The New Look YGG – V3.0

I’ve always been a one for forums. Maybe its the sense of atmosphere created by like-minded individuals who share the same passions and goals, or maybe its because between yourself and your computer – its a big internet world out there – so the extra companionship can’t hurt along the way.

Anyway, there have only been 2 main young entrepreneurship forums that I have ever frequented. The first – YoungEntrepreneur.com – was a fantastic place to start learning but as you grow maturer and start developing the knowledge yourself, the constant questions of “How Can I Make Money Online” start to drive you round the bend. I do pop in there now and again to share my knowledge (which is something I try and do a lot anyway), but its moved down my favourites list.

The second was and is YoungGoGetter. I was invited there quite a few months back by one of the co-founders Travis. Since then, I’ve struck up some really good friendships and have been constantly impressed by the amounts of knowledge most of the members have.

However best of all, I love the sens of belonging I get whenever I log in to the forum. As only 1 of 20 or so active posters I feel that I really have a place in the circle of young go getters (and I just hope that this doesn’t change as the site starts to rapidly expand).

Back to the point, lately the site has gone through a major revamp. They call it Version 3.0. I would tend to describe the site as bloggified and as you can tell by reading these words – I love a good ole blog! At the moment, Travis and Eric (the other co-founder) havn’t said too much about their “wonder coder” who seems to be a guy called Brandon.

Before the site had really annoying iFrames, where some failed to load for me altogether. Now the website is more streamlined, quicker and more aesthetically pleasing. On top of this, there is even more community power with blog posts announcing Entreprenews, Podcasts and Interviews.

In short the site will continue to be my number 1 entrepreneur forum and I wish Travis and Eric the best of luck in its expansion and the eventual domination of the entrepreneurial market! Congratulations on Version 3 guys – its fab!

Going away for the weekend – Have a bit of “Me Time”!

Tomorrow I leