W Revenue dot ComDouble Your Site’s Revenue - Scott Wainner on Web Business

Five Months From PR0->PR6

WRevenue reader Jack wrote today to let me know that wrevenue.com had achieved a page rank of 6! From its launch in September 2007 until now, W Revenue’s page rank had been 0, according to the toolbar. Conventional SEO wisdom says that the toolbar rank is meaningless, and that Google assigns its own internal rank to pages. I’m not so sure about that. For months, searching Google for my name would never find a wrevenue.com result until today. Now, wrevenue.com is found in the 4th and 5th positions on the first page in Google when searching for my name.

I was surprised that it took so long to get a page rank >0 but I’m ecstatic that it’s a PR6 :). When I launched Dealighted in late 2006, it had a Page Rank of 6 in under 30 days. Matt Cutts thought that was just a timing issue, saying that I probably launched Dealighted right before a PR update.

In any case, I’m ecstatic about the PR6 and based upon my own test search above, it does appear that a toolbar PR update affects rankings. Checking my other sites, ResellerRatings remained a PR6, TechIMO went up from a PR5 to a PR6, Dealighted remained a PR6, and PhotoPost dropped from the PR7 that it had maintained for years to a PR6. Whether any of that translates into changes in traffic remains to be seen.

Popularity: 17%

Living Life Without Regrets

I’m an avid cyclist as you may know, and had planned to spend Saturday and Sunday this weekend in Palo Alto cycling and watching the 2008 Tour of California prologue kick off. I had an opportunity to be one of 40 amateur cyclists invited to ride in a charity race on the prologue course with official timings and everything, just minutes ahead of the pros on Sunday afternoon. For those that aren’t familiar, the prologue course of this event is a time trial, where each rider races against the clock one by one. All the big guns were there for the race, Levi Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Paolo Bettini, Fabian Cancellara, etc, those are the guys that could give Lance Armstrong a run for his money.

As luck would have it, I woke up Saturday morning with a sore throat and feeling terrible. I was supposed to do a 45 mile ride Saturday, but decided to forget it in hopes that I’d feel better for Sunday. Well, Sunday morning arrived and I still felt like a ton of bricks landed on me and had spent half the night hacking and having a sore throat. I had to make a decision about whether or not I could get out there and ride in the Tour of California prologue in a couple hours, which meant warming up on my bike for 45 minutes and doing a 2 mile race with a heart rate of 195bpm when I felt like I could barely get out of bed. I decided to bail, and some other cyclist got my spot to ride in the race. I was totally bummed.

Later in the morning, I felt better, and went out to watch the race. As each rider flew by me on the race course, I was reminded of how I voluntarily handed over my once in a lifetime opportunity to someone else because I was sick. I’ve even travelled to Europe a handful of times to watch races like these, and here was one right here in my community that I could actually ride in, and I lost the opportunity.

Granted yes, I felt like crap, and clearly that’s why I bailed. But later, I thought, “why didn’t I force myself to go ride around on the bike a bit to see if I felt better”, or “why didn’t I at least just go do the race at a snail’s pace for the experience”. I hate having regrets like these. I get angry at myself for not predicting those regrets, and taking action beforehand.

And herein lies my tip: before turning down an opportunity, try to visualize yourself in the aftermath of your decision. Picture the story as it would play out. How does it feel? Are you content with your decision? If you have feelings of regret when you do this forward-looking visualization (and that can be regret internally, or feelings of remorse or shame of lettings others down too), then take another look at the situation and figure out how you can get to “yes” and accept the opportunity. For me, that would have meant pushing myself to get on the bike and move around a bit, or riding the course slowly. I might have felt bad doing it, but there was a chance that I could have felt better too, and no matter what, I would have had no regrets.

Popularity: 15%

Guaranteed to Fail

Every day of my life I hear someone say, “why should I bother doing all that work, it probably isn’t going to succeed anyway.” Sure, it’s easy to label that person as a pessimist and some people think pessimism is a good thing (because they are pleasantly surprised if they are wrong, and if they are right, then they get exactly what they expected), but how does that attitude fit in with success, failure, and entrepreneurship?

If you don’t try, you will fail. If you do try, you may fail. I always tell people this. If you don’t do something, I can guarantee you 100% you will fail at it. You won’t complete the task or succeed, and there’s 0% chance of it happening. But if you do it, you try, you make the effort, there’s a 10%, 30%, 80% chance that you will succeed but regardless, that chance is greater than 0%.

