Changing my blog topic
In an effort to focus my time and attention on one company for the next few years, I have decided to change the title of my blog from Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur to Paul Allen: Internet Genealogy.
I have been blogging for more than 3 years. I think I have made about 750 posts during that time, many of them about internet marketing, entrepreneurship, angel investing, the success of Google and other popular web sites, and other such topics.
Someday I’ll probably write a book for entrepreneurs. And someday I’ll probably change the focus of my blog back to entrepreneurship.
But if all my readers will forgive me, the primary topic of my future blog posts will be online genealogy.
I’m feeling wonderfully about my decision to focus on one thing, especially because it’s the thing I love the most.
When I attended CES this week (Monday to Wednesday), everything I saw, heard, or read, was processed through the filter of “how does this relate to family history,” or “how does this fit into our vision of connecting families?”
I had this same experience from 1996-2002 when I started Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com with my friend Dan Taggart. During those bubble years I had extraordinary amounts of energy, I didn’t want to sleep, I was driven like never before. I know my friend Dan Lynch had a similar experience when he joined MyFamily.com. There was something truly special about this company and this company’s mission.
But things changed, and all of our founding team left the company over the years. I left in February 2002, and out of respect to all my friends and investors there, didn’t do anything in family history for the next few years. But enough time has passed, and the time is right to refocus all my energy and resources on this wonderful mission: of connecting families.
I think the simplest way to describe the mission of WorldVitalRecords.com is “to bless all the families of the earth.” (See Genesis 12:3 if you are interested in a biblical reference where Abraham was given a promise that he and his seed would provide such a blessing.)
I’m certainly not claiming any inheritance of this promise, although as an amateur genealogist and as one who loved math in my early years, I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of people on earth today are descendants of Abraham.
Modern civilization and technology has tended to break down families and disconnect the generations. We have become so industrialized, so mobile, so independent.
My hope is that WVR can enable families to use technology to connect, communicate, share, preserve, and grow closer together. I’ve never been involved in a more fulfilling cause than when we pursued this same mission at MyFamily.com, and now we’re starting over. At the same time, The Generations Network (the new name of MyFamily.com) is doing wonderful things, and I’ll be cheering them on as they continue to help families around the world.
As far as mission goes, I see WVR as being on the same team as TGN. They have 800+ employees that are trying to help families connect and share. And we have 8.
I think that will change as we grow. We may be 1% of their size right now, and have 1% of the amount of data they have on their site today. But I think the time will come when we will be 10% their size and have 10% as much data. And who knows where it will go from there?
Competition will be good for this industry, and will spur more innovation and wider adoption. More families of the earth will be blessed if more companies focus on providing content, tools, and services that help them.
I want to apologize to hundreds of entrepreneurs in advance who will not appreciate my change of blog topic and will continue to email me and ask me for advice or guidance as they start their ventures. I’m going to have to turn down most of these requests for help, until World Vital Records is executing on all cylinders and I can take a breath.
But I want to welcome all my new readers who love genealogy and family history.
I invite you to comment freely on this blog and email me with your ideas and advice. Let’s create something really significant together. It feels great to be back with you. Thanks for the notes of encouragement and the ideas you’ve been sending me and the team already.
Utah’s First Blog Search Engine: TagJungle.com
Filed under: Blogging, Provo Labs Companies, Search Engine News, Utah Entrepreneurship, Web 2.0
Our friends at TagJungle have launched a working blog search website at TagJungle.com. I like the implementation a lot. Phil Burns blogged last month about the leadup to the launch. It’s nice to see a Web 2.0 company launch in Utah with a very different approach to searching the blogosphere than anyone else. I like the TagJungle Alexa chart, which is showing about 18,000 for today. I’m betting their traffic will increase rapidly and they’ll quickly break into the top few thousand web sites. They have a LONG way to go to catch Technorati, but catching icerocket and feedster may not be so difficult.
Google Employee Posts Videos on How Google Search Engine Really Works
Filed under: Blogging, Provo Labs Academy, Search Engine Optimization, Utah Entrepreneurship
I have recently discovered that Matt Cutts, a Google employee who blogs about search engine optimization (he explains the kinds of tactics that Google considers black hat SEO tactics and encourages everyone to do only appropriate search engine optimization) is also doing video posts on Google Video. (See all 19 Matt Cutts videos on Google Video.)
I’ve been watching some of these and I highly recommend them. First, because Matt works for Google, he is an authority on these topics. Second, he is both articulate and concise. He doesn’t waste your time. His explanations are very clear.
Yesterday I showed my Academy members a Matt Cutts video on “some SEO myths,” which explains that hosting a few web sites on the same IP address or the same server is not a problem (but hosting several thousand is.)
