Paul Edmondson’s blog on ideas
At HubPages we’ve seen the power of blogs. TechCrunch has written about us a time or two and it’s been an incredible way to get the word out. Now, we are in the process of rolling out the YieldBuild service and blogging regularly on internet advertising. Check out http://blog.yieldbuild.com.
(This is a test post to make sure trackbacks work on the YieldBuild Blog)
When creating an idea for a new company, I’ve always leaned towards the creation of something simple. The initial idea may not feel like it will turn into the next Google. That’s OK. The key is to start, and iterate to increase the size of the vision.
When new companies have large visions, before they have customers and a chance to learn, it almost causes paralisys. When starting a product or service with small teams, you need to bite stuff off in small chunks that can be measured towards progress. If it’s too big, you get lost in the weeds.
With HubPages we started with a publishing program that came with built in monetization. We’ve iterated by adding features. Originally, I thought we should target freelance writers. That evolved to targeting enthusiast. At the sametime we knew that the monetization we were offering the writers performed better than anything else we had seen. We realized that every web publisher that runs contextual ads has to do the optimization of placement and formatting manually. Now that we are taking on high quality publishers and helping them earn more money, that has led us to many new ideas (not announcing them yet).
Social Networking features can drive traffic like good SEO.
There are a few ways to get traffic to a website. I’m going to rank them by value. Build a useful site that spreads by word-of-mouth. Number two, search engine optimization. Number three, social networking. Four is an email newsletter and five is many possibilities like RSS or promotions.
We’ve been talking about SEO for years and today we were reminded of the value with How Things Work getting bought by Discovery. Here. Here. Here and Here. Lot’s of reminders.
Now, social networking is the new SEO. It’s a feature set that ties a community to a website. It can be tight like friends or loose like HubPages, forums, or other community sites that revolve around a topic.
My top social networking features. Number one, invite your friends. Where would Myspace and Facebook be without this? Small. Number two, find your friends on this service. Number three ties it altogether
with email notifications of things like new friend requests, and photo albums.
I think more and more sites will realize that social networking sites are less about friends and more about growing a websites traffic.
Today I was reminded of what a huge business and opportunity there is in printing. Not just selling printers and cartridges, but formatting content so that it is printable, which in turn sells more printers and ink.
I went and checked out Facebook and a few other social networking sites. It turns out, the content is very poorly formatted for printing. While more content and information will be distributed to devices, email, and other formats, printing should not be forgotten.
I suspect there is a killer opportunity in formatting pages to be easier to print. I’d use a Facebook application or widget that took a web page’s content and formatted so that it printed in a nice, clean, readable format that was sized correctly.
I’m often amazed at the questions I get about making money online. I’ll be the first to say that it’s not easy and it takes time. Today, I posted a Hub that explains the process of finding topics, what to include in the text, and how to promote them to earn money. I’ve explained this many times. The interesting thing is how few people follow through.
So, you can imagine how happy I was to see a Hub created following the suggestion to pull a topic from Google Hot Trends. He chose lipstick recall. Google indexed the Hub in minutes and immediately starting delivering traffic. This even surprised me. I’ve never seen a Hub this quickly get this much traffic. Glad it works. It’s also impressive that Google indexed the content so quickly.
See the chart of his traffic for the first five hours.
Not that long ago, Yahoo disabled their keyword tool. It was a little surprising that they did this. Today, I discovered Google has made their free keyword tool public. It’s like the tool you get when you research words to purchase through AdWords, but having it exposed like this certainly capitalizes on Yahoo’s decision to turn theirs off.
Posted by mobile phone:
I’ve been posting to my blogger blog via email. Now that I have a iphone, I’ve tried using wordpress to mobile blog on the phone. But, its to slow. So now I’m trying a mobile blog plugin. It’s light-weight, but the file upload feature is disabled. Is there a way to get this to work?
Last night, I watched Hot Shots on-demand from ABC.com. The quality is excellent. They have the full series available if you missed an episode. There are a few 30 second commercials. Overall, it’s an awesome experience.
If all the networks make their content on demand this good, who needs Tivo?
At HubPages we’ve been attacked by spam posts, comment spam, email spam, fake profiles, and let’s not forget forum spam. If you can spam it, we’ve been hit.
This has been a huge tax on us. We’ve also been working on partnerships with other companies in the social networking category. The larger they are, the worse spam problem they have.
We’ve tried running pieces of it through akismet, but the false positives are too high.
What we need is an excellent piece of spam detection designed for social networks. With how many resources go into moderating communities and enforcing rules this would be a no-brainer for us.
MySpace is announcing a competing platform to Facebook’s. Hi5.com is doing the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if sites like Digg follow suit. Also, Google is getting ready to launch a social networking platform.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington suggest that a company make a platform that simplifies the development of applications across the social networking platforms. Widgetbox has made a platform for developing widgets for Facebook. Perhaps they will take the lead here.
I think until there is a platform that simplifies the management, it’s incredibly difficult to run a site and applications. It’s almost like having multiple companies. And for small teams, this spreads them pretty thin.
You are currently browsing the Train Thoughts weblog archives for the month October, 2007.
Longer entries are truncated. Click the headline of an entry to read it in its entirety.
