The Greatest Software Ever Written

12. The Morris worm
11. Google search rank
10. Apollo guidance system
9. Excel spreadsheet
8. Macintosh OS
7. Sabre system
6. Mosaic browser
5. Java language
4. IBM System 360 OS
That leaves my third, second, and top-most choices still to go. So here they are:

No. 3 is the gene-sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research. It isn't a mammoth software system, but "on sheer technical brilliance, it gets 10 out of 10," Morgenthaler says. The institute's sequencing system helped subdivide the task of understanding the DNA makeup of 20,000 human genes. Its breakthrough insights into the human genome and sequencing analysis, plus its ability to recombine subunits of analysis into the whole, "accelerated the science of genomics by at least a decade," Morgenthaler says. We now have the tools to begin tracing the paths of human migration out of Africa. The human genome reveals how minute the genetic differences are between ethnic groups at a time when such information is sorely needed. It gives a scientific basis for how humans can view each other as brothers at a time when we seem in danger of destroying one another. The software will be called on to perform many additional gene sequencing feats; the roots of many diseases and puzzles of heredity remain to be solved. Seldom have great research and great software been more closely intertwined.

My No. 2 choice is IBM's System R, a research project at the company's Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, Calif., that gave rise to the relational database. In the 1970s, Edgar Codd looked at the math of set theory and conceived a way to apply it to data storage and retrieval. Sets are related elements that together make up an abstract whole. The set of colors blue, white, and red, for example, are related elements that together make up the colors of the French flag. A relational database, using set theory, can keep elements related without storing them in a separate and clearly labeled bin. It also can find all the elements of a set on an impromptu basis while knowing only one unique identifier about the set.

And now for The Greatest Software Ever Written--Unix.

Bell Labs often gets credit for creating the Unix operating system, but Bell never funded its development. In fact, the labs' management knew nothing about it. Bell Labs had committed developers to a multivendor project called Multics that made use of many new ideas for an operating system. But the project fell apart, and a Bell Labs participant, Ken Thompson, decided he wanted a personal version of Multics so he could write shoot-'em-up games, says Feldman (who was the No. 7 developer on the AT&T Unix project and is now president of the Association for Computing Machinery).

In the best tradition of software, Unix was an individual effort that took on a life of its own. Thompson crafted Unix on a Labs reject, a tiny DEC PDP 7 minicomputer with either 16 or 32 Kbytes of memory--Feldman isn't sure which. "Unix was written under great constraints," he says. "There was no memory and no CPU power. You'd be embarrassed today not to have more memory and CPU in your wristwatch."

Thompson designed his stripped-down operating system to move data in blocks or "pages" from a computer's random access memory onto disk, freeing up memory space. When they're needed again, the operating system knows to go to the disk and page them back into memory. This way, a big operating system can run on a small computer with a small amount of memory. His operating system also was a multiuser system. Even the mainframes of the day were limited to a single user, making computing time expensive. Thompson's Uniplexed Information and Computing System (Unics) would let two people use a computer at the same time.

The Computer Science Research Group at the Labs heard about Unics and wanted a copy. At the group's request, Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, agreed they would add text formatting to their system, provided they were given a PDP 11/20, a larger machine. Thus, Unix text processing was born of barter. Unics became Unix; was recast in tighter, more portable C code; and was brought to market by AT&T as the Unix System III.

So Unix System III was the greatest piece of software--almost. Bear with me here.

The Greatest Web Software Ever Written

12.	AOL Instant Messenger
11.	Digg
10.	Hotmail
9.	World Of Warcraft
8.	Wikipedia
7.	XMLHttpRequest object set
6.	Amazon.com
5.	eBay
4.	The Well
3.	Craigslist
2.	AltaVista

My last choice is also first, my No. 1 pick for greatest Web software developed so far.

Berners-Lee's enforced step backward to a simpler platform brought about new concepts and new opportunities. The platform was based on asynchronous communications, where one system delivered a message to another when it was possible, rather than both needing to be available when the delivery was initiated. The user sessions on the platform were stateless; servers using HTTP could rapidly serve information pages, without worrying about carrying information about the user forward from one visit to the next or even one page to the next.

Before Craigslist, Hotmail, or the other user-intensive sites could be developed, software was required that could cope with the need to serve millions of HTML pages in quick succession and still draw on background databases and other resources. It would need to bridge the new HTTP protocol to many of the back-end systems necessary for Web operations.

Enter the Apache Web Server. "There wasn't an established Web server when it first came out," recalls Brian Behlendorf, co-founder with Roy Fielding of the Apache Group. Most early Web site managers used NCSA HTTPd, the early Web server developed by Robert McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (the source of the Mosaic browser). But the HTTPd server didn't scale smoothly as traffic mounted, it couldn't easily manage more than one Web site at a time, and it needed more APIs--a lot more--to interface with back-end systems. "The first Web sites were having common problems with the amounts of traffic," recalls Behlendorf.

The original NCSA HTTPd was improved by a virtual community of Web managers that became known as the Apache Group. In its second version, the Apache Group tore apart the server and rebuilt it as a series of modules, which became the Apache Web Server 2.0. (The latest version is Apache 2.2.4.) The new design let different contributors work on different parts of the server without holding up one another. The server advanced quickly.

In 1998, IBM announced it was dropping its own Web server development and contributing to the Apache Group. IBM said it would include Apache with its WebSphere middleware. The move had the effect of winning acceptance for open source code in business and drawing attention to Apache as it was pitted against its chief rival, Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

The Apache Group was one of the first open source projects to develop a product that competed successfully with commercial code. Apache's market share has fallen off its peak of just under 70% of active sites on the Web, but Apache still powers 66.9 million Web sites to Microsoft IIS's 35.3 million, according to Netcraft's April report. Support for Apache comes from a variety of commercial sources, including IBM and Covalent Technologies.

Apache was a volunteer project in which skilled developers exchanged ideas, parceled up work, eliminated bugs, and committed finished code to a central code management system--Behlendorf hosted the original contributions on his own computer. Apache addressed the user scalability problem and moved on to develop a tight linkage with PHP, the scripting language that would become dominant on the Web, tying disparate elements of sites together and supplying the small applications that tied databases to Web pages.

The quick access to data meant pages could be refreshed with the latest information or tailored to the individual with specialized data. Apache was linked tightly to an early open source database, MySQL, a system originally designed for fast reading and serving of data rather than data storage, a property suited to the new Web.

In its example of timeliness, innovative technology, volunteer development, and ability to match commercial competitors, the Apache Web Server set a standard that many have sought to emulate but few have matched. Most of all, it enabled "the network effect," where the concerns and passions of one person connected with those of others and resulted in the construction of new Web sites, swift communications, and virtual communities by an endlessly diverse set of builders.

With Berners-Lee's fateful step backward, the World Wide Web returned computing to a simpler platform and opened the door to a series of rapid steps forward, not just for a single interest group but for the world. The best software on the Web capitalizes on those possibilities. The Apache Web Server and its compatriots are the harbingers of a new age. We can only dimly perceive the outline of that age, but many have started to think it will be characterized by more open standards, more freely available software like Apache, and more human intelligence finding its free expression and outlet in communities on the Web.

How to Get Started as a Domainer: 28 Tips, Techniques and Resources

How does a salary of $10,000 per day sound to you? Webmaster and marketing extraordinaire Marcus Frind reportedly pulls in $10,000 per day in Google AdSense from his dating website PlentyofFish.com. But that’s chump change compared to the $100,000 per day that domainer Yun Ye was pulling in before he sold his domain portfolio for about $164M in 2004 and subsequently disappeared under the radar.

When it comes to making a buck on the internet it seems that everyone has a solution, although few of them seem to work. But if you’re looking to capitalize on one of the most powerful cash earning enterprises on the internet that is actually making plenty of people money, you should check out domaining. Although you may not be quite as successful as these two entrepreneurs, it’s never too late to start in the domaining industry.

A domainer is someone who earns a profit buying and selling domain names. The philosophy is similar to the stock market: buy low and sell high. Here are 28 tips, tools, techniques and financing options to get you started on your way to successful domaining.

Domain Buying Strategies

Domaining is a lot like stock investing, the very best in the field have moved beyond basic strategies and have developed their own specific formulas for success. But just as with stocks, to obtain the skills necessary to reach that advanced stage, beginners must first understand the fundamentals of strategic domain buying. In this section we introduce you to five traditional domain buying strategies, and explain a bit about each.

1. Trademark Typo Domains.
   One of the original domainer buying strategies was to hunt for any trademarked names that hadn’t yet been purchased, and failing that, to purchase typos of those domains. These trademark typo domains often yielded a lot of type-in traffic, and because e-commerce law hadn’t yet developed to its current state, companies would often buy out these domainers at very inflated prices. But if you’re thinking about getting into trademark typo domaining, the ship has sailed. Current trademark law treats domainers that are seeing lots of traffic from a typo domain, and don’t otherwise have a legitimate business use for owning the name, as illegal trademark diluters. As such, trademark typo domainers typically have to turn over the domain to the trademark holder with little or no compensation. Simply stated, avoid the trademark typo strategy altogether.
2. Keyword Typo Domains.
   While the trademark typo domain loophole has closed, a very legitimate and ethical domaining technique is pursuing keyword typo domains. Keyword typo domains (e.g., Mortgeges.com) can bring in a good deal of type-in traffic and are often significantly undervalued. While normally these aren’t the type of domains that someone would want to build a high-value company around (though typo domain Voyuer.com went for $112,000 in 2005), smaller individual webmasters are always in the market for targeted type-in traffic, so these sites are often in high demand among small-time domain purchasers.
3. Automated Volume Buying.
   The next strategy, automated volume buying, is simply that; using an application to automatically search for available domains that meet your pre-set criteria, and purchasing the domains that result from the search. Automated volume buying requires, first and foremost, an excellent application to accept your search criteria and conduct the searches. While there are a number of domain research tools available for purchase, many top domainers use a customized version. No matter which volume buying tool you’re using, however, they all work in roughly the same way by allowing you to search WHOIS servers and filter results by keywords, Overture price ranges, search engine results, etc. So, for example, you could filter your potential domains by those that have a minimum of 1000 keyword searches per month and which yielded more than a top bid of $1.00 on Overture. While it is certainly true that now that more people are using automated volume buying tools the easiest bargains are usually taken, domainers can still find a good haul of cheap .com’s as long as they stay ahead of the curve by getting creative with their filter criteria.
4. Trendwatching.
   If you’re looking for a domaining strategy that is longer-term but that can be highly lucrative, you might consider trendwatching. Trendwatching is simply the practice of anticipating popular domains before they become popular. The keys to successful trendwatching are good sources and creativity. One of the biggest mistakes novice domainers make, is attempting to trendwatch a very diverse group of industries, rather than focusing on a few and becoming an expert in those areas. The best way to start trendwatching is to pick two or three niches that you feel comfortable with and which are reasonably lucrative, then add eight to ten blogs within that niche to your RSS feed. Bloglines, Newsgator, and Google Reader are all free web-based feed readers, just in case you are unfamiliar with RSS. If you’re in a competitive niche, time is of the essence, so regularly check your feed for information on rising stars, new technologies, burgeoning trends or hot products, and once you hear of the trend, pounce on it immediately by buying up some relevant domains. In addition to RSS feeds, Google Trends can also help keep you on top of developing trends by showing relative query volume for one to five keywords or phrases. One thing to keep in mind when trendwatching, is that not every predicted trend will pan out, so anticipate plenty of total losses for every big hit. As a consequence, it is important to keep your domain holdings diversified, so that you aren’t too heavily invested in a single trend, and thus you can afford to wait out the staggering returns when one of your trend predictions proves true.
5. Brute Force.
   Automated Domain Research Tools (DRT’s) allow you to sift through millions of available domains to find the few thousand that you might be interested in buying. But getting from those thousand to identifying the few specific domains you want to purchase can often be accomplished only through brute force. By “brute force” we refer to the most common domaining technique, which involves the use of a compilation of different manual research tools to identify the most lucrative domains. Each tool listed in this category simply helps to facilitate the process of manually going through and examining each potential domain on an individual basis (thus the “brute force” moniker). While it is impractical to cover every sort of tool that would fall into the “brute force” category, we have compiled a few of the most common tools to get you started.
   
