Behind Every Successful Man is a Woman
January 29, 2008 | 7 Comments
Shoemoney and Chow in recent posts on their respective blogs have said that they didn’t find success until they had met their wives.
Shoemoney because he was able to become better disciplined (and thus focus):
My success can be traced back to the day I met my wife. You take a brilliant marketing mind and apply some discipline and work ethic and magic things happen.
Chow because of the support the significant other gives:
I was doing OK before I met Sarah. However, I didn’t hit big time until she came into my life. No, she wasn’t some Internet guru or superstar blogger. She knew nothing about that stuff. What she did offer was a positive family environment and unwavering support for whatever it was that I wanted to do. She was my number one cheerleader and inspired me to levels I never dreamed possible. You will be amazed at the things you can do when you have a truly supportive wife or girlfriend backing you.
Both obviously had the ingredients/talent to become successful (as they have), but that didn’t happen until they lined up the support and discipline from a significant other.
Having the support of a significant other is huge — someone that believes in you and will be there to lift your spirits even if you fall flat on your face as an entrepreneur. They are also a time savings — in my case, when I have a significant other, I spend less time at bars til all hours of the night (and then wasting the following morning), and instead can focus to accomplish more.
What’s your situation? Do you find having, or not having, a significant other to be beneficial to your success (support and focus)?
I’m back!
January 28, 2008 | 1 Comment
Alright, let’s hope the title of this post isn’t a bunch of fluff. I’m going to try to pump out 10 blog posts a week on this Site. The focus is changing slightly and thus I’ve shifted all my writings from the original Techquila Shots website to this one.
This Site will still focus on my ideas, but I’m going to dip into my creative marketing abilities, as well as my Internet marketing background — and I’m going to focus on trying to help people make money online. Thus I’ll be doing writing about affiliate marketing, various “offers” to promote, deep dives into specific niches (thinking outside of the box regarding keywords/users to target; ad copy; etc), reviews of tools, interviews with those in the field (super affiliates; affiliate managers; etc), and websites that could be built.
Of course I still love the ‘web tech’ field of start-ups and technology companies; and I also can’t stop my mind from thinking up crazy web start-up ideas — so you can expect to still see analysis/reviews and my ideas, as some of you have come to expect from my Techquila Shots blog. Note: Techquila Shots is now officially closed — and I’m redirecting all traffic to this Site.
I hope to benefit the newbies with my blog, as well as the experts (”super affiliates”) by getting them thinking out of their boxes. So I hope you’re able to pick something up from my writings to put some extra cash into your pocket.
Communication is always open — and I’m always looking for things to write about, so if you have anything you’d like me to write about, or brainstorm about — just let me know.
Twitter Business Model
January 2, 2008 | 4 Comments
Jason Calacanis is talking about it after Allen Stern brought up the issue.
While I agree with their various ideas, I see the ad model being similar to what Facebook has done with their newsfeed advertisements — but more importantly, where users after making a purchase on Amazon.com could opt-in to share that purchase via Twitter [and even earn 4% of any purchases from that]. I mean Twitter begs the question, “What are you doing?”. I just purchased something I’m really excited to get!
Somehow the user’s Amazon.com account would be tied to their Twitter account, and post the purchase to Twitter (”Steve just bought the book ‘The Richest Man in Babylon’”) — then people that click the link and buy that item, and the user ["Steve"] is compensated with 4% of the sale (for promoting the sale of the book to their friends; and Twitter makes 1-2% as well from Amazon.com).
Or Twitter just works a deal with Amazon.com [and others], where on the purchase receipt page, it asks if the user has a Twitter account — if yes, they input their username [or full login credentials] and the item is posted to their Twitter account. If no account, Amazon.com is promoting the Twitter service to their millions of users, which adds millions of more accounts to Twitter.
The question is, how are etailers working with Facebook now, to have a purchase added to their newsfeed in Facebook? Maybe the etailer adds a line of code that contains the newsfeed info and is shot over to Facebook, where the user logs in to confirm?
Google Ornaments - a Holiday Easter Egg?
December 22, 2007 | 2 Comments
I was just doing a search for “.at” domain, and the results page had ornaments displaying. As of right now, this search still does that, but I can’t get any other searches doing that:
Focusing Up: CNET - A Stock To Watch
December 20, 2007 | 1 Comment
I use to dabble in stocks in the dot-com days and before then, roughly 1996. It was the summer before my Senior year in high school and I was in the shape of my life, because I’d wake up at 5:30am, go to the gym to work-out, come home to watch CNBC and eat some cereal — CNBC in the morning use to get me juiced. I told my Dad to be investing in Intel and Yahoo back then — and he made a killing over those years.
