResearch and Evaluate Your IdeaChoose a Business, a Location and its Structure, and Name ItCalculate the CostsWrite Your Business PlanIdentify Sources of Startup FinancingWork Through the Startup Paperwork MazeDevelop Your Marketing and Customer Service PlanCourt

Tools and resourcesReaders have been sending in different tools and articles that they have found useful for various reasons. Here's a collection of links. If you have other favorites, please add them in the comments or send them in. Putting a Del.icio.us, Digg, technorati and Slashdot button into your blogStealth Start-Ups SuckGood list of adsense alternatives - see both this article and the

In Lesson #4 we talked about resonance as being one way that visitors use to find their way to your site. Resonance expresses itself in a number of different ways. For example, people might talk about your site while "standing around the water cooler" at work. They might email your site to several friends. If someone likes your site and they have a website of their own, they may also link to your

What happens if you get mentioned in a major web site like Wired? Last week we had the chance to see. Wired published this article:Artist Cranks Up No-Name RantsThe article talks about this web site:www.onefreeminute.net/On the day that the article appeared, the onefreeminute.net Web site was totally unranked in Alexa (all rank columns had "--" marks in them). Its one-day rank stats rose to about

26 steps to 15k a Day offers 26 tips and promises the following:Do those 26 things, and I guarantee you that in one years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. If you build a good site with an average of 4 to 5 pages per user, you should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in one years time. What you do with that

A WebKEW reader, age 23, wrote me a letter this week to say, approximately, "I have book ideas and I am having trouble getting started. I have business ideas, but they need money to get started or they seem too big for me to start with. What can I do to get moving?" It was a very good letter actually, so I wrote back and asked him to call me.If you have read How to make a million dollars, you

'43 Things': The world's to-do listFrom the article:Officially launched last December, 43 Things is, at its most fundamental, a shared and public 'goals blog.' And with people in more than 2500 cities currently posting their desires, the site would seem to have tapped a significant demand for global self-disclosure.If you look at it in Alexa, you can see that it gained traction very quickly.

Forget about making a million dollars. What if you want to make a billion? This article points the way:The Midas Formula - How to create a billion-dollar movie franchiseFrom the article:The franchises that have raked in over a billion dollars from all markets (including world DVD, television, and toy licensing)—The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Star Wars, Shrek, The

"Robert, they can't eat you!" My rules for survivalFrom the article:Over a year ago, I was asked by BizAz Magazine (a local Phoenix magazine) to speak at one of its "Business Beneath The Surface" breakfast meetings. As part of the event, participants have the option of submitting questions to the speakers, which are then answered during the breakfast.One of the questions directed towards me was,

Friendster.com was a pure resonance play when it started -- it achieved a massive audience in a short time through resonance and very favorable media attention. The article Why MySpace Is the Hot Place talks about a successor to Friendster called MySpace.com. The article states, "Only 20 months old, it already has 14 million unique visitors a month." That's pretty resonant.

In the How to make a million dollars vein, this resource from the Wall Street Journal contains articles and ideas for people starting businesses:StartupJournal | The Wall Street Journal Center for EntrepreneursI first learned about it when a friend sent me a link to this article on ThriftBooks.com, which is an online book retailer. The article is interesting to us because it talks about how one

I read about this site in Alexa's blog, where Geoffrey Mack had this to say about it:Contagious Media Showdown is an experiment in creativity and the seeming random nature of viral content and the way it spreads across the Internet. Take for example the Hamster Dance or Peanut Butter Jelly time -- remember those? There is no formula for why those sites become popular. People just start forwarding

Student's start-up draws attention and $13 millionFrom the article:It is not easy capturing the attention of Jim Breyer, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists. But Mark Zuckerberg, a 21-year-old Harvard student, managed to do it with a Web site that has attracted 2.8 million registered users on more than 800 campuses since it began in February 2004. Breyer was so taken with