• AjaxWhois is a convenient web2.0 domain search engine that executes multiple Top-Level Domain (TLD) queries on a root domain name. This can be a time-saver if you already have a specific root domain name in mind to purchase.
• dnScoop provides a variety of information about a domain, including whois, traffic, domain history and popularity, appraisal, pagerank check, inbound links and more.
• DigitalPoint is a set of webmaster tools geared more for websites and SEO’s, but which also provides some helpful tools such as a keyword recommendation tool which can help you come up with new domain ideas and word combinations.
• DomainState tools is a suite of browser-based domaining tools and links to trademark databases.
• Domain Tools has a suite of useful tools for domainers, including domain history, reverse IP (to see what other websites are hosted on an IP), DNS tools (whois, traceroute, etc.), domain monitor, and more.
• PagerankPredict is a very simple tool that gives you a predicted Google pagerank for a domain. This tool is handy if you plan to build out a domain with content. It is also free, but the site limits you to 5 queries per hour.
• SearchStatus is a robust SEO, SEM and domaining tool that works as a plugin for the Firefox browser. It will enable you to quickly get an overview of a potential purchase as well as a look and what backlinks are powering your competitors’ sites.
6. The Marchex Model.
   Back in early 2005, Marchex Inc. paid a whopping $164 million for 100,000 high-quality hand selected domains, planning in the short term to leverage the domains’ type-in traffic for revenue, and in the long-term to selectively sell their appreciating portfolio. Individual domainers can follow a similar strategy, by targeting domains in the $1,000 to $5,000 range that are of higher quality and thus have a higher long-term upside potential. By targeting a dozen or so sites in this higher price range, Marchex Model domainers can eliminate most casual domainer competition and though they face higher risks, there is the possibility of much higher returns. It should go without saying, that having access to cheap capital is a must, as well as having a good understanding of domain appraisals. Unlike brick and mortar real estate, the domain name resale market is still not fully competitive, meaning that domains are often wildly under-priced, but can also be wildly overpriced. As a result, simply following market valuation for a domain without having a firm grip on your own appraisal metrics, is a certain way to fail when Marchex domaining.

Financing Your Domaining

No matter what buying strategy you decide to follow, the first step to getting into domaining is acquiring enough capital to play in the market. Put simply, the more capital you have, the easier it is to build your domaining portfolio. So in this section we cover some simple strategies for coming up with the right types of capital you need to get your domaining off the ground.

7. Spend only cheap capital.
   What’s the point of making a profit domaining only to pay it right back out again with high credit card interest rates? It is difficult to consistently make a return of more than 20-50% on your domain flipping, but you will need that return just to break even if you are funding your operations on credit card debt. So to minimize the risk of paying out all or most of your gains in credit card fees, make sure that early on you are only purchasing domains with only the money you have, and not what your credit limit says you are worth. If you do buy domains on credit, make sure that you are paying off the cards before they start accumulating interest and fees; otherwise you’ll start to see your domaining profits shrink as your break even point becomes that 20-50% interest rate.
8. Partnership.
   Nobody likes to share their profits. But teaming up with a few partners who bring capital to the partnership will allow you to diversify your holdings and overall lower your risks and increase your net earnings. Just remember, however, that if the partnership dissolves, you may be forced to pony up cash to buy out your partners, or sell domains for less than you were hoping for. So if you and your partners have different ideas about how to profit from domaining, it may be a good idea to instead opt for a joint venture in which everyone’s obligations are spelled out ahead of time.
9. Credit card balance transfer arbitrage.
   If you’ve opened up your mail lately, you’ve probably noticed that 0% APR credit card offers have now replaced AOL Free Trial CDs as the most abundant piece of mail in the world. Well, some card issuers have taken the free credit offer one step further by offering you something called a transfer check, which is simply a 3-18 month interest free loan. They make the offer to entice you to use their credit card, but if want to live dangerously, this can also be an easy way to come up with some quick cash. This advanced financing method, known as balance transfer arbitrage, will allow you to use that “free” money before the offer period expires, then pay it back. This is a very risky technique, however, because if you run into emergencies or other financial problems and cannot pay back the free loan before the regular high interest kicks in, then you are sunk. But in a situation where you come across the once in a lifetime deal, engaging in ‘balance transfer arbitrage’ may be worth the risk.
10. Bootstrap and reinvest.
    Bootstrapping isn’t so much a single fundraising technique, as it is a ‘do it yourself’ mindset of leveraging what you earn back into growing your business. Entrepreneurs engaged in bootstrapping take very little of the company profits out of their business early on, and instead use those funds in lieu of a formal bank loan or venture capital. If you are anxious to quickly expand your domaining portfolio and can afford to live without the immediate profits, consider leaving all or most of your profits in the business to leverage new purchases. Bootstrapping is the poor entrepreneur’s way to compete against larger competitors, because by reinvesting their gross profits back into the business, bootstrappers gain a return which is functionally equivalent to compound interest.

Important Practices

Now that you have decided on a strategy for identifying domains to purchase as well as secured the financing to make those purchases, it is time to turn to the actual practice of holding and maintaining your domains. In this section we cover some basic ground rules and insider tips to keep in mind as you purchase and manage your domains.

11. Organize and auto-renew.
    If you’re holding domains for longer than a year, it’s a very good idea to have them all set to auto-renew. Make sure all of your contact info is correct and updated, and if necessary, change registrars. Whatever source of funds (credit card, PayPal) you use to pay for auto-renew should always have enough in extra funds so that in case you miss the notices, you’re still able to avoid auto-cancellations, which usually cost more to get back than a new registration.
12. Don’t fall in love with a domain name.
    Plain and simple, your goal in domaining is to make a consistent profit. One of the biggest mistakes new domainers make is holding on to a domain just because they like the name, or personally feel its worth more than the market will bear. If a domain doesn’t sell and you can’t monetize it to at least cover its costs, the domain is just dead weight. A name may sound unique or potentially popular, but you have to face the possibility that it may not have a market value beyond what you paid for it. Ridiculous domain names (the very sort new domainers tend to get attached to) can be lucrative, but the buzz may not last long enough for you to hold out for more money after a decent bid comes in. So when you are dealing with a gimmicky domain name and you get your chance to make a quick profit, take it.
13. Name that domain.
    Whether creating new domains or acquiring existing ones, the current trend (which doesn’t show signs of changing) is to stay away from those domains that have digits and/or hyphens, as both naming schematics devalue a domain. The only exceptions are specific 3- and 4-digit domain names, most of which are all taken.
14. Taste this.
    After you register a domain, many registrars offer a few day grace period during which you can rethink your purchase and still get a full refund. Domain tasting, is the ethically questionable, but legal, act of utilizing this loophole by parking a domain, testing the amount of type-in traffic, then cancelling it before the grace period expires. Most registrars are starting to recognize these loopholes and are quickly cracking down on this unscrupulous practice, but with those registrars that haven’t yet barred the practice, this can be a very good way of minimizing the risk of a purchase.
15. Create traffic.
    If you own domains that aren’t receiving a lot of type-in traffic, you may want to try to increase their value by getting them indexed into the search engines so that the eventual purchaser will find it easier to get the site to rank for relavent search engine results. The easiest way to do that is to place a link with relavent anchor text to the domain on one of your own related websites. In addition to getting the domain indexed, this is also a way to advertise the domain to interested buyers. Linking to your domain is generally allowable by most parking sites, but you may want to check with yours just to make sure.
16. Forums.
    Everyone loves to use forums to exchange information and to connect with people who have similar interests, and as a result many new domainers buy up “forum” domains. But if you’ll notice, very few people are getting rich managing forums, and even fewer are making money holding on to forum domains. Popular forums can generate tons of traffic, but domains with “forum” in the name are worthless without the actual site. Unless you can find a buyer capable of turning it into a site, or can build the site yourself, stay away from “forum” domain names.
17. Be prepared, legally.
    If you decide to domain full-time, talk to an accountant about at what point in the yearly tax cycle is financially most advantageous for you to form your domaining enterprise into a legal entity. Forming a legal entity can be a headache, but by not doing so, you may be missing out on business deductions you might otherwise be able to take. So, just in case, keep all your relevant receipts, even if you’re just starting out, to prove to the IRS how much you invested.

    Potentially more important than financial concerns, however, are the legal ones. Deciding to form a limited liability entity (Inc. or LLC) will limit your personal financial risk if legal problems ever arise. Though the legal differences between LLC’s and corporations can be subtle, they are not insignificant, (e.g. differing tax treatment) so you should do your research before forming an entity.

18. Watch for pinchers, swipers, and thieves.
    Sex.com was stolen from its owner using a fake transfer form, eventually costing the owner millions. Slammers, spammers, swipers, and claim jumpers will try various tricks to get a domain away from you, including fake renewal email messages or snail mail letters (e.g., Domain Registry of America scam letters). If you fall for one of these sneaky transfer forms, you may end up paying extra for a domain or accidentally “permitting” the transfer of your domains to someone else.

