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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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'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.
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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
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"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,
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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