Today I watched this excellent Matt Cutts video about Dynamic vs. Static URLs (he says they do inherit exactly the same PageRank from sites that link to them, but he says avoid multiple parameters and use mod rewrites where possible to make dynamic pages look like static pages) and how to not be guilty of “cloaking” (which violates Google’s policies) if you do GeoTargeting with your web site (deliver different content to different users depending on their country/place of origin, as determined by their IP address.)
As I told my Academy members yesterday, my job is to read, listen to, and watch everything I can find about internet marketing (as well as oversee the internet marketing campaigns of my portfolio companies) and then share only the best, most relevant information with them, so that they can focus on running their business, and I can help them find all the best new opportunities in internet marketing. And of course, their sharing their successes and failures with each other helps everyone too.
We had an open house last night at the Provo Labs Academy for Entrepreneurs with about 20 people and signed up several more members.
I’ve had several people email me lately about signing up for a online version of the Academy instruction that we do. I’ve been considering rolling out a $99 per month service for entrepreneurs who don’t live in Utah. Several people have already told me they will sign up for this as soon as it is ready.
If you are interested in this service, please email me or comment on my blog. As soon as I get 25 people who are willing to subscribe, we’ll launch this.
MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia and Free Downloads
Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing Tactics, Search Engine Optimization
Okay, I’m just keyword stuffing my blog post, to see how many visitors I get by using these keywords in my title. These are all very hot keywords according to Google Trends.
Here are the trends for MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
But the title wouldn’t be complete without including “free” and “download.” I can’t seem to find any search terms on Google Trends that get more searches than they do. I compare “free” and “download” to “yahoo”, “google”, and “myspace.” Interesting results.
Anyone searching on Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, or Google Blog Search for any of these keywords will find this post, at least for the next few minutes until others post entries that also have these keywords in them. I wonder if I’ll see a spike in traffic.
I don’t believe in keyword stuffing. I’m doing this just to make a point. (I did blog about an effect press release that I saw the other day that used keyword stuffing to drive traffic to its site.)
But I do believe in careful keyword selection. Every time you post a blog entry, write a news article, or create a title for a web page, you really ought to make sure that your title does make sense, both to readers and to searchers.
Make sure that the keywords you are choosing are actually popular keywords. They should also actually match the content of your post, unlike my poor example here.
I really do check Google Trends most of the time before posting. For example, yesterday I wondered if “online marketing” or “internet marketing” would make a better title.
Clearly, internet marketing won easily.
My title was “Next 3 days: free online conference on internet marketing”
I checked “3″ vs “three” and “online conference” vs several other options.
So, with a 1-2 minute check of Google Trends, I’m guessing that I increased the odds that anyone using a blog search engine would find that post by about 50-100%.
My traffic has been going up lately, but I can’t tell if it is because I’m posting more frequently or if my post titles are better. But I’m going to keep using Google Trends to do this, because I think it will make a really big difference long term on my site traffic.
When the bloggers in our world history blogger network all start taking an extra minute or two before each post to check their keyword selection, I believe that the traffic there will increase dramatically.
I actually hope someone will create a WordPress plug-in that will access Google Trends within the interface. Maybe it could grade my headline while I’m writing my article, and then return some alternatives (by checking a thesaurus in the background as well as querying Google Trends) and then let me know the best ones before I finalize my post.
What do you think about keyword stuffing and careful keyword selection? Do you know any journalists or newspapers or online publishers that train their writers to do this? And if so, are their tools out there that get into the daily workflow?
Better than Rocketboom!
Filed under: Blogging, High Tech Stocks, Investing, My Friends, Video, Web 2.0
I heard about Rocketboom last year, a simple, short-format daily news video broadcast that has attracted millions of views. They have a growing archive, of course, and they use a simple web 2.0 tagging system to identify the topics that are covered in each broadcast. (See the Rocketboom Alexa chart.
When you visit Rocketboom, your first reaction is, anyone could do this. But the fact is, they did it, and they did it early in the online video revolution, and they are still doing it. Unfortunately, Amanda Congdon, the original Rocketboom news anchor left the site earlier this year. Now the anchor is Joanne Colan.
I swear that when I originally saw Rocketboom I thought about my friend Lindsay Campbell, an actress in New York with a degree from Stanford University. She was my assistant at “Infobase Ventures” (the predecessor to Provo Labs). After graduating from Stanford she got an MFA from a very fine acting school in Colorado.
I actually thought she would make a better news anchor than Rocketboom’s. I tried to figure out something that worldhistory.com or one of my other companies could do that might put Lindsay in front of a daily online video news broadcast. But I didn’t figure anything out and never approached her about it.
So imagine my surprise yesteday when I got an email from Lindsay saying that she is quitting her day job to become the news anchor for a new online video news site called WallStrip.com.
It’s a better concept than Rocketboom because it has a more narrow focus, but it will appeal to millions of people who owns stocks and who want to know how changing trends will affect the companies they have invested in.