    In addition to having your existing domains hijacked through subversive transfers, there are an increasing number of reports of people having their domain ideas pinched before they can register the domain themselves. It appears that a number of domain research tools are culling the data from users’ searches, and using that data to instantly purchase the searched domains before the searcher himself can do so. So, for example, if you are using a tool to research available domains and come across a real gem, the owner of the tool you are using may swoop in and buy up the domain, thus taking advantage of your ingenuity while depriving you of a great domain. Because of this possibility, it is important that if you come across a previously unregistered gem domain, spend the few bucks right then to buy it up rather than take the chance on losing it by waiting a few minutes.

    Beyond pinches and swipers, you also need to keep an eye on your registrar. There are a number of reports of domain registrars being intentionally slow or unresponsive in the days leading up to a domain’s expiration so as to ensure that the domain expires and reverts back to the registrar. If you have a dispute, check with WIPO for mediation, but the best policy is just to protect yourself in the first place by having at least a full-month’s buffer when transferring registrars.

Techniques for Monetizing

For almost every domainer, the big money is in the actual flip, not the domain maintenance. So just as with real estate, one of the biggest keys to domaining success is to limit your overhead during the holding period when you are waiting for your buyer. In this section, we cover some common and not-so-common techniques for monetizing your domain to cover your overhead expenses.

19. Duke of URL: type-in traffic.
    Google may control most of the western world’s web traffic, but they don’t yet control everything. In fact, a good keyword based domain can receive loads of type in traffic. With a well converting PPC landing page, this type in traffic can bring in from $100 to $1000 per day for a top-notch domain. Not a bad way to bide your time waiting for that perfect buyer to come along! So, when you’re searching for domains, keep in mind that type-in traffic is entirely defensible, meaning it doesn’t rely on a search engine or any other third party to send traffic your way, and that with enough of it, you can entirely cover your overhead expenses.
20. Optimize your parked domains.
    Some registrars allow you to add content and advertising directly to your parked domain’s page at no extra cost. If that is the case in your situation, you should definitely take advantage of this opportunity by optimizing your landing page. Try various configurations and combinations of affiliate ads and PPC ads to see what yields the highest return. Often simply changing the color of your landing page is enough to double your click-through rate. So, don’t sell yourself short by using a default ad configuration, or worse, not placing any advertising at all.
21. The (traffic) collector.
    If you already have your own well-converting highly monetized website within the same niche as your domain, instead of optimizing your landing pages, it may be more profitable for you to simply redirect your parked domains to that website. The key consideration when making this decision is simple, can I make more money by optimizing or redirecting? By electing the more immediately profitable option, you ensure that the maximum amount of your domaining overhead costs are offset, which may ultimately enable you to hold out for the right buyer longer than you might otherwise be willing to.
22. Park and go.
    While running your own PPC or adsense is the more lucrative solution, some domainers who are short on time or technical expertise choose to simply park domains at a service like Sedo. These sites allow you to optimize your parked page template, and they run PPC (Pay Per Click) ads such as AdSense for you, in exchange for taking a cut of any PPC revenues your domain earns. While this is a fine solution for those that are flipping sites on a very short timeline, for those domainers planning to hold the site for any significant length of time, the technical knowhow required to optimize on your own is very small relative to the earnings you may be giving up by sharing with a site like Sedo.
23. Community spirit.
    Converting expired domains with traffic into web 2.0 community sites is one of the most popular new trends in domaining. The theory goes, that by starting your own community, regular focused traffic will visit your website in great numbers which you will be able to leverage to offset maintenance costs. Unfortunately, the hype surrounding web 2.0 typically overshadows the reality, which is that most community sites eventually fail, so trying something like this will require a lot of time, effort, money and luck. For those of you working on a tight budget, good ole’ fashioned domain parking may still be the best solution.
24. Creating your own lead generation.
    Buying up older expired domains with a niche focus can serve as an internal lead generation system. For domains with a narrow focus, redirecting them to specific landing pages on your more general high-converting website can be an excellent way of leveraging your domains into a sort private Adwords / PPC campaign.
25. Adsense Arbitrage.
    Google AdSense arbitrage is the practice of buying traffic at a relatively cheap price, and leveraging that traffic by having those users click through to ads which are relatively more lucrative than the cost of bringing in the traffic. When considering whether adsense arbitrage is the best monetization solution for your domains, it is first necessary to consider whether it is allowed by your parking host. Even if it is, however, adsense arbitrage is a very risky game which is in almost every instance better left for more experienced domainers and webmasters.
26. Choose volume over quality early on..
    It’s the volume domain purchasers who consistently earn the highest profits from domaining. New domainers are often intrigued by the possibility of owning THE keyword in a niche (keyword.com). But more often that not, it is better to diversify your holdings, start small, then later bootstrap your early profits into domains a bit higher up the food chain. Think of it like this: it’s easier to sell 100 domains at $10 profit than one domain at $1000 profit.

Tools for the Trade

In the business of domaining, automation and resource tools are your friend. Because the key to regular success is volume, not that one big hit, utilizing quality resources and tools will go a long way to improving your bottom line by marginally increasing the profitability every transaction you make.

27. I’m pickin’ up good registrations.
    Since you’re dealing in volume, a cheap registrar is important, especially when you’re first starting out. But some deals are too good to be true, and occasionally registrars will go out of business. For good cheap hosting, GoDaddy is a baseline option, but it’s not ideal for many high volume domainers or high quality domains. For your biggest domains, the ones you hope to sell and retire from the proceeds with, you may want to try Moniker. Whatever direction you decide to take, make sure to shop around, and at a minimum check the resource list at the end of this article for a few more of your options.
28. Traffic monitors and predictors.
    Keeping track of a site’s traffic and popularity are both important metrics in valuating your own domains as well as those of potential acquisitions. The following tools, despite their individual limitations, are designed to provide you with a method of obtaining those stats on your own domains, as well as those of your competitors.
    • Alexa is the benchmark traffic rankings directory. It is widely regarded as inaccurate, however, its relative numbers are still very valuable when studying a domain for purchase.
    • Alexaholic is based on Alexa but allows you to compare the traffic charts of multiple domains. The value of Alexaholic (and Alexa) is that you don’t need the current owner of a domain to have installed a traffic monitoring script (which is usually not possible on a parked domain anyway) to estimate the volume of traffic the site is receiving.
    • Ranking.com provides the popularity of a website and requires script installation on your domain.
    • Ask the Owner. A domain parking service will provide traffic statistics for the site’s owner. So if you’re interested in a domain, simply ask the owner for proof of statistics.

Resource Sites

In domaining, as with most industries, a key to success is keeping yourself educated about new developments in the field and constantly learning from the successes and failures of your peers. As a result, we have compiled a list of a few popular sites that offer domaining related news or services. You can find them in our directory here.

As the value of domains continue to increase, the industry of domaining becomes continually more sophisticated and competitive. But for the person willing to do the necessary research, planning and investing, domaining can prove a very lucrative profession. In this article we have introduced you to some of the basic strategies, tips, and tools used by domainers. Recognizing, however, that no single article can fully cover even the basics of this complex industry, we recommend that you constantly seek out new and more domain investing information, even as you begin to go out and compile your own domaining portfolio. Best of luck!

21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

Witnessing the launch of a blog as successful as Performancing’s first two weeks might lead you to think that launching a successful blog is easy… well, it’s NOT. Thousands of new blogs are launched every day, but only a handful ever get read by more than a few hundred people, and even fewer ever make a dollar’s profit. While a site can survive a terrible launch (see Instablogs’ surprising turnaround) the cost is high, and the truth is, most never recover. With no money coming in, and a readership which can be counted in the dozens, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of bloggers give up and shut down their site within a year.

The 21 points included in this checklist will cover the basics of what you need to do during those all-important first two weeks of your blog’s life. While there are no guarantees in the blogosphere, if you follow these launching tips closely, your chances of success are greatly improved.

The First Impression

1. Connect with your readers through an about page and welcome message. One of the best ways to make a lasting impact is to connect on a personal level with your readers. That means letting them know who you are and what your background is. Darren from ProBlogger does this well by including an image of his ugly mug and an ‘about page’ link above the fold. You don’t necessarily need an author pic to relate to your readers, but you should find some way to allow readers to connect with you on a personal as well as a professional level to develop some rapport.

2. Don’t get seen naked: Never launch a blog with fewer than 5 posts. In the blogosphere you typically get just one shot at impressing a visitor or fellow blogger. Too many new bloggers throw up two posts and then start working on promotion. In the world of blogging, you are selling yourself and your writing. If you can’t give people a fully dressed picture of what your blog is all about and what type of writing will be on it, then why should they throw a link your way, or subscribe to your RSS feed? When someone links to you or subscribes they’re giving a vote of confidence that your site is worthwhile, so give them something to grab on to, and let them know your space won’t be “just another abandoned blog.”

RSS & Subscriptions

3. Make sure a link to your RSS feed is available above the fold. Though they won’t help your AdSense revenues much, subscribers are the lifeblood of any successful blog. These devotees are often the ones providing you with regular comments, and are far more likely to be webmasters themselves (meaning more links). It should be obvious to anyone launching a blog, but its amazing how many new bloggers do not make a link to their RSS feed readily available. New bloggers often don’t want to devote space on their site to an RSS feed when they could squeeze in a bit more AdSense. While this thinking is understandable, it is simply wrong. The returns of having subscribers are much more valuable because subscribers drive long-term traffic organically, while an additional AdSense block provides at best a marginal short-term gain.

4. Make RSS easier still: Add subscribe links to the most popular newsreaders. Again: we want to make it easy for people to subscribe. No one reads RSS raw. Provide readers with above the fold access to some of the most popular newsreaders such as Bloglines, MyYahoo!, Google Reader, and MyMSN.

5. Offer an email version of your RSS feed. According to Copyblogger, offering an email version of your RSS feed can as much as double your subscribers. We have already covered the reasons why subscribers are essential to a healthy blog (links, comments, buzz). Feedblitz offers this service for free, as does Feedburner. But beyond simply offering the email RSS feed, you need to make sure that signing up for it is easy. A study by Marketing Experiments reveals that reducing the steps to signing up for both your RSS feed and your email subscription will increase signups by over 700%. That means more than 7x the number of repeat readers and over 7x the benefits that subscribers provide to your blog.