Being an entreprenueur means taking risk but it also means learning from failure. I look at failure like a series of test tube lab tests. You take 10 test tubes, each has a different experiment running, and you go into it knowing that 9 of them will produce nothing, but 1 will produce that spectacular result. I don’t get all discouraged when 9 out of 10 of my ideas fizzle, that’s what I EXPECT will happen going into it, so my expectations are actually being met when those ideas fail. If you go into it thinking that all 10 ideas will succeed, and 9 fail, you will have disappointed yourself, you’ll be depressed, and you’ll be less likely to want to test any ideas out ever again.

Most of the ideas I implement aren’t success/failure black or white types of things. They are building blocks, and one idea by one idea I build the business to be better. Some ideas don’t do as well as others, but I know one thing for sure: if I don’t brainstorm, I don’t play around and test different ideas, I don’t implement anything, then I absolutely will not achieve anything.

This is what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from employees: employees know that all of their ideas will succeed because no matter what slop they produce, their bosses will send them a paycheck (unless they get fired, but the amount and quality of work they have to do to be above that threshhold is pretty low), and they love that - they can’t handle failure, they can’t stand risking their income on the success or failure of their ideas because they expect that all of their ideas will fail so “why try”. Their “reward” for zero risk and zero chance of failure is a mediocre capped paycheck and a prison sentence to report to an office building from 9am to 5pm every day.

Successful entrepreneurs approach a problem from multiple angles and with multiple ideas, knowing full well that most of their attempts will either fail or won’t do much, but they know that with enough effort, all of their work will slowly build a great business over time, and every now and then an idea will win and win big, which rewards entrepreneurs with a huge financial upside. When you’re just starting out, the risks are large and the rewards are small. But as you build a successful business over time, you begin to reap huge benefits: like being able to work from home every day if you want to, taking half a dozen vacations a year, and answering to no one. So never be afraid to fail, because the most successful entrepreneurs out there know that most ideas will fail, and that’s their key to success.

Popularity: 18%

It’s Who You Know

Today I had the pleasure of seeing President Bill Clinton speak at the Napa Opera House. The free event venue was supposed to hold 150 people, but 1,500 showed up, and I was #350 in line. Luckily, they decided to allow about 450 people inside, but I and others ended up in an overflow room, unable to see him speak, but able to hear the speech via loudspeakers.

If I didn’t have any connections, that’s where my experience would have ended. But as luck would have it, a close friend of mine works as an administrator at the Napa Opera House. Half way through the event, she pulled me out of the crowd of hundreds in the overflow room and took me to the main room where I got a great view of President Clinton’s speech and Q&A. Then, just before the speech ended, she took me out the back entrance, down a private elevator, and I was able to shake the president’s hand and wish him and Hillary well on their campaigning efforts, to which he replied “thanks”, which was awesome when you consider how inaccessible a person like President Clinton is.

On a similar note, a friend of mine recently asked me if I knew anyone who worked at a company that my friend wanted to do business with, because he needed to get a foot in the door. The company is owned by a well known billionaire CEO, whom I don’t know, and there’s no way that anyone could find his contact information anywhere. But I remembered that another CEO friend of mine knows that billionaire CEO, so I asked him for contact info and he’s sending it over this week. Soon, my friend, who runs a small high-tech consulting firm, will be hobnobbing with a well known billionaire due to that connection, which is something that he could not have accomplished on his own.

Making connections is almost always about a “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”, kind of thing. Most people are more than willing to help you (or your friends and associates), because they know that they’ll be able to cash in the favor some day. This is a very powerful business tool at any level. You never know who you will need a favor from some day, so be nice to everyone, do business with as many different people you can (even if you just talk about the prospect of doing business with them and never actually do anything), and meet as many people as you can. Tradeshows/conferences are great for this, where you can schedule to meet lots of different people in your industry.

Popularity: 15%

Why Do Celebrities Keep Working?

The average person with $100,000,000 would probably buy a yacht and travel the world, or sun themselves in the French Riviera every day.  Yet, most A-list celebrities who have that kind of cash still churn out movie after movie.  Over the holidays, a relative asked me what I would do with myself if I received an attractive offer to sell my business: the answer is, keep working, of course!  Case in point:

• Tom Cruise earns $67M per film and is appearing in three films in 2008.
• Oprah Winfrey earns $225M per year (and is worth >$1B)  and is on TV daily.
• Tiger Woods earns $90M/year and keeps playing.

There is a lot to learn from these exceptionally wealthy people.  They contradict conventional wisdom about money.  People think they will retire or stop working when they become “wealthy”, but in reality, few do.

So why keep working if you’ve already got $100M in the bank?

