Up and Running:

I’ve been joining the #sbbuzz chat on Twitter lately, Tuesday evenings. I’m finding it a nice way to get in touch with a lot of people at once with an interest in technology in small business. I guess Twitter is controversial in some circles, but I like it and use it a lot.

For example, click here for the transcript of a recent chat on business planning and funding for new businesses.

And you can click here for instructions on how to participate in the sbbuzz Twitter chat on Tuesdays.

And from last week, the group produced this list of good small business blogs.

What a great story in The New York Times weekender edition. A struggling young couple, two kids; he’s a programmer worried about losing his job in recession, so he turns to iPhone programming:

For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night”–by day at his job on the Java development team at Sun, and after hours on his side project. In the evenings he would relieve his wife by caring for their two sons, sometimes coding feverishly at his computer with one hand, while the other rocked baby Gavin to sleep or held his toddler, Spencer, on his lap.

Apple approved his shoot-em-up iPhone game last October, and soon after, he made $2,000 on downloads in a single day. But it gets better later on:

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day–Jan. 11–iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.

It reminds me of the (sort of) “good ol’ days” of the personal computer boom, back in the early 1980s, when individual people were making money with early PC software.

Here’s where you get the whole story: Hoping to Make iPhone Toys as a Full-Time Job

(Note: I’m traveling today. I posted this on Huffington Post last week. I’ve been meaning to re-post it here. Tim.)

Coincidence? Last night I wrote an e-mail to a nice woman roughly my baby boomer age answering her “should I put my business on Facebook?” question with a polite “probably not.” This morning I see Michael Gray’s post Web 2.0 Weenies and Bulls**t Social Media Economics. I think it’s more synchronicity than coincidence. (Side note: Give Michael credit for that plain-talking title, and me the blame for putting asterisks into it.)

My e-mail exchange was a response to a column I wrote about social media for business. I went to this woman’s website and liked it; a kind of quirky, cotton-related store, a slightly old-fashioned look and feel to it, but it also told a story of how she’d come to get into selling cotton goods, and the whole thing worked pretty well. Here’s what I told her:

Having a Facebook page isn’t hard to do. That alone, however, won’t make much difference at all. You have to use that to make people know, like and trust you. And that takes a lot of time and effort, and not just by the web developers, but by the personality at the core, namely, from what I read on your website, you. You have the makings of it. You clearly understand how to tell a story about your business and to put yourself into it. But is this what you want to do every day, for several hours a day?

Michael’s post (the Weenies and Bulls**t link above) gets to the point quicker. And he’s straighter about it.

Social media is filled with false gods and idols, who try to sell you their own “secret sauce” in get-rich-quick schemes, and hundreds are duped by the lure of easy money. The truth is if you approach social media with a cookie cutter plan from one of these gurus, it won’t work for you. I can’t tell you the secret of making money; I can only tell you what works for me. And chances are since you don’t think and approach problems the way I do, they won’t work for you. The best I can do is give a you some basic pointers and tell you where the cliffs are so you don’t walk off. After that you’ll have to get off your butt, work at it and fail more than once, if you want to make some money.

Sad but true; Michael’s very cynical view is also spot on. And you see it over and over again. The real booming business in Web 2.0 and social media is the boom in people writing, speaking, blogging about Web 2.0 and social media for business.

It’s sort of like signing up for a toll-free telephone number and discovering, soon after, that it doesn’t ring. Nobody calls without the whole time and effort involved in making them call.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing does a great speech that boils marketing down to “getting people to know, like and trust you.” A Facebook page, a Twitter account or a blog can’t do anything more than give you a forum. You have to have something to say–and more than just once–to make that matter. It takes time and effort.

And, no, I’m not selling expertise. I am in fact blogging, tweeting, and struggling with Facebook and LinkedIn, and enjoying it thoroughly, but I’m not sure there’s a business payoff. I do it because I like doing it.

Somewhere in the foundation of business startups is the idea that one of the best foundations of a good startup is actual customer need. Somebody needs or wants something, and you figure out how to get it to them or do it for them. One of the strong principles of business success.