Social Bookmarking (aka Going Viral)

6. Put chicklets in your template. Chicklets are ugly, and having too many “If you liked this story, submit it to Delicious” lines in a post looks plain spammy. That said, when you have a top-notch post that you hope is going to go viral, there is no better way to boost your votes than to add the Delicious link and Digg button right onto the post. When used correctly, chicklets can get you the coveted ‘double vote’ (when visitors who came to your post via Delicious, for example, then drop you a Digg vote once they are on the site). When you consider the tens of thousands of visitors that visit a good linkbait, those ‘double votes’ can be enough to carry you to the popular page of a second site, just by leveraging the traffic of the first.

7. Be your own promoter: Seed your best posts. Hundreds of thousands of content hungry readers are using social bookmarking sites every day, and many track specific keywords. By seeding your best articles, and by using a mixture of both popular and specific keywords as tags, you can bring a new crop of readers to your site on a weekly basis. The best way to select the tags for your article is to think of social bookmarking sites as a form of search engine. By including both broad keywords and narrower keywords you are certain to get a blend of both low quality/high volume readers (AdSense baby!) and high quality/low volume readers (links). The following is a list of the top 10 bookmarking sites which you should submit your top articles to:

1. Digg: Mammoth traffic; tech-focused; savvy users
2. Delicious: Pretty big traffic; somewhat tech/design-focused; a lot of bloggers browse Delicious for “things to link to”
3. Netscape: Pretty big traffic; a mix of topics; less savvy users
4. Stumbleupon: Medium traffic; weird stuff/literary articles; normal users.
5. Yahoo MyWeb: Medium traffic; general interest; normal users
6. Reddit: Lower traffic; politics/random stuff; normal users.
7. Furl: Lower traffic; tech-focused/some random stuff; normal users
8. Newsvine: Lower traffic; politics and news; normal users.
9. Lookmarks: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users
10. Blinklist: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users

Getting networked

8. Leave highly valuable comments on other blogs in your niche. Every niche within the blogosphere is made up of a few tightly knit communities. Like all communities, so much of what is actually going on (passing links, giving tips, etc.) is all done behind the scenes through email and IM. As a result, getting integrated into some of the communities in your niche is essential to growing your blog. New bloggers often try to integrate themselves through email solicitations, “Hi my name is Newbie, will you be my friend?…” This rarely works. You need to first make a name for yourself and make yourself valuable to the community. One way is to start commenting on the sites of community members within your niche. By being an initiator of, or contributor to, good conversations on other blogs, other webmasters will come to recognize your name. Note: This takes a bit of finesse, so don’t go around dropping your blog’s URL in the comments themselves. Rather, just type your URL in the URL field and let your ideas speak for the quality of your writing and your site.

9. Reload quickly: Take advantage of your initial launch buzz. A successful blog launch will give you two or three days of buzz (yes, that’s all you’ll get in the blogosphere). During that window, other bloggers in your niche will be checking out your site. Take advantage of those extra visitors by putting up some top-notch content within the first couple of days and updating your site frequently. Many webmasters will stop by during the first week to check out the ‘new kid on the block,’ so make sure they see you at your best. Launch buzz is a unique opportunity to gain easy links with no real extra marketing work, and it will not happen a second time. So don’t waste the opportunity by putting up garbage or sporadic content during your first week.

10. Include tons of outbound links in your posts. As a new blogger, your target audience is other bloggers. They have the links that you need to get to the top of the search engines and to get in front of other readers. So a big key is getting other bloggers in your niche to notice you. A good trick is to use website referrals to your advantage. Almost every blogger checks their site referrals list on a daily or weekly basis (which tells them the last page a visitor was on before they landed on their site). They use this list both to track new links and to see who is talking about their site. By putting a lot of outbound links in your posts to other blogs in your niche, you can start to raise your profile. When your readers click on those links your site will appear in the referrals list of the bloggers you link to. This is free marketing for you. When other bloggers see your site in their referrals list they will often visit your site and are also much more likely to return a link to you.

11. If you have something to give, give it away! Give people a reason to visit your site which goes beyond the typical content. If you’re a designer, give away a free HTML design or Wordpress skin. Are you a programmer? Make a cool FireFox plugin. Are you an expert at XX? Give away a free 8-page report, in PDF style, called “Secrets of XX Revealed”. The point is, by giving away something, even something small, you can create buzz.

12. Start real relationships with bloggers in your niche. One of the biggest misconceptions new bloggers have is that because you are online, somehow the way business is conducted has changed. It hasn’t. Just as in the offline business world, much of what is really going on in the blogging world takes place between colleagues. That means that the most helpful tips, links, assistance, and so on are given on the basis of a preexisting friendship or relationship between you and another blogger. So after spending some time getting a lay of the land within your blogging niche, send a few relevant emails out to other bloggers within your community. Let them know that you are an avid reader of their site (and actually be one), and then ask advice, suggest something, etc. The key is to: 1) Not ask for a link, and 2) Have something interesting to say. Networking (which is just a fancy way of saying making friends) is maybe the single most important difference between an average and a successful blog. So do it.

Link Building

13. Submit your blog to blog directories. Incoming links help your site to get spidered, indexed and ranked better by search engines. Conveniently, there are many blog directories that specialize in categorizing and linking to quality blogs. You can find a comprehensive list of them at the RSSTop55.

14. Submit your blog to general web directories such as DMOZ and Aviva. Links from DMOZ (The Open Directory), Yahoo! Directory, Aviva Directory and other quality general web directories provide you with what are considered “trusted links” by the search engines, a key to ranking well. Search engines value links from quality web directories because it means that your site has been checked and selected by a human being. But not all web directories are equal, and you want to be careful when submitting your site to not just throw good money after bad links. Another nice thing about the top web directories is that they will send you relevant traffic, just like a search engine.

15. Leave your blog’s URL as your signature when you participate in forums. When you make a good comment on a forum, people will not only remember your URL and begin to associate it with quality information, but also a number of forum readers looking for more information will click the link and visit your site.

16. Use your URL in your email signature. If you’re like most new webmasters, you will be writing hundreds of emails in your first few months of blogging. You can easily and subtly convert these emails into marketing efforts for your blog by simply including your URL below your name in your signature line. The setup takes only a minute, and once it’s done you won’t ever have to think about it again.

17. Myspace or Facebook members: Put a link in your profile. Putting a link in your Myspace or Facebook account is a nearly effortless way to market your site. Again, the response won’t be hundreds of new readers, but picking up a few dozen new readers here and there (even just your friends) never hurts. Also, consider sending out a bulletin (bulk mail) announcing the blog to all of your Myspace and Facebook friends. Even if just a couple of your friends drop you a free link on their own pages or blogs, it’s worth the two minutes it takes.

18. Submit guest posts at other blogs. Few experienced bloggers can resist the appeal of good free content. But most new bloggers simply don’t take advantage of this, because the first few weeks after the launch of their blog are so hectic that they don’t have time to write additional posts for someone else’s blog. With a little planning, however, you can overcome the time crunch and pick up some great links. Save up a half dozen good posts before you launch, and submit them to related blogs as a way to introduce yourself and your blog to their audience. (It’s usually better to only do this when the blogger is actively seeking submissions; you probably shouldn’t submit posts unasked-for.) Of course, link back to your own blog in the “author’s bio” at the bottom of the post. It’s not good form to submit the same article to multiple sites, so don’t cut corners here; instead create a good unique post for each submission you make.

Finishing touches

19. Ask friends for feedback on your site. Ask some of your webmaster friends to review/critique your site a few days before its official launch. The blogging world is largely comprised people who consider themselves somewhat entrepreneurial, and as a result, bloggers tend to respect (and want to help) people who are out there trying to start up their own site. By asking other bloggers to give you feedback, you put them in the role of expert and create in them a sense of ownership in your site (which means they will be more likely to give you a hand when you need it). Not surprisingly, this technique usually does provide some valuable feedback from people who have experience, if not expertise, in running a blog. But in addition, by putting your peers in the position of expert, you dramatically increase the chance that they will follow your launch and drop you a link once you get off the ground.

20. Go ‘Real-World’ with other bloggers. If you live in a major city (or visit one occasionally), invite other bloggers to join you for a drink or dinner. While friendships can be developed in cyberspace, the most fruitful business relationships, even in the world of blogging, tend to flourish only after face-to-face interaction. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just send a few individualized emails to some specific bloggers in your city asking them to meet up. You can frame it as an opportunity to learn from their wisdom (bloggers love to consider themselves experts), or simply a meeting of the minds. Either way, having a relationship bolstered by face-to-face contact can provide countless benefits over one maintained entirely online.

21. Dress up your comments. Even if you don’t have any readers, you can be assured that comment spammers will find you. Comment spammers are the guys dropping off-topic advertisements for Viagra and weight loss pills in the comments of your blog. Nothing kills the ability of a blog to attract new links like a spammy site. And nothing says ’spammy site’ like a comments page full of irrelevant comments and links. So monitor and delete spammy comments on a regular basis. In addition to deleting the garbage comments, you need to foster a positive community. People want to participate in and link to a vibrant site. So create one by encouraging your friends to comment on your blog. The key is that you want to create the impression of an energetic and participatory group of readers. Nobody wants to be the first guy to comment on a post, but everyone wants to chime in on a hot debate.

The bottom line: if you follow the preceding tips, you’re not guaranteed to have a successful blog, but you are guaranteed to have a strong launch, and a fighting chance to make it big in the blogosphere.

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0 Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business

Are you doing a good job meeting the needs of your small business? Keeping a good handle on finances? Networking? Do you have a system for organizing your marketing strategy? Do you even have a marketing strategy?

If you are running a small business, you know that to be successful you need to be a jack-of-all-trades. The smart way to manage everything from company finances, to client relations, to marketing, is to use the right tools – tools that are simple enough that they won’t require you to spend a lot of time and money you don’t have setting them up.

In this guide we cover the 25 best web2.0 applications for entrepreneurs who are looking for simple, cheap, and effective solutions to solving some of the tasks facing their small business or startup. The 25 applications selected were chosen both on the basis of their usefulness for the individual small business manager as well as their effectiveness in providing community support and networking opportunities for users.

Finances, Money Management, Payments

You’re in business to make money. However, if you can’t manage your finances, payments, and assets, you’re going to find that expenses start to creep up, financing runs short, and your ability to plan for the future is nil. Thankfully, the following five apps are designed specifically to help you manage your finances. With these apps, you’ll know where every dime is spent and what you owe at all times, allowing you to start planning your company’s future rather than always trying to play catch up.