1) Ego and Competition: For movie stars and Internet business celebrities alike,  staying active in a profession keeps the spotlight on them, which strokes the ego, and keeps them out there competing with their peers, which feeds everyone’s competitive nature.

2) Hey, $10M jets and $20M homes don’t pay for themselves.  The more you make, the more you become accustomed to spending and the more glamorous your lifestyle becomes.  It costs more and more to feed that lifestyle.  You’ve watched cribs, right?  A lot of those celebs take their cash, go buy a $10M house in Malibu, 5 cars, etc, and then need to do another movie because they’re broke.  As an Internet business owner, you’re much more savvy than that, but the same concept applies.

3) Doing nothing is boring.  Work really is fun and challenging afterall! If you are smart enough and business savvy enough to earn $100M in the first place, you’re not working as an admin assistant.  Your job is probably a lot of fun, so you’re very likely to keep doing it.

So if we’re all working to earn that $1M, or $10M, or $100M,  what’s the point if we still have to work when we get there?  When you have $10k in the bank, work = survival and it’s pretty darn stressful.  But if you have 100 times that much in the bank, you can literally afford to take risks and relax more.  So I think work ultimately never ceases, but what used to be work becomes much more like play for those that have the big bucks.

Popularity: 20%

The Wealthy Have Mortgages

First, sorry for the blogging hiatus! The holidays are the busiest time of year for me what with ResellerRatings and Dealighted both being diehard shopping sites, and with the usual family/holiday festivities. Thanks for coming back and sticking with me :).

I was reading John Chow’s blog recently about a $5M house for sale in Vegas that he toured, and someone said, “I wish I had $5M so I could buy that place”.

If you sell your business or get another kind of cash windfall, don’t don’t don’t assume that you should go pay cash for a house UNLESS you’re a bad investor, or a big spending money waster, and have no intention of learning about good investing habits. Good investors know how to limit their risk by using well diversified assets, and earn an average 10-12% per year on their investments. For those investors, it’s much smarter to mortgage a house at 6.5%, and keep their money invested.

Why? For starters, on a $5M house, a 100% mortgage at 6.5% (without property taxes and insurance) costs $27,000 per month, but $5M invested at 12% earns $50,000 per month before taxes. Right there, you’re coming out ahead by having your money invested even taking monthly property taxes and insurance into account. Add to this, though, that your $5M home is an appreciating asset, and that it should appreciate at anywhere from 5% to 10% per year, and home ownership via mortgaging looks very attractive.

You have to be able to afford the monthly payments though, either via current income or by selling off investments over time. But having as much money invested and working for you as possible is the way to go for reasonably disciplined and educated investors.

These economics are the same on a smaller scale but again, it comes down to whether or not you know how to invest. It’s not rocket science to earn a 10% return by investing in well diversified index funds like an S&P 500 fund, a small cap U.S. fund, and an international fund, for instance, and you’d be better off with your money invested than sitting locked up as equity in a house.

The exception here would be emotional.  It feels good to own a home outright, so a well-off person might pay cash for their primary residence and then mortgage vacation homes, for instance.  It’s all about investing as much cash as possible, rather than having it tied down.

Popularity: 13%

Be Your Own Celebrity

At PubCon a couple weeks ago, I kept running into Jeremy Schoemaker everywhere. I was staying at the Wynn, as was he, and I saw him coming out of the elevator, often with a “Best of the Web” entourage. Other times, I saw him at the convention center, and someone was always coming up to him to try to talk to him.

I’ve never actually met Jeremy and I have nothing against him. I’m sure he’s a great guy. If I noticed that he was idle, I’d probably go up and introduce myself just because I do read his blog and I bought a ReviewMe post from him at one point. But these people who go up to him wanting photos, trying to talk to him while he’s on the phone, and otherwise acting like star-struck stalkers, should really reevaluate that approach.

By putting a well known blogger or business person up on a pedestal like that, and making a public display, you’re lowering your position with that person. Why didn’t Jeremy come up to you and tell you how great you are? I don’t think anything good can come from inflating the ego of an Internet celebrity, because it takes any well deserved celebrity status, and any position of power, away from you. If you want to do business with someone, make a meeting appointment – if you just want to introduce yourself and say hi, be cool about it and don’t do it when the person is busy. I think I’m going to hurl if I see one more Shoemoney groupie run up to Jeremy at a conference yelling “Jeremy, Jeremy, it’s blah from blah blah dot com, you’re the greatest Jeremy!” :).