It’s about the stock market. It’s about highlighting one stock each day that is close to a 52-week high and then going behind the scenes to figure out what is powering the growth of that stock. They will interview people, figure out what is going on in pop culture that is fueling each company’s growth. Then, on all the Wallstrip blogs, professional investors and others will debate the company’s prospects.
Today’s Wallstrip news story is on Apple Computer, whose growth is fueled by the iPod as well as the retail stores that Apple is opening.
So the bottom line is: better concept than Rocketboom. Better anchor than Rocketboom.
I’ve never hired a news anchor before, but I can tell good ones when I see them. I was a huge fan of Soledad O’Brien early on, back when I watched MSNBC’s The Site, one of the programs that fueled the internet revolution.
I am extremely happy for Lindsay and the founding team of Wallstrip.com, and I wish them well. I think their format is excellent. I think Lindsay is perfect for this job. Her career is going to take off. I always knew she would go places!
Howard Lindzon, the founder of Wallstrip outlines one of his goals on a recent blog post:
One of my goals out of Wallstrip is to create a deeper conversation, a better MEME for stock bloggers, market investors and enthusiasts.
The tech nerds have MEME
What blog topics are most popular?
A new study on blogging shows that technology, culture and political blogs are very popular in the United States.
In the list of the top 100 blogs in the United States, 34 are about technology, 26 cover culture and 25 deal with politics. Personal blogs accounted for only 3 of the top 100 – far lower than in other countries.
The report also states:
Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of sites linking to a blog within the previous six months. It estimates that the total number of blogs at over 56 million, with over 1.2 million posts written daily.
Only 1.2 million daily posts? That isn’t an overwhelming number. If you haven’t started blogging but want to become an expert on a subject that you love, start blogging. You’ll meet some great people, become a better writer, and learn a lot in the process as you look for things to write about.
There aren’t that many great blogs yet, so it’s not too late to start.
Help Wanted: World History Blogger Network Technical Manager
Worldhistory.com is looking for a talented developer who can work part-time to help us maintain our current blogger network and launch new blogs as we add new editors.
Experience setting up WordPress blogs and web analytics software is required.
Eventually we hope to have hundreds or thousands of historical bloggers in our network, so we need a developer who can not only set up WordPress blogs on new domains for our new bloggers, but can also improve our efficiency by automation the creation of blogs in the future, the cross-promotion of those blogs, and the tracking and reporting of site traffic and revenue for all of our editors.
If you are interested, please contact Amy Rhoads, at amyrhoads “AT” gmail.com.
Mark Cuban on Becoming a Billionaire
September 29, 2006 by paulballen · 4 Comments
Filed under: Advice for Startups, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, VideoLast night I caught part of Big Idea with Donny Deutsch on cable. Donny was interviewing billionaire Mark Cuban, who is one of the smartest entrepreneurs I’ve ever followed.
The best written article I’ve seen about how Mark turned Broadcast.com into a multi-billion dollar company is the chapter in Net Entrepreneurs Only, published around 2000, to highlight a dozen or so successful online entrepreneurs. The work ethic that Mark and his partner Todd had back then is nicely described there. Mark talked about it again last night. He described a typical work day.
He works from home most of the time. Never lets anyone call him on the phone (except his wife). If they want a phone meeting or if he needs to have a meeting in person, he arranges it through email. His wife has 2 girls, including a 6-week old girl, so Mark describes a typical day as involving playing with his girls, feeding them in the morning, he even mentioned watching the Wiggles and Stanley with his older daughter. He had a great daddy-gleam in his eye as he talked about his girls. He seems to care more about his family than anything else.
I think there are at least three major lessons we can learn from Mark Cuban. (I happen to have almost the exact same approach to work that he does, and is has taken me places, but not nearly as far as Mark. Not even close. So we’ll use Mark as the reason why internet entrepreneurs should adopt these practices.)
1. He reads like crazy and uses email like crazy and has access at his fingertips to all his correspondence for the last 15 years. The way he described it on the Big Idea was really cool.
(I have used Folio VIEWS for 16 years as my full-text database, and now I use gmail for my email archive. Someday I’ll combine the two into a single seach engine.)
Mark dives in deep to any new technology. He learns everything he can about it and talks to all the pioneers in developing it. He knows his stuff.
2. He is willing to do the blocking and tackling to build a business, even if it means thousands of hours of what others might think is tedious work.
He described launching AudioNet (the precursor to Broadcast.com) and working crazy hours doing nothing but posting on forums and emailing and doing everything possible to generate interest and usage of his internet sports radio channel.
3. Like Warren Buffett, who claims that being an investor made him a better business man, and being a business man made him a better investor, Cuban obviously does both, does them a lot, and loves them.