1. Prosper.
   
   Got a business idea but little or no capital? Prosper is a new type of peer lending service which brings individual lenders and small business borrowers together. Each loanee creates a profile, describes what the loan will be used for, and what interest rate they are able to pay. Lenders indicate how much they are offering, at what rates, and who they want to offer sums to. So your loan may come from multiple sources, or a single person. Alternatively, if you already have a group of investors you already know, such as friends and family, Prosper manages the transaction’s lifecycle for you. Regardless of whom you borrow from, Prosper takes a small percentage for managing each loan. For the entrepreneur looking for alternative financing, peer lending can be a great solution. The only downside, however, is that everyone knows your business, literally and figuratively.
2. Dimewise.
   
   Dimewise lets you record your purchases/expenses and categorizes them. Then, when you’re wondering where the heck last month’s budget went to, you can produce a pretty pie chart showing you exactly what you’re spending your money on. You can also set recurring expenses as well as track balances in one or more accounts, which will make it easier to predict what your future months’ total expenses will be. Of course, you could do much of this with a spreadsheet, but Dimewise lets you do it from anywhere with a web browser, and saves you the time of setting up macros.
3. NetworthIQ.
   
   NetworthIQ, winner of an SEOmoz web2.0 award, will help you keep track of your company’s finances as well as your personal net worth. It also includes a fun tool that lets you compare your income to other entrepreneurs of the same age or industry, so you can keep track of your company’s success relative to your peers.
4. Wesabe.
   
   Wesabe goes a step further than both Dimewise and NetworthIQ by integrating its financial organization and planning tools with your bank account. This allows you to complete a monthly accounting report and simultaneously use that report to manage and pay your bills. In addition to this added function, Wesabe also serves as a meeting point for other entrepreneurs to discuss financial advice. While this application won’t be robust enough to meet the needs of larger companies, for small startups Wesabe can serve as a one-stop finance resource.
5. Instacalc.
   
   Whether you’re rolling in the dough or just squeaking by, every entrepreneur has to crunch the numbers. There’s no easier tool to do long financial equations than instacalc, which will also give you a variety of charting options to display your figures. And if you need to go beyond basic algebra, calcoolate will help you add up all your moola in ways that would make your calculus teacher proud.

Timesheets, Invoicing, Billing

For a small business to succeed, managers need to maximize the amount of time they spend on developing the business, and try to minimize the time they spend on mundane tasks like creating timesheets and invoices. The following three web2.0 apps are all designed to help you cut the time you have to spend on these mundane tasks while simultaneously increasing your company’s accuracy and effectiveness in doing them.

6. FreshBooks.
   
   FreshBooks is an app designed with the web-based entrepreneur in mind. Not only does the program let you bill clients via email with professional-looking invoices, but clients can also pay you online via PayPal, Authorize.net, and other options through FreshBooks. The wide range of invoicing options is certainly enough for most small business owners, and because the generated billing reports the application generates can handle imported data, FreshBooks will work well with your current billing system.
7. Harvest.
   
   If after a long work day you often find yourself trying to wonder what exactly you did with all your time, both you and your small business would probably benefit from some time tracking. GetHarvest offers ten reasons why you should use their time tracking solution, including professional quality reports, Internet-based access, daily data backups, and privacy. Perhaps the most important feature is the application’s ability to analyze the hours worked by your entire staff, thus enabling you to identify company-wide inefficiencies.
8. SidejobTrack.
   
   SidejobTrack is billed as a software tool for the part-time independent contractor. If your startup involves providing services for a number of different clients, this all-in-one finance app is ideal for you. With SidejobTrack you can organize all the various jobs and services you’re performing, send estimates, do invoicing, tax reporting and even manage projects.

Communication and Collaboration

A common ingredient in every small company’s success is teamwork and communication. We’ve got both covered here with five web applications designed for conferencing, voice communication, text chat, team/project management, live customer support, and workspace sharing.

9. Campfire.
   
   The much celebrated product company 37 Signals has a suite of award-winning tools for collaboration and productivity: Campfire for group chat, Basecamp
   for collaboration and project management, and Backpack for organization (calendaring).Among these, the most useful tool for small business owners is Campfire. The application offers password-protected chat rooms to which you can invite clients, vendors, colleagues, and employees. These secured rooms are an excellent place to conduct negotiations that may involve sensitive company data without fear of having that information compromised.
10. Meebo.
    
    If you’ve used any of the text chat IM clients such as AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or MSN Messenger (aka Windows Live Messenger), you’re aware of one fundamental problem: they don’t play nice together. If you have one contact on one IM and another contact using another service, how do you stay accessible to both of them? You could open a whole group of IM clients and chew up your free RAM memory, or you could use Meebo as a web-based bridge. For online companies where an increasing amount of business is conducted over IM clients, making yourself accessible to everyone through a bridging app like Meebo can mean the difference between success and failure.
11. Userplane.
    
    Userplane offers a suite of communication and conferencing tools, the most useful of which is called Presence. Presence is the new hot niche tool in telecom, be it over the Internet, cellular networks, or the good old regular telephone system. The technology allows a communication system to “know” where a user is and to reroute calls and messages accordingly to the specific device he is near. For those entrepreneurs who work from home, the office, and the road, this app is really helpful.
12. ConceptShare.
    
    Of all the above conferencing and collaboration solutions, none of them is suited for creative live interaction, such as having multiple people in different locations designing artwork or editing a document. ConceptShare solves the need for having a way to collaborate on a project in real-time by providing a creative workspace where employees can add to and modify graphic presentations. Changes made on the artwork or web design are even tagged by contributor, so different filtering combinations will allow your team to look at a variety of different filtering options.
13. Near-time.
    
    Near-time offers collaboration tools including group calendars with event and activity tracking, private shared weblogs, author pages, categories and tagging, and more. Near-time is designed specifically for small businesses, work groups and professionals, which no doubt includes the collaborative entrepreneur.

Organization

As a small business owner you don’t have the luxury of having a personal assistant to keep you organized. But just because you can’t afford to devote hours or dollars to staying on top of things, doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. The following three apps are designed to help you quickly and easily keep track of deadlines and schedule your work week so you can focus on the most important task, building your business.

14. Google Calendar.
    
    There are numerous web2.0 calendaring applications out there, including CalendarHub, Planzo, and spongecell. But what sets Google Calendar apart from the rest is its ease of setup and use. With Google Calendar you can quickly set up multiple calendars for different projects or clients, as well as link up to public calendars which can help you stay synched with your client’s activities. And for the entrepreneur on the go, Google Calendar even lets you check on your schedule from a mobile phone through SMS messaging.
15. Remember the milk.
    
    Have you ever tied string around your finger to remind yourself of something but then forgot what it was?Remember the milk can help you and your company remember all of the days important details. The app will let you set and receive reminders via email, SMS and IM. And to minimize the total number of apps you’re running independently on a daily basis, Remember the Milk even works as an add-on to Google Calendar.
16. Neptune.
    
    Neptune is the ultimate in practical planning. This web2.0 application won a spot on this list primarily because of its ease of use and simplicity. It’s a GTD (get things done) type of to-do list application with multiple project folders and drag and drop task reordering. Neptune also sends you email each day reminding you what your most urgent task for each defined project is. And for those of you daunted by the idea of having to go in and constantly update your to-do list, Neptune will even allow you to set up events and reminders simply by mailing items to your personal inbox.

Networking, Social Spaces

While big companies can afford just wait until contacts come to them, as a small business owner you have to go out and make your own opportunities. That means being proactive about developing relationships with people in your niche and finding new ways to introduce yourself and your company to prospective clients. The two apps in this section are designed to help you to be more effective at professional networking.

17. LinkedIn.
    
    LinkedIn is the new, hot, de rigueur networking tool for professionals and entrepreneurs. It builds on the concept of six degrees of separation, which says that every human being is connected to every other human being through at most 6 people. Entering into a network means being able to take advantage of business opportunities, asking for, or offering advice, and letting people in your network know about your projects. The best part? You’re connected to everyone that your direct connections are networked with. That means that you can quickly expand your contacts and develop your professional reputation with minimal effort, since you already have something in common with the other person (a common contact).
18. Ning.
    
    Ning is easily one of the most unique web2.0 application sites out there. Ning takes web2.0 to a whole new level by letting you build your own networking and social space. The plug-n-play social space creator will allow you to create your own community space for other entrepreneurs and potential clients in your niche to communicate and share ideas. With hundreds of pre-fabricated modules no programming is needed to get the space up and running making it just the sort of marketing boost your company needs.

Content Creation, Office and Productivity Tools

No matter the service or product that your startup company sells, you are going to need to maintain accurate records if you want to stay productive and steer clear of legal issues. But since you’re already strapped for time, recordkeeping is often one of the first dropped tasks if a small business doesn’t have a good plan in place to make sure that it gets done. In this section we cover four of the best web-based apps to help you take notes, write documents, preserve records, and create spreadsheets. When used correctly, these tools will minimize the time it takes you to make and keep hard copies, records, and backups so that you will actually follow through and get them done.

19. Zoho.
    
    Zoho has one of the most well-rounded offerings of web-based tools for the entrepreneur/ business person, including an Office Suite (Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Virtual Office), Productivity Tools (Projects, CRM, Creator, Planner, Chat), Polls, and website monitoring. One of the most useful applications, however, is Zoho Challenge, which lets you test and evaluate job candidates using a combination of multiple choice and descriptive questions. Candidates can then be emailed results for one or more tests. Perhaps the best feature is Zoho Writer, a superb web-based replacement for Microsoft Word. Zoho Writer’s only limitation is its own popularity, which has been known to cause slow server response times. By using a web-based writing program, your employees and clients will be able to access their work at any time without the need for email attachments.
20. ThinkFree.
    
    ThinkFree calls itself “the best Online Office on earth.” Their suite of apps includes ThinkFree Online, Server, Desktop, and Portable. Of these numerous tools, the two most useful for entrepreneurs are ThinkFree Online, a document management and sharing application, and Desktop, a Microsoft Office compatible word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. Together, these two tools will allow small business owners and their employees to access a project no matter their location.
21. MyStickies.
    
    Does your business involve online research, but keeping a pad of paper and a pen handy for notes seems arcane to you? Or maybe you’ve made the cost-effective choice to try to make your company paper free. Whatever your reason, MyStickies is one of a number of digital sticky note apps (among others are stikkit, jotcloud, sticky tag, and webnote) available to you to quickly record short notes. In addition to putting post-its on your desktop, MyStickies will also let you put digital stickies on a particular web page so that when you return to the page later on, you won’t need to spend time trying to remember where you were in your research.
22. EyeOS.
    