Since then, and since the dot-com days when I turned $3k into $12.5k, then played all of that on margin ($25k total), and then the bubble burst and I received an end check of $0.11 (which I still have to this day as a scar reminder) — I haven’t done any investing in the market. In fact, when I tell my friends various stocks to look at (MIVA - I thought it was a good acquisition target) — they typically go down; ditto on my sports picks. You can pretty much bet against whatever I say in regards to stocks and sports.
But I have to put one out there — CNET. I haven’t looked at their income statement or balance sheet, and I don’t even know who is running that place right now (it’s Neil Ashe) — but whoever it is, they seem to be doing a great job “trimming the fat”. Their founder/CEO resigned a year ago and all the trimming has been happening since then. The past few months they have really tightened down to sell-off assets that aren’t part of their core. They sold Webshots and now just closed shop on their RSS reader product. They also recently secured a $250mm credit line.
They seem to be really working on FOCUSING. Focus is such a difficult thing to do — particularly as a young startup when you’re trying to get your feet on some steady ground (aka generating revenue and doing whatever it takes to do to accomplish that) or as a big public company when investors want to see increased returns. According to comScore, CNET’s News.com has dropped from 11mm monthly pageviews to 6mm monthly pageviews in the past year alone (although pageviews is a misleading metric in this AJAX world — I should focus on unique visitors and time spent).
Look for CNET to sell/close other assets like AllYouCanUpload (photo upload site), Consumating (dating site for geeks; ah hem Digg? er, this post is about focusing, digg doesn’t need a dating site), etc.
I digress — back to their stock, is it a buy or a sell? I like this simple ‘Ratings‘ feature by TheStreet.com — it looks at financial metrics, what analysts are saying, etc., and gives a rating from A to F (like grades in school). CNET is a sell with a ‘D+’ rating. I didn’t look at that before writing this post, but as you can see — I’m not the best with picking winners in the market. I’m the same with betting on horses — I go for the risky 80:1 bets, because if they pay-off, they pay-off BIG. But that’s me, a risky entrepreneur.
The real question is: What does the brand CNET mean to you? It means news and reviews to me — whether it’s video games or tech news. But that brand image has been diluting over the years.
Music recommendation: The Silent Years
December 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I never talk about music on this blog, despite it being likely my biggest passion in life. One band that blows my mind is a small band out of Detroit called ‘The Silent Years‘. Their album can be played over, and over, and over again — all in a row. (Yes I have done this)
They are giving away their debut album for free online this holiday season — I highly recommend downloading it.
P.S. If you’re looking for another album that is mind blowing — check out an 8-person band from Indianapolis called Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s. Their debut is called ‘Dust of Retreat‘.
If I could invest in bands, it’d be these two horses.
Juno: The “Little Miss Sunshine” of 2007
December 7, 2007 | 1 Comment
The new movie Juno is awesome. If you liked the movie ‘Little Miss Sunshine‘, then you’ll love this film just as much. There are still some free screenings going down of Juno — see if you can get some free passes to a theater near you.
Web Startup Ideas - The List and The Drought
December 6, 2007 | 4 Comments
I’ve published a ton of my web startup ideas in the past (see my Archive page and scroll through them), but have shown a bit of a drought here on my site. I still get them daily, but now I write them in a little notepad that sits behind my wallet in my jeans each day.
My buddy Andrew Hyde hooked me up with a few of these “moleskin” pads — they are great and handy. Everyone should have one of these on them at all times, along with a pen — you never know when inspiration will strike. I also have a notepad with pen next to my bed.
Facebook giving stock to Universal Music? Full length songs removed from Myspace for Universal Music artists - Ouch to MySpace.
December 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Very interesting — the only reason MySpace still really exists, is because every music artist is on it. As Universal retracts full songs from MySpace, that cripples MySpace a bit — and will get users to go to other services like Facebook, iLike, Purevolume … [if Universal isn't telling artists to remove full songs from those services].
Does Universal have ownership in any of MySpace’s competitors? Wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook gave them some stock in an effort to get consumers to follow artists over to Facebook.
My MySpace Days Are Over
December 3, 2007 | 3 Comments
I’ll likely let my profile sit there, but those days are over. The only comments I get anymore are from my “friends”, but are really bots that have hacked my friends’ accounts, and have posted comments on my page on behalf of my friends. I wonder how many people on MySpace realize they’ve been caught in a phishing scam — and thus, how many don’t have a private email anymore. I bet the number is high — like at least 5%.
It’s easy to get caught by the phishing scams — they are very deceptive on MySpace. You click a link that looks like a myspace URL, but really that’s just the sub-sub-sub-sub domain of some phishing site, then it shows a page that looks like MySpace and asks you to login [again], which isn’t a rare occurrence given that MySpace does that quite a bit. Then the user just gave their login credentials over to some hacker.
Literally the last 6 of 7 comments in the past 3 months have been hacked comments not by my friends. MySpace needs to do something to earn credibility… fast. (One idea: assign a few people to be finding all the spam, hacks, phishing activities going on — and erase all of those comment posts / links).