Popularity: 19%

$1,000 Contest Winning Ideas Announced

Winner: Funnyexamanswers.com with his elementary SEO rel=nofollow tip. After reading this suggestion, I realized that I’m not using rel=nofollow ANYWHERE, and I’ve started paying more attention to where I’m sending link juice.

2^nd Place: Domtan. I liked several of his ideas including, turning AllEnthusiast.com into a “mothership blog” (though I’d more likely turn it into an automated content portal, showcasing content on my other sites), putting keywords into logo image names, missing alt/title attributes in images,

3^rd Place: Woody Hayday at critix.co.uk. His idea(s): “With photopost you could potentially expand it using subdomains/user content. If you provided a way that your users could create a gallery on theirname.photopost.com this would perhaps add another form of revenue from this product. You could provide this subdomain gallery free and include advertisements for revenue or otherwise charge.

Another Idea I thought of, in a sort of related way would be to provide “world photos” - a site that houses photographs that are geographically linked to a co-ordinate. That way everyone could compare eiffel tower photographs or discuss landmarks.”

I had already thought of doing a photo sharing gallery at PhotoPost.com (either johnsmith.photopost.com, or a huge portal gallery indexing photos from all PhotoPost powered sites), but props to Woody for thinking of this because it’s a very evolutionary idea.

Runner-up ideas that I really liked:

Chipseo with his “I can’t find any about pages on any of your sites” tip. Yes I agree, and this isn’t intentional.

Fili - optimizing robots.txt for wordpress.

Turk Hit Box – Using icons instead of repeat “Very Satisfied”, and “Satisfied” text on ResellerRatings reviews pages to improve keyword density.

From the looks of it, there are an absolute ton of SEO savvy marketers reading W Revenue. I know how to build successful, automated, user generated, and profitable sites, but SEO is not my strength, so this is a great opportunity to exchange knowledge here. If anyone has any follow-up ideas regarding SEO or anything else, I’m more than eager to hear them and your suggestions will be helping all W Revenue readers.

Popularity: 15%

Working Late

I’m not a morning person. I do my best work late at night, between 12am and 4am, and I usually sleep till at least 11am or 12pm. I just don’t seem to be able to get into the groove and really accomplish lots of quality work at other times of the day.

If you’re the same way, don’t let what others say bother you. It’s natural for someone to think you’re a slacker if you sleep ’till noon, but you have to remember that you worked half the night.

If I’m working on a big project, one that can’t be completed in a day and probably needs several days of constant work, often times I will work as many consecutive hours as possible at a time, which would probably be about 14 hours straight for me (like 12pm to 4am) . This way, my concentration isn’t interrupted and I’m able to stay on task.

I don’t know if this has to do with my success, but it definitely has a lot to do with my ability to concentrate and finish everything I start - implementation, finishing what you start, is in my opinion more important than the quality of your ideas. People have ideas all the time, but it’s the ones who actually rise to the challenge and implement them that end up succeeding.

Staying up late at night if you’re wide awake (like me), when it’s quiet (no phone calls or emails, no one awake around the house), can be a great way to get things done and go into an ultra-focus mode. Only downside - if you need to talk to someone else while you’re working, tough luck, unless you work until 4am and want to talk to someone on the east coast at 11am :). It’s best to do these late night sessions in bursts, in those cases. For me, it has always been a way of life. My hours do vary; I don’t always stay up until 4am, but usually at least until 2am. It works for me.  And when I’m not up late working, I enjoy vegging out watching an old episode if the X-Files or Seinfeld on the Tivo at 2am just as well.

Popularity: 13%

Matt Cutts Talks About Paid Links

We all know how much Matt Cutts hates paid links that transfer page rank. Each time he speaks about the issue he sheds a bit more light on his and Google’s philosophies and policies. Matt is an interesting guy to talk to. He is clearly very smart, friendly, and loves what he does.

• He’s totally fine with paid links that don’t transfer page rank (rel nofollow, which is how Adwords works)
• He’s mainly going after sellers of paid links, not buyers.

So, two things for link buyers: 1) It sounds like you’re reasonably safe for now, but 2) The value of your paid links is on the decline because the sites where you bought the links have less link juice to pass along after the page rank penalties that they have incurred.

Matt sounds very serious about curtailing paid linking, so I’m sure sites that accept paid reviews like ReviewMe will be next, since sites accepting PayPerPost and TextLinkAds have already been hit with page rank reductions.

The great thing about Matt is that he takes the time to investigate individual problems and issued raised by publishers. He has a notepad where he keeps track of everyone’s questions and actually follows up.

Popularity: 13%