    If your company would benefit from having multiple employees having access to the same documents, images, and programs, but they’re spread around the world, a shared online operating system might be the answer. EyeOS, one of the new breed of web-based “operating systems” is one of the best options available. EyeOS is Open Source and can either be downloaded and installed to your own server, or run off their public server. Once EyeOS is setup, anyone with the correct username and password can access the “desktop”, no matter where they are located. That means that if you and your employees are frequently working off the same data or tools, EyeOS may be the ideal application for your company.

Promotion, Marketing, Sales and Support

Fortune 500 companies have entire departments devoted to branding, marketing and supporting their products. For the small business owner, however, you need to replace all those departments and still have time left over to meet the other needs of your company. As the face and driving force behind your startup, it will be largely up to you to get your product in front of new customers, control the way it is perceived in the market, and answer questions from potential clients. The following four Web2.0 apps are all designed to maximize the effectiveness of your time by helping you promote your product and provide customer support.

23. Veetro.
    
    Veetro is designed to be a one-stop organizational and promotional application for small businesses. It offers a wide range of tools from invoicing and project management to customer support.The most useful aspect of Veetro, however, is its emphasis on client development and sales. With built-in lead tracking, email marketing, customer support and direct advertising functions, Veetro is an excellent tool for small businesses that are making a push to expand their client base or break into a new niche.
24. eBay.
    
    eBay is the classic early web2.0 application because of it’s pseudo-social network reviewing system. For small businesses trying to generate buzz, selling a few early product examples on eBay is a good way to get your product out early without a lot of overhead cost. In fact, some people legitimately make their living selling products full-time on eBay, though it’s not necessarily as easy as all those $97 e-books would have you believe. But if you’re an entrepreneur with volume purchasing and drop-shipping experience or just looking for some pre-launch exposure, eBay might be perfect for you.
25. Qoop.
    
    Qoop, there it is. When it comes to promotional/ advertising efforts for your small business, Qoop is an excellent resource as it allows you to create calendars, posters and other “memorabilia” with your company’s logo added. Qoop goes beyond sites like cafepress by taking numerous web2.0 photo sharing sites and networks including photobucket, webshots, and flickr and mashing them up. So if you have, say, a flickr photostream, you can create custom calendars using your images. Qoop has also partnered up with sites like blogprinting and fundprinting to outsource volume printing.
26. Bonus App: YouTube.
    
    Don’t underestimate the value of YouTube to a business, especially because of its pseudo-social network and category tagging. Real estate agents use YouTube to post video walkthroughs of properties they’ve listed on their website. Other web2.0 applications in alpha and beta stage post screencasts of their “secret” software to create some buzz. The innovative entrepreneur will come up with some way to utilize YouTube or similar sites such as revver to promote their business. If new media advertising doesn’t work for your company, you might want to promote via traditional TV through spotrunner. Spotrunner lets you pick pre-shot footage snippets to mashup, and then finds you budget ad spots with TV stations across the USA.

Being an entrepreneur has always been a high risk/ high reward venture. This year, more than 50% of new startups will close up shop before they reach their first anniversary. And while you cannot control things like market fluctuations, being smart about how you spend your time and energy can dramatically improve your company’s chances of success. This article has introduced you to 25 of the best Web 2.0 applications, all of which are designed to help you organize, control and promote your company, so that by working smarter you can maximize the chances of your startup’s success.

Little Known Ways to Brand Tips for Poor Web Startups

“If you build it, they will come.” That might have worked for Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams, but if you’ve built a good site and are expecting people to just show up, you’ll be waiting a very long time. The days of setting up shop and automatically getting traffic just by being online are over. Today, if you want to have success on the web you need a unique angle and a reputable brand so that visitors have something to remember you by.

Branding distinguishes you from your competition, and having a unique identity is especially important on the Internet, because buying from a competitor’s site instead of yours is just a click away. But despite its importance, surprisingly, most webmasters have either never heard of branding, or just choose to ignore it.

If you have heard of branding, then you’ve probably heard two things: it takes a long time to see results, and it’s expensive. While that is definitely true about traditional branding, Web 2.0 branding is flipping the traditional model on its head. By using offline and online DIY (do it yourself) methods and some guerilla marketing techniques, you can build, announce, and control your brand without having to spend loads of money. The following tips should help you on your way:

Branding in the Blogosphere

Yes, you can use a blog to develop your brand. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.

1. Launch an influential blog to build up your profile.

2. Go niche and dominate. If you’re going to try to leverage a company blog into traffic, links, and reputation development for your primary site, your efforts will be far more successful if you become the authority in a smaller niche, rather than one among many in a broader topic.

3. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel. Remember that blogging for branding is a tool to get new customers, so it’s only worthwhile if blogging doesn’t take so much time that you can’t concentrate on your central business. So save time by simplifying your blogging by using these 50 blogging resources.

4. Create stars out of your audience. Everyone loves flattery. So if your goal is to develop a reputation as an expert in a particular field, start by doing profiles of the other webmasters and sites in your niche. By giving some positive but fair press to others in your niche, you can quickly develop a reputation as a person in the know. For a couple of good examples, you can check out the BlogNetworkWatch, which covers the blog network industry, and Peter Csathy, CEO of SightSpeed software, and his Digital Media Update. It’s about the industry, not the company.

5. Mix your off-line personality with your online world. Straight-laced professionalism is so passe. Throw some of your personal life/ flair into your blogging to give your site personality and start developing your own brand. But keep in mind that the brand you develop through your blog will carry over to your primary site. So don’t go so informal that you discredit your products or service.

6. Respect yourself, it’s contagious. Treat your work as authoritative if you want others to. That means citing your past articles in your current ones, mentioning work you’ve done on related topics whenever interviewed, etc.

7. Target your audience geographically. Despite the huge numbers that accessing the world community through the internet can bring, targeting your product or service to a particular geography, where applicable, can be a great way to help carve out a particular niche for your blog and brand it as the destination site for people in that region.

8. Concentrate on one domain, not 10. A lot of people think that developing a strong brand means keeping your site extremely narrow in topic scope. As a result, they decide they’ll need 10 sites to cover all their related topics rather than just one. But ‘branding’ means much more than being narrow in focus. So get the full benefit of all your marketing and promotion efforts by focusing on one slightly broader domain rather than breaking your topic into 10 blogs.

9. Host a carnival. Hosting a blog carnival, or to a lesser extent just joining in on one of dozens already in your niche, is a great way to get some exposure and establish your site as a central player in the niche.

10. Guest blog and have others guest author on your site. No one can resist the offer of free quality content. So write other bloggers in your niche and ask to be a guest blogger anytime they go on vacation or just need a couple of days off. In addition, when you have other bloggers write on your blog, they’ll be sure to mention their cameo on their own blog, bringing some new readers to your site.

SEO and Reputation Management

In addition to building your presence on social media sites (next section), there are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and reputation management tasks you should consistently follow up on to help develop your brand.

11. Choose your company name carefully. Before incorporating, stop by a domain registrar and check that an associated domain name is available. Also ask a wide array of people what the first thing they think of when they hear the name is. Often niche insiders will give a very different answer than people who’ve never heard of your niche before. If you hope to attract both, you will need a name that is attractive to a broad spectrum of users.

12. Secure your brand throughout all top level domains. Your brand should be untouchable, so secure it by purchasing your company domain name across all the major top level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .info, .org, .biz etc. Failing to do so leaves the door open for competitors/ imposters to damage your brand uniformity.

13. Use e-press releases. Press releases are great for branding, as they show up well in search engine searches for your company name. Sometimes even bloggers will republish them, building automatic links to your site. If you’ve never done a press release, consider starting at PR Leap, which receives and publishes online press releases from some 20,000 companies and provides free basic accounts. For a quick primer on press releases, see Taming the Beast. Also read how KFC made their brand visible from space. Some other distribution options are clickpress, prweb, prnewswire, prminds, sourcewire, and marketwire.

14. Clean up your web-history. If you have things in your past that show up bad when someone Googles you, clear those things up (by creating good pages, such as press releases, which then rank). If something is really bad, consider trying to solve the problem with whoever is disgruntled.

15. Interface with bloggers. Communicate with them, nurture them. E.g., Nokia hired a VoIP blogger, Andy Abramson, to manage their successful blogger relations program. By being friends with major bloggers in your industry you can help shape the way your service or product is covered on the web.

16. Avoid placing others’ free articles on your site. Try to avoid using free Adsense-directed ‘niche’ articles written by others and either directly submitted to you or found in article banks. Typically, these are poorly-written pieces written for search engines, not humans. If you have to use free articles instead of writing your own content, be selective.

17. Use article marketing. Write quality articles and give them away at various article directories like EzineArticles. While this can get you some freebie links, your efforts will be even more successful if you can email bloggers directly and ask them to cover the article on their own site.

18. Become part of a community. Find blog, forums and usenet groups and participate. Think long-term when you participate in these communities. That means giving advice that will represent your own expertise and the high standards of your company. Community interaction is extremely powerful, and it can show up in search engines years after the conversation took place. So make sure that whatever you say, it doesn’t represent short-term emotion, but instead stands for long-term quality.

19. Leave valuable comments. Every blogger’s goal is to develop a vibrant community on his blog. So if you leave valuable comments on others’ blogs without overtly marketing your own site or product, you will earn the trust of that blogger as well as some of his/her readers. When you write comments, you should always insert your site’s URL and consider using your site’s name as your username. But beyond that, no extra self-promotion should be done.

20. Use SEM. Craft a quality SEM (Search Engine Marketing) landing page on your site to explain all the wonderful benefits of your product. If you don’t want to shell out the cash for an SEM consultant, at least run your own mini-test, by asking friends and family to create a list of the 10 search terms they would use when searching in your niche. In addition, have each person in your mini survey go to your landing page and write down their activities. You can use this small sample size to predict how your larger audience will behave.

21. Create an affiliate program. See the big picture. Affiliate programs build links for you, expand your presence, and reduce advertising costs. It’s worth giving up a percentage of profits for the ROI later. Consider using intermediates like Clickbank and LinkShare, who bring sellers and affiliates together can help get your affiliate program up and running.

Social Media/ Bookmarking/ Wikis/ E-Profiles

Using Social Media for branding is at the forefront of online branding. There are hundreds of thousands of readers (and webmasters) searching for good content on Bookmarking sites. It’s time to learn how to give bring your content to them.

22. Social Bookmarking–where to start?. Start by building a profile and keeping it active at all the top bookmarking sites. A few sites we recommend are: Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. Each has a different audience, so some of your content will do better at some sites over others. Because of their differences, it is important to be an active member of all the sites and submit your content at all of them.