If nothing else, you may want to scan through this site and see if it gives you any ideas: UI Patterns and TechniquesFrom the site:Each of these patterns (which are more general) and techniques (more specific) are intended to help you solve design problems. They're common problems, and there's no point in reinventing the wheel every time you need, say, a sortable table -- plenty of folks have

This is an in-depth and fairly scientific paper, but if you are interested in understanding the impact of blogs it is something that you should read: blogs and buzzFrom the article:Blogs are hot. Two Pew surveys conducted in early 2005 show that 16% of U.S. adults (32 million) are blog readers. After a 58% jump in readership in 2004, this number marks a leveling off within the survey’s margin of

There are many cases where the appropriate art or photography can completely change the look and feel of a Web site that you create. Taking your own digital photographs is one easy way to obtain them. When I started HowStuffWorks I did my own photographs and created my own simple illustrations, and that worked just fine. A picture paints a thousand words, and it does not need to be an

This is a place to look for web design ideas: CSS Beauty | CSS Design ShowcaseFrom the site:CSSBEAUTY™ is a project focused on providing its audience with a database of well designed css based websites from around the world.It's purpose is to showcase designers' work and to act as a small portal to the css design community.If you are "in need of inspiration", you have come to the right place.Some

If you read the post entitled An example of resonance, you know that the little movie described in that post created the word "Googlezon". Once this word was created, people started to use it and it began to show up in Google. If you now look up the word "Googlezon", Google will tell you how many pages in its index contain that word. Click here to see what I am talking about:Google Search:

One problem that many sites have, especially at their inception, is that visitors do not know how the site works or what they are supposed to do. Today's example shows you an excellent way to solve this problem:Fundable.orgWhen you open the site, you see a nice, big, front-and-center graphic that explains how the site works very simply and cleanly. It takes about 10 or 15 seconds for the

Blogging, as in SloggingFrom the article:Serious bloggers, I realized, aggressively report a pet issue, updating their sites throughout the day. They scavenge the Internet for every shard of information on a hot topic, like John R. Bolton's chances of becoming ambassador to the United Nations or Tom DeLay's ethical troubles.There are several interesting insights like these in the article.

If you have looked through Lesson #8 and decided that it is time to create a custom web site, then there are two things that you are going to need at the very minimum to get started:A domain name for your site. A template of some sort for your siteWe will talk about domain names in more depth in the weeks to come, but in general you should try to think of a word or phrase that describes your

In Lesson #6 we discussed the process of picking an idea. There simply comes a time in your life when you decide to create a Web site, so you pick an idea and start down the road.Once you have picked your idea, the next question you face is, "what sort of structure should I use to contain my site?" That depends on the type of site that you are creating. Look back at The different types of Web

If you start a web site, and if you publicize an email address somewhere on your web site, and if your web site becomes at all popular, then one thing is for sure -- you will get email. Lots and lots of email in some cases. In my case, one of the things that forced HowStuffWorks to become a business was the amount of email I was receiving. There simply was no way for one person to process all the

This article demonstrates that it is possible to make money with blogs:A Blog Revolution? Get a GripThe article talks about Nick Denton, who is the creator of Gawker Media. The article points out that: Gawker.com gets about 1 million visitors a monthFleshbot.com gets about 2 million visitors a monthGizmodo.com gets about 1.5 million visitors a monthCheck Alexa for details on traffic. See Lesson #

In Lesson #4 I talked about resonance. Here is a great example of resonance at work:GOOGLING THE FUTUREThe article talks about a flash movie created by journalists Matt Thompson (of The Fresno Bee) and Robin Sloan (of Current). The movie happens to be resonating with journalists, and journalists are spreading the word through articles. One of these articles appeared in my newspaper today, which

At some point in the WebKEW process, you are going to arrive at the place where it is time to pick an idea and create a web site. In general, one of two things is going to happen when this time comes:You will be struck by the idea for a new web site that is so compelling that you MUST create it.Over a period of time you will accumulate a set of ideas in a blog, on a sheet of paper, in a Word

As you are browsing the web, you will see web sites that appeal to you. Maybe you like the theme of the site, or the site has a feature you like, or you find a page that sparks an idea. It can be very helpful for you to save these ideas in a list so you can refer back to them. There is a very easy way to create the list, if you don't mind it being public:Get the Google tool barStart a blog on

A little mid-week inspiration:Getting your business startedIn the web space, Alexa is a great source of ideas. That is why Alexa is Lesson 1 and Lesson 1a.