The reason he was able to sell his internet company at a peak valuation of $5.7 billion is that he had seen the hardware industry, the networking industry, and the software industry all go through bubbles. He sold a computer software company for $6 million in 1990, and started investing. So he knew some of the macrotrends in the investment industry and saw the internet bubble for what it was. He got out when he could.
He said, and he is 100% right, that most entrepreneurs aren’t willing to do the required blocking and tackling to build a successful company. John Bresee, at BackCountry.com, describes pretty much the same approach in the first few years of BackCountry.com. It was mostly going online all the time, trying to get links to your site, posting in usenet groups, on message boards and doing email. Same thing for the 2nd person at eBay. I remember reading that he used to answers something like 1,500 emails per day.
Most of the internet millionaires I know and the internet billionaires I’ve read about were completely willing to work 12-16 hours a day doing the most tedious possible things, like email and guerilla marketing, in order to get their companies in a position to win in their market.
How many of you are willing to do that? Have you ever spent till 2 or 3 in the morning working on your web site, visiting and posting on message boards, looking for the hundreds of online directories that should be linking to your company, finding email lists to advertise on, and visiting thousands of sites looking for the ones that ought to be your affiliates?
How many times have you done that? Would you be willing to do it many times a week, for several months, or even a year or two, to get your company in a position to succeed.
For some people, it might not be worth it. There is definitely more to happiness than financial success. And sometimes the pursuit of financial success costs people their health, family, friends, and peace of mind.
So it’s definitely not for everyone. But it is an essential ingredient in most entrepreneur success stories.
Another lesson I’ll point out, is that Mark Cuban is an avid blogger, and probably has one of the most interesting and controversial blogs in the world. He is never afraid to say what he thinks, no matter what fine the NBA might throw at him. He is incredibly smart and outspoken.
I have said before that every CEO should blog. It is so healthy for CEOs to be in touch with customers, employees, and to get feedback from everyone. And I love the transparency of blogging. That is healthy for companies.
If you are an internet entrepreneur, definitely check out the Mark Cuban blog regularly. He talks about trends that most people ignore. He got into HD TV when so many people ignored it, partly because he saw computer pricing drop over the years which led to a huge adoption rate, and he saw the same thing coming with plasma screens. He knows that we will all have amazing high-definition screens in multiple places in our homes in the coming years, and so just like with Broadcast.com where he and Todd went on a rampage and signed hundreds of licensing deals for audio content on the interenet in the first years in business, he repeated that approach with HDNet, and he is a leader in that marketplace now.
He has more ideas that he can handle himself, so sometimes he’ll throw things out that he won’t be doing personally, like this post about “3 ideas that are all yours.” Not well received by some of his readers (he has a TON of comments on his blog.)
Yahoo Mail Question
September 26, 2006 by paulballen · 6 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Email Marketing, Software for EntrepreneursI switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail a long time ago, but I still get dozens of emails a day sent to my old Yahoo email address. I forward them to Gmail, but I’d like to make sure my 2,600 contacts in my Yahoo Address Book and many thousands of other people who have emailed me in the past know my new email address.
I’ve avoided using Plaxo just because it annoys me so much when other people use it. I love LinkedIn.com because the email addresses of my 480+ contacts there get updated automatically whenever they update their profile. Maybe I should use Plaxo, but I’m looking for another solution.
Does anyone know how I can email not only the contacts in my Yahoo Address Book but also the thousands of others with whom I have corresponded in Yahoo Mail, whom I haven’t added to my Address Book?
I’ve been looking for some kind of email harvest tool, but every one I found works primarily on external web sites and won’t allow me to legitimately harvest my own email contacts in my own personal address book?
That is my first question.
My second question is how do I harvest all the email addresses from people who have posted comments on my personal blog? I’d like to invite them to listen in on a free conference call and possibly join an online network of entrepreneurs in an exclusive private forum. I certainly don’t want to collect their email addresses on at a time. I use WordPress 2.03, and I read something about a MySQL query that could give me access to the email addresses of the commenters, but I don’t know more than that.
That is my second question.
Finally, how should I get around the Yahoo Mail limit of 100 emails sent at a time? To notify all my legitimate contacts that my email address has changed, I’ll need to send about 5-6,000 emails out, and I don’t want to do them in batches of 100.
That is my third question.
Any suggestions from all of the wonderful people out there?
Advice from Shawn Nelson
September 25, 2006 by paulballen · 11 Comments
Filed under: Advice for Startups, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Retail, UncategorizedKelly Anderson blogged about her lunch visit with Shawn Nelson of LoveSac and his wife Tiffany who owns a shoe boutique at the Gateway in Salt Lake City. Shawn gave her advice about retail and brand building.
Kelly has an excellent blog. I love how she gets so many other women entrepreneurs to guest blog on her site. One example is the guest blog from my friend Erika Wilde of StopDirt.com, who post some excellent advice about finding products to sell online.
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