23. Play nice: Don’t abuse social bookmarking sites. Don’t submit (seed) every single page on your site. Be selective and only submit your best blog posts or website articles. The social bookmarking sites are getting better at weeding out users who are just self-promoters, so make sure that along with your own submissions, you mix in a healthy share of random articles.

24. Make your social bookmarking username your site URL. If your domain is mywidgets.com, use “mywidgets” as your username when you sign up at social bookmarking/ e-profile sites. Branding is all about incremental gains in visibility and trust. While your username alone won’t add tons of either visibility and trust, it can help incrementally as part of an overall branding plan.

25. Make lots of social bookmarking friends. Each site supports this differently, but under almost every site ‘friends’ is just a proxy for people that will vote for your submissions if you reciprocate. So make sure you vote for most (not all) of your friends submissions, if you want them to help vote your articles to the front page.

26. E-profiles: manage your reputation. If a potential customer types in your name into a search engine, what sort of results will they see in the top 10? It’s key for you to secure the top 10 results in Google, Yahoo and MSN for searches relating directly and indirectly (if possible) to your brand. You need to be the one defining what people see when they search for you, not your competition. Start by building e-profiles on authority domains such as MySpace, Squidoo, AboutUs, WordPress, Blogger/ Blogspot, MSN Spaces, TypePad, Newsvine, LinkedIn, Rollyo, Wikipedia, etc. Don’t let someone else define who you are.

Additional Linkbuilding

Branding and building links back to your site go hand in hand. Here are some tips that focus on how to develop and control your brand through linkbuilding.

27. Submit to select directories. Get listed on the best directories and authority sites in your niche. Some suggestions are; Aviva Directory, Yahoo!, DMOZ, BOTW, GoGuides, Sevenseek, v7n Directory and Skaffe.

28. Get listed on local authority websites. Many cities will have a large, centrally operated online business directory. A link from a local government site (.gov) will boost your visibility and build your search engine rankings. Often that requires no more effort than doing a GoogleSearch for “(your city) business directory” and emailing the webmaster.

29. Use sitemaps. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft recently agreed to follow one standard sitemap format. A well-built sitemap can help your site get indexed regularly and fully, but its primary purpose is to give users an easy way to find a particular piece of content. Remember: by catering to your visitors, you not only create a site brand associated with quality and ease of use for those same visitors, you also increase the possibility that your regular readers will help spread your brand by dropping links to you on their own sites.

30. Be a link leaker. Give lots of link love to everyone in your niche. A lot of new bloggers think that they shouldn’t link out because it waters down their PageRank. That is completely wrong. Link out to everyone, including your competition, and as those webmasters you linked to check their referral pages, you can watch as the links come pouring in.

31. Linkbait. Write fun or helpful “top 10″ (or top 99) types of lists - they always work. Make sure that they are easy to read (i.e., each bullet point is brief). Have someone seed the article on one of the social networking sites and hope for the best.

32. Ping blog directories. Most top weblog platforms support pinging to blog directories. Use Pingomatic, Pingoat, Technorati, etc., when you update your blog. Pinging means that the search engine spidey’s will crawl your site quicker and more completely in the future.

33. Use Feedburner. Using Feedburner will allow you to control your brand’s name in the Feedburner URL. And having above the fold feeds available encourage webmasters and experienced web surfers (the people most likely to use feeds) to keep coming back and dropping you links every time you update.

Usability, Accessibility and Design

Your website is your online calling card. Make it usable and accessible by following these steps:

34. Get a unique logo. Your logo is your brand. It should be simple, straightforward, even obvious if you hope it will be remembered. You can get a graphics design student from your local college (just email a professor in the department’it works, we promise) to draw up a top notch logo for under $100. When it comes to a logo design, don’t trust your own judgment. Have a few sketches drawn up and ask people of all different sorts what the first 3 words that come to mind when they see the logo are: if its not your niche, and something like “quality” then try a different logo.

35. Create a tagline. A tagline is central to any brand. But if you don’t want to shell out big $$$ for a marketing company to develop a tagline for you (and who does?), then come up with some options yourself (shorter is better) and do a mini-survey among friends to see which tagline conjures up the brand image you are trying to create.

36. Design with a focus on MDA. Design your blog with a focus on visitor experience that leads the user to your MDA (Most Desired Action). Test various designs before launch by asking friends and family to go to the site and see where they click and when.

37. Define a distinct layout. As an online retailer/marketer you have the built-in disadvantage of a lack of trust from customers. You can help overcome that inherent bias by creating a site layout that creates the impression of organization, ease of use, and trust. Designing Website Usability by Jakob Nielsen should be at the top of your reading list.

38. Use whitespace liberally. There is nothing like a busy confused design to destroy a brand. Keep your design minimal and your logo prominent. Don’t feel the need to fill in every square inch with another advertisement. Less is almost always more.

39. Design for scanners, not readers. I know, you’ve put a lot of time into your content, so you want people to read every little word. But the truth is, people online are scanners, not readers. So if you want to get your message across, you need to tell them your unique selling points in a bullet list or in short crisp sentences.

40. Learn from the best. Compare yourself to established leaders such as Apple, Amazon and Google. How does your site’s user experience compare with those top sites?

41. Contact information. Offer a clear, concise and easy to find contact page, with relevant info, including a Skype username. Provide a toll free number and/or “click to call me” buttons for Skype or SightSpeed. People want to feel like there is a person behind the web page. By providing them with easy contact information, you go a long way to establishing your brand’s credibility.

42. URL structure. Brand with your page URL structure. That does not mean stuffing your URL with all related keywords, but it does mean letting people know what your site is about through the URL. (NOT: www.submit-site-directory-webdirectory-linkbuilding.com. YES: www.AvivaDirectory.com).

43. Page titles. Don’t underestimate the power of the humble little HTML tag to promote your brand in web pages. A good page title will expose searchers to your brand and help search engines to know what your site is all about.

44. Navigation. A clear navigational structure will help develop your brand authority. When people know how to easily navigate a site they feel more comfortable with the site’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

45. Check your content for typos. What you say on your website speaks volumes for your brand and your company. If you can’t spend the time to eliminate typo’s, why should your customers think that you will spend the time to get their orders correct and send them out on time.

46. Remove inaccurate content. If you no longer offer a product or service, remove its pages and use a 301 redirect to the homepage. Nothing says spam site like having content that is clearly outdated or having links that don’t work.

47. Use consistent style. Use consistent grammar, linking style, etc. Expert Said Rouhani refers to this as “repetition” in his article How to Brand your Website. But whatever you call it, the basic point is that consistency in web design = trust. And trust = a strong brand and more regular visitors.

48. Be specific. Don’t try to be everything under the sun to every type of user. If your site sells blue widgets, you might get away with selling red widgets too. But if you try to start selling something completely different in addition to widgets, you won’t get nearly enough new visitors to offset the visitors you’ll lose by watering down your brand.

49. Get a website facelift. Give your ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages a freshening. Bryan Eisenberg of the ClickZ Network has several suggestions for both of these largely forgotten foot soldiers in the war for internet visitors’ hearts and minds.

50. Block out spam. Use a comment-spam filter to present a more professional blog. But be aware that whatever filter you use, you will still need to make a weekly manual check for spam comments a filter isn’t going to pick up.

51. Compatibility. Your website should be accessible through every web browser. By having parts of your website inaccessible to particular browsers, you necessarily cut out a significant portion of your potential audience. Being compatible isn’t hard, but its surprising how many major sites simply don’t do it.

52. Use valid code. Make the site meet 508 accessibility standards Designing a 508 compliant site doesn’t require a whole lot of extra work, and it can bring you more traffic in two ways. The first is that visitors with impairments are underserved on the net, so if your site is compliant it may be the only one in its niche, and as a result you will by default become the authority for those people. Second, a compliant site will typically be crawled better, because taking basic steps to make your site handicapped accessible, such as including image text for screen readers, also means more text that search engines can actually use as opposed to most graphics.

53. Be proactive: clean up problems before they happen. Remember, you are building your brand for humans and search engines. Your site needs to be solid and fast. So make sure you haven’t accidentally blocked spiders from indexing your pages with your robots.txt, rewrite dynamic URLs to appear static with a .htaccess file, and create a canonical domain name with a 301 redirect. You can also use your robots.txt and .htaccess files to block bad robots from spidering your site, stealing your text and damaging your brand.

54. Use Stock Photos. Make your website look as professional as the big guns’ sites for much less by incorporating stock photos into your site. A silent revolution is currently going on in digital photography, the rise of stock photos now allows people on a limited budget to produce site designs as good as those operating on a much higher budget. Big Stock Photo and iStockphoto are two good sources for stock images.

55. If you need design help, look in all the right places. If you can’t do a good job on the design work yourself, consider hiring an art student. Excellent work can still be had for peanuts. If going the student route isn’t to your liking, take a look at the deviantART website’s designs and interfaces section for some DIY help. And if you do want to hire a professional, you can check out the contact information on that site or try Rentacoder to get bids.

56. Have a web feed. Web-savvy readers are increasingly subscribing to web feeds of their favorite sites. Because developing a trusted brand for your own site depends on getting links, you need to cater to your web-savvy readers, who are the most likely to be webmasters themselves. So make sure to offer a wide array of web feed buttons above the fold on your site.

Personal Communication

Word of mouth has always been infinitely more powerful than any marketing campaign. Here’s how to extend this old school viral branding technique online.

57. Use email sigs. Put your site URL in your email signature, especially if you’re using a freebie account. It will help give your site credibility if your emails look professional and you may pick up a unique visitor once in a while. As a side note, a freebie account is usually associated with crummy companies, simply because your customers reason that you’re only using the freebie because you’re too lazy or broke to setup something more personalized. Nonetheless, if you prefer the freebie accounts, or are just looking for the lazy way out, at least throw in an email signature to give yourself some credibility.

58. Brand your free email accounts. Sign up for free email accounts (Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail) using your company name as your user name. That way you there won’t be any dupe email accounts available when your evil competitor or phisher starts to try to impersonate you.

59. Network. Attending local conferences in your niche is a great way to meet people. If there isn’t a conference for people in your niche, consider hosting a meet-and-greet at a local restaurant to accomplish the same thing.

60. Can I give you my card?. Always carry business cards with a visual of the product or your tagline on the back of the card. To save money you can print business cards out on your own printer using card stock. Better yet, get Moo’s Skype cards for a fun and different way to stand out.