As we discussed in Lesson #3, it is possible to make money with web sites these days. The amount of money you can make depends on the number of visitors who come to your site. Obviously your question then becomes, "How do I attract visitors to my web site?" If you think about it, you realize that there are a number of ways that visitors can find their way to you:They can search for your site in

Here is a very interesting article on "rethinking" that is occuring in the internet community right now:It's a whole new internetFrom the article: "If you're not yet amazed, inspired, and a little anxious, you might want to consider it. Then get a good night's sleep and perhaps take a rejuvenating vacation. We're going to look back at Spring 2005 as a milestone. Watch closely, ladies and

In this post I mentioned that HowStuffWorks had to become a business at some point. And the question was asked, "Why did HowStuffWorks have to become a business?"It's very interesting how this happens, and it has happened to a lot of people. When you start your web site, you typically begin on some kind of $15/month virtual hosting account (more on these accounts next week). If your site starts

What we have here is an amazing web success story. Do NOT ignore this post - read it carefully because there is a lot to learn. There was an article yesterday in the paper about a knitting book. This article (written by Marcy Smith Rice of the N&O) is not something I would normally read, because I have no interest in knitting. But here is the amazing paragraph from the article that got my

There are two reasons why you would spend the time that it takes to create a web site:You enjoy it. For example, you might enjoy bicycling as a hobby and you enjoy writing about it to spread the word. You have read How to make a million dollars and you are thinking about starting a web site as a business -- specifically to generate revenue.When I started HowStuffWorks, it began strictly as a

The question was asked yesterday, "I read your post on celebrity blogs - Can a normal person make any money on a blog?" Another way to phrase the question would be to ask, "Is it possible to create a blog that gets any kind of traffic?" The answer to this question depends on a lot of different factors, one of the most important of which is resonance. We will begin discussing resonance next

This is a nice article on "thinking big." The example it uses has to do with small web design firms, but the principles discussed in the article can be applied to just about any small business -- it is a general call-to-action for business owners:Why Small Web Design Firms Should Think Big

[This is a follow-up to Lesson #1 - Using Alexa]The question was asked, "If you know that a web site has a rank of 1,000 on Alexa, what does that mean in terms of real traffic? How many visitors a month is that?"The way you figure that out is by calibrating alexa. Many sites will publish or announce their "unique monthly visitors", and by finding several announcements like that you can determine,

If you are interested in seeing how web advertising has changed over the past 10 years, or if you would like to better understand what the state of the web advertising world is today, then this is a good report to read:The decade in online advertisingSee also:How Web Advertising WorksThis article (written perhaps 3 years ago) is now a bit dated in terms of ad rates (they've gone up since the

An amusing article discussing how different celebrities use their blogs:Blah, blah, blog!

This blog is going to include "formal lessons", like this one about Alexa, combined with news-of-the-day links that demonstrate different people/companies trying out different ideas. There will also be links to other sites that offer valuable information about the Web.In Lesson #1, let's talk about Alexa. Alexa is a great way to understand what people care about on the web. From our perspective,

On Marshall Brain's Blog I have been keeping a chain of little web ideas that caught my eye over the last couple of months. Start here and page through the list.Perhaps the most noteworthy of the bunch is the article on IPodLounge.com. The article points out that, "In recent months, iPodlounge has grown from a niche website into a professional publishing operation with big plans. Riding the wave

After I published How to make a million dollars, I started getting a lot of email. People are asking great questions, especially about the Web and creating new Web sites. I thought it would be interesting to create a blog to answer questions and talk about different techniques that people are using on the web to make money. So here we are. The idea behind WebKEW is to collect together ideas,