With that in mind, here are a couple lists of things people need or want.  One of them is for Web 2.0 offerings, the other for mobile tech offerings:

1. Talk about great ideas. Starting with Rafe Needleman, who came up with this one on CNET. He asked the world for Web 2.0 ideas, offering a free pass to Web 2.0 2009 conference. And that produced a really interesting list. People wrote in suggesting things they’d like to see. And that’s a great way to start a business–with something somebody wants.
2. The other is a collection of Windows Mobile ideas, posted here. They are presentations in video, nicely done. It gives me the impression that Microsoft has money to spend on this.

So if you’re in the tech world and have capabilities, here are some ideas. Offered to you free, which is, by the way, what an idea is worth. You add technology, management, capital, operations, marketing and getting it all done, and you have a business.

OK, I admit it: I post for startups about why you need to take advantage of the cloud–specifically, the Amazon.com cloud that seems to be available to all and priced for accessibility–but I haven’t quite mastered the Amazon cloud server step. I do use the Amazon S3 servers for all the illustrations on this blog and for some other files, but the server was a bit daunting.

I did, however, run across (recommended by a friend on Twitter) this very nice, simple explanation, with steps along the way and illustrations posted by Dave Winer on ReadWriteWeb.

I’ve posted here recently–several times–on how important web search is for startups and growing businesses. Today I found one interesting new site and received a recommendation for another longstanding good site to follow in this area.

Thanks to Josh Cochrane of bplans.com for these tips:

The SEO consultants at SEOmoz have a couple of catchy recurring series of posts on their blogs. One is “Headsmacking Tips,” which covers basic techniques or easy wins that often get overlooked. Sort of a “back-to-fundamentals” message. Here’s an example: Vertical content can earn you links.

The other is “Whiteboard Fridays,” a weekly video post series (similar to your new Bplans.com content) where the company founder explains a topic on video using simple whiteboard. Again, I just like the catchy title. An example: How to get awesome links

Meanwhile, thanks to somebody recommending it on Twitter, I just discovered an almost brand-new blog called Rank and ROI Web Marketing. There are only a handful of posts, but the first two I saw were very good. That would be:

• Small business owner’s guide to Google backlinks and
• Online Local Business Listings for Small Business

If you’re involved with a web business, are you on the cloud yet? Consider this comment from a partner at Union Ventures. This is Albert Wenger on his blog Continuations:

All of this is great news for startups because it is further driving down the cost of hosting.  At this point I am encouraging everyone who is starting up to write for the cloud from Day One.  In fact, I think it is time to be somewhat suspect of a technical team that is not doing that.

I’m not that involved in the IT and all at Palo Alto Software anymore, but I do know that our Email Center Pro and all of our main websites are up on the Amazon cloud now. The team tells me that it’s a huge improvement in performance, at a lower cost, with a lot more peace of mind.

Seems like startups and smaller companies can’t afford not to.

If you’re looking at a new web startup these days, you have to make a choice. You can aim for money or aim for traffic. Ironically, it’s hard to do both.

Whose business is Web 2.0? You update on Facebook and Twitter, post to your blog, comment on everybody else’s blog, and put your pictures on Flickr. What do you own? How do you make money? It’s your life on Facebook, but who gets the money for the ads?

How much is your content worth? How much is it worth to you? How much is it worth to the rest of the world? And who makes money with it? Given that it’s your life, your opinion and your picture, will other people pay for it? Can you make them pay for it?

In her post Is Facebook Turning us Into Digital Sharecroppers, Anita Campbell makes a very serious, concrete suggestion:

I think there’s a way you can participate in social sites such as Facebook and not be relegated to a digital sharecropper. That is: You should have your own websites or blogs that you own. Or write books, develop DVDs or author academic papers. Whatever methods you use for developing content and intellectual property that you own, you should do it. In other words, create the majority of your work on a venue or in a form where you own it and can benefit from it.

I know I’m just one example, but I think she’s absolutely right; and that this strategy, or my variation on it, has been working for me for years.

Start with this list of 15 Applications No Online Business Can Live Without on Freelance Folder this morning. Some are obvious–Google Analytics, for example, and Basecamp–and some I’ve never heard of, but want to.

Add four more:

16. Email Center Pro

As soon as you have a second person–let alone three, five or 10–working with you, your e-mail takes a nosedive toward chaos. Email Center Pro adds management, accountability and collaboration to your existing e-mail. Assign e-mails, coordinate responses, speak as a company with a single e-mail voice but manage with visibility in the back office. Email Center Pro doesn’t replace your e-mail server; it works with it. (Disclosure: published by my company, Palo Alto Software).