61. Mix work and pleasure. Host an alternative after-party to an industry convention. If the group is small enough you can host it in your home or hotel room. Otherwise just have people come to a local bar. You can usually make a deal with the local bar to give everyone a deal on their drinks just for agreeing to throw the party at their bar. That way, it doesn’t cost you a dime but you still look like a hero.

62. Give thanks. Send hand-written thank you notes to your most important customers. If you don’t want to deal with the post office, at least send personal emails. Individualized contact to customers is a great way to establish your brand as the destination site for those repeat customers by letting them know how much they are valued.

63. Support your customers even after the sale. Support post-sale questions for your product or service. The cost is a few minutes of your time, but the benefits are long-lasting customer loyalty and word-of-mouth goodwill.

64. Solicit repeat business. It’s easier to get repeat business than new business. So if you’ve only got enough time/cash to run one advertising campaign, you may want to spend that energy on your repeat buyers. Your marketing efforts to repeat customers don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. As Chris Philippi mentions in Five Ways to Get Repeat Business, a simple “Thank you” can go a long way.

Going Viral to Develop Your Brand

Viral is in, it’s fun, and requires just a bit of thought.

65. Develop a viral link building strategy. Link building and brand building are inextricably linked. The best way to build links is with a viral strategy whereby sites link to you because of a unique service, an extensive and original article or an interesting product. You can use social networks like Digg, del.icio.us, Fark and Magnolia to get the word out quickly.

66. Go viral with a video. Make and post an interesting/ fun video (or series) on YouTube. Just make sure it’s relevant to your business. Maybe you’ve got your own addition to the Apple vs PC series of TV commercials. Whatever you create, spend a little time and effort to make it good, as a video that goes viral can bring tens of thousands of new readers to your site.

67. Use your webcam. A variation on viral videos: use your webcam to run a small competition. Make your webcam publicly available, then hold up a code or phrase that participants must send in to you. The first person in wins.

68. Go viral, part 2: create valuable e-books. Give them away; white papers are so passe. For ideas on how to create your e-book, check out Copyblogger and Seth Godin. A good ebook will keep bringing in new readers and links for months, and it will help establish your brand as an authority site in your niche.

69. Go viral, part 3: buttons. Create some utility or service on your site for free, then create a graphic buttons that websites can display, linked to your service. Consider Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog, which hosts the famed How Much Is My Blog Worth? code.

70. Go viral, part 4: free templates. If you have a flair for design, and know your way around a stylesheet, consider creating free templates for Wordpress, MySpace, eBay listings and the like. Why free? By giving them away, each marked with your brand (name, logo and link), you will soon find them all over the internet… and so will everyone else. If you want to get really creative, create free templates specifically designed for competitors’ sites in your particular niche. For example, if you’re an online directory, create Online Directory Templates. That way you can ensure that in addition to picking up some unique incoming links from other people using your template, you’re also creating a strong web footprint within your niche so that the search engines will better recognize you as an authority.

71. Create controversy. If you have the stomach for it, be controversial and create buzz. Just remember, whatever controversy you create will reflect on your site and your brand. So in some instances going too far in creating controversy can backfire. Just walk the line and be careful.

More Unconventional Ideas - Online

You don’t have to go viral to utilize unconventional ideas online. Here are few unconventional ideas that if executed well can yield big results.

72. Hold a contest to develop an opt-in mailing list. Give something away in exchange for building a contestant email list. Artists can raffle off illustrations or paintings, booksellers and writers can offer free copies, et cetera. A opt-in subscription list of email recipients is flat-out invaluable.

73. Free swag for reviews. Nokia loaned out some of their N-series phones to bloggers to try out and review, regardless of their feelings. Try something similar, including a free download for otherwise paid software.

74. Getting reviewed without giving stuff away. The good folks at ReviewMe.com have made it easy to get blogger reviewers of your products. But if you want a freebie review you can simply email other bloggers in your niche and ask them to review your service. By letting other bloggers know that you respect their opinion and are seriously looking for feedback, many bloggers will feel flattered and respond. You will be surprised at how much good feedback and free publicity you get.

75. Buy some good keyword text. Text-Link-Ads is a great way to build reputation through branded anchor links. But you can do the same thing yourself (often for much less) by emailing bloggers in your niche and asking if they’d be willing to take some cash in exchange for a text link.

76. Build a funny 404 page. At the time of writing, according to Technorati, the 404 Research Lab had 226 blogs linking to it - quite an achievement for a single 404 page.

77. Do something outrageous. Or at very least unusual, and document the action itself and reactions others had to it. Randy’s Affiliate Marketing Programs Blog discusses a few of the more famous outrageous branding ideas, from Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage (the original dollar-a-pixel site) to John Freyer’s All My Life for Sale (a wildly-successful eBay project).

78. Do something outrageous, part 2. Duplicate marketing zen master Kyle MacDonald’s One Red Paperclip experiment. Kyle is the genius, unintentional or not, who managed a series of trades to turn a single red paper clip into his own home. Now, he owns a house and he’s using all the publicity and web traffic to sell “one red paper clip” gear on his site. And all from a free-hosted Blogspot.com blog. True genius.

79. Do something outrageous, part 3. Announce that you are offering a new service which is either so underpriced or so overpriced that it causes everyone in your niche to wake up and pay attention (and give you some free press). Just be careful that you can meet demand if the price is too low (and offer it for a limited time only).

80. Head over to the Bestest Blog of All Time. Exchange links, or spend a buck or two to become a ‘Premium Blog.’ The site’s ‘Random Blog’ button will teleport visitors to your site, but in addition you’ll pick up a good backlink. The site also awards a daily accolade — the Bestest Blog of the Day — which typically generates respectable traffic numbers to winners’ sites.

Unconventional Ideas - Offline

And of course, you don’t have to be online to use marketing and branding techniques.

81. Promote Offline. Greg Harnett of BOTW fame once offered a free listing in his directory if you created a banner about a passionate idea and made it into the local media. Try something similar.

82. T-shirts. Shoemoney gives away t-shirts emblazoned with his name/ logo and URL. It’s worthwhile for Shoemoney because he knows that the cost of producing the T-shirt is a whole lot less than the amount he will make back in free offline branding. And if you want to combine two forms of promotion in one, you can hold a contest to design a promotional t-shirt , then give the winning shirt away. That way you get the net buzz of a contest, you don’t have to design the shirt yourself, AND you get free offline advertising by having people wear a shirt with your site on it.

83. Stickers. Everyone loves stickers. Slap’em on your car and give them away to friends.

84. Flyers. Print out a small-sized promotional flyer, and then leave copies in trendy local stores, bars and restaurants. But ask first.

85. Bookmarks. Print up some bookmarks (you remember those pieces of card stock used to keep your page in a book) and set up a stack at local coffee houses, bookstores, libraries, and any other place that your audience is likely to be.

86. Sponsor a local sports team. Why not sponsor a softball team, bowling league or other sporting event. Sponsoring = a lot of eyeballs and surprisingly it doesn’t cost a whole a lot. Often just $100 will get you listed as the sponsor of a team or event.

87. Payoff a DJ. Approach a DJ with a bit of a following to mix a track with your site name worked in. (Yeah, we know it’s an unconventional idea, that’s the point).

88. Pull off a publicity stunt. Want to get free coverage in the press, online and off? Pull off a publicity stunt. Come up with an original idea and inform the press that something special will be going down. If you’ve whetted their appetite, the press and public will turn up and bring your message to thousands of new people.

89. Be visible at local festivals. Get your name about by participating in local festivals where you will have ample opportunity to network, hand out promotional material and even sell your services / product. Just make sure that the event is the type that your service and site want to be associated before jumping in on each and every festival that comes to your city.

90. Give away a free branded product. Just like Shoemoney’s free t-shirt giveaways, why not give away a free sample of your product? This can be extremely successful, just make sure you have enough stock available in case demand skyrockets. This is ideal for conferences and festivals where the audience has self-selected to be more likely to be interested in your product or service.

91. Guerilla marketing. Head down to your local library and hunt down books relevant to your topic. Then insert your business card or flyer into the book at the very front. This guerilla marketing can work on an individual level, but the benefits can multiply dramatically if your persistent activity starts to create buzz.

92. Guerilla marketing, part 2. Change the homepage on publicly available computers. Changing the homepage of local libraries and internet cafes will bring in some new visitors, but more importantly it will create buzz.

93. Go real-world alternate advertising. Pay people to advertise your logo on their forehead, tattoo it (non-permanent), or trim it into their hair. One guy went to the extreme of hiring homeless people to carry ads for his website. (We don’t like the idea of exploiting the homeless, so we’re not giving a link).

94. Be a star. Call up your local public cable access channel and ask to be interviewed. They are desperate for content and may go for it.

95. Talk the good talk. Give a speech or volunteer for a career day at a high school.

96. Sponsor a highway. At the least, an adopt-a-highway sponsorship will build goodwill. But it also gives you a tax-deductible form of advertising. Gotta love those tax loopholes!

97. Make’em laugh. Hire a local comedian/ comedienne to do a schtick (with your logo and URL prominently displayed, say on a t-shirt) for a Youtube video. A service like GIGMasters or Entertainment Unlimited may be a good place to look for someone, but you might also luck out and save a lot of money by hanging around the stage doors of local comedy clubs and making a face-to-face deal.

98. Get physical (templates redux). Templates needn’t be digital. Mirkwood Designs, for instance, has made several box, envelope and card templates available for anyone to freely download. Ms Zaroff accepts donations for her templates, but her company also receives recognition through her customers and other webmasters providing free links: This is what happens when you type ‘Mirkwood Designs’ into Google.

99. Join up with your local Chamber of Commerce. Almost every city has it’s own Chamber of Commerce (and website), which you should join and become and active member of. Once a member, ask them to list your business on their website. The link won’t bring in much traffic, but it will give you a good quality back link, and for those customers looking to verify your legitimacy, a link from your local Chamber will go a long way.

Resources + References

The following sites are great resources for tips on successful blogging, promotion, improving your website’s rank, branding, reputation control, and more. Obviously, we can’t list everyone, but here are a few starters, in alphabetical order.

Marketing

1. (About) Marketing.

2. (About) Retail.

3. MarketingProfs.

4. MarketingSherpa.

5. MarketingStudies.

6. OneDegree.

7. SethGodin.

Professional + Business Blogging

1. BlogWriteForCEOs.

2. CopyBlogger.

3. Problogger.

4. Successful-Blog.

SEO + Related

1. AvivaDirectory’s Successful Blog Launch Tutorial

2. SEO Book

3. SEOPedia.

4. Wolf-Howl