17. TypePad

The list of 15 starts with WordPress, which is appropriate. I like WordPress and use it a lot. But TypePad belongs on this list as well. It’s a reasonable alternative to WordPress for blogging. I use it for my Planning Startups Stories blog. Last time I looked, so did Seth Godin, Robert Sutton and many other major-league bloggers.

18. Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit

OK, neither of these is actually online. The real zing of blog post editing software is being able to work in the same interface for multiple blogs, and switching from one to another. I use both Mac and Windows at different times almost every day. The Windows Live Writer, a freebie by Microsoft, is the best I’ve tried. MarsEdit for the Mac is pretty good, too; it switches from blog to blog as does Live Writer; and if you’re on the Mac, Live Writer is irrelevant anyhow.

19. Instant Messenger

Instant communication. I use mostly Yahoo! Messenger because my team standardized on that one a couple of years ago. There are four or five main standards and several online apps that combine them. A lot of people like Meebo, which links to several of the major instant messengers. I’ve also used and liked Trillian. Here’s a link to a Lifehacker post from a year ago called the Five Best Instant Messengers.

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And I’m stopping here, with 19. Sure, I could make this 20 by adding something obvious like Google Docs, but let it be 19.

I’ve had a couple of posts in the last week or so about the importance of SEO, and particularly Google and rankings on Google. So it seems like a good idea to point out this one on Small Business Trends: SEO–Just Snake Oil?

Blogger Janet Meiners Thaeler does a very good job following up on PC Magazine long-time guru/crank columnist John Dvorak, who posted that snake oil question in a recent column:

Dvorak says changing URLs for SEO is worthless because he tried it on his blog and his web traffic went DOWN. So do website addresses or URL structures matter? Yes–especially when you start out. Rather than having a long URL with no keywords, it’s ideal to have keywords included in the URL. It’s usually best to keep URLs as short as possible.

Janet does a great job tracking Dvorak’s problems and the response from search engine experts who disagree. I really like her conclusion:

Most of all realize that SEO isn’t snake oil, but it’s not a silver bullet either. It takes time–especially if your keywords are competitive or your competitors more entrenched. I’m always worried by clients who sign up and then cancel two months later because they haven’t seen mind-blowing results.

Search engines do not produce instant results. Pay-per-click or sponsored results in a search engine can have an almost immediate effect, but these can be expensive and, depending on the terms you use, very costly. With SEO, you make changes and those changes could take months to be updated in search results. Always remember that while good SEO will give you the best chances, it can’t “guarantee” top rankings, but with a good strategy and diligence it will definitely make a positive difference.

If you’re starting or running a small business, particularly a high-tech small business, web-related, and you don’t know this pretty well, I suggest you click and read The Importance of Google PageRank: A Guide For Small Business Executives on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog.

This strikes me as a quick and easy summary, going through the fundamentals very well.

Quick recap: Organic search is like free advertising. It’s worth the investment to try and get a high ranking by the major search engines. To rank high you should do two things: First, make sure your site has the right relevant content for the types of searches your potential clients are conducting. Second, try to get the highest PageRank possible. To do this, you need to get as many inbound links from as many high PageRank web pages as possible.

No, it’s not crazy; or at least, I should say, I’ve done it. I spent many hours during business travel using my t-Mobile PDA phone as an ebook reader, compatible with the Microsoft Reader format. It worked for me then (several years ago), and might still be convenient now. And that’s even despite the fact that I also own a Kindle.

That comes up because a Canadian company is introducing a digital book application that makes e-book readers out of smart phones. And the iPhone (hooray) is first.

As several providers rush into the e-book reader market, a Canadian company is preparing to take advantage of a huge population of stealth e-book readers — smartphones — and launch its Shortcovers service, which lets consumers read books on their handsets.

The digital book platform has been tested for Apple’s iPhone, according to people who have seen the service. Shortcovers is a division of Indigo Books & Music, which operates a Canadian nationwide chain of bookstores.

I like to post about ebooks and related new things on this blog because I think this is a market that has a lot of future to it. Or maybe it’s just me, that I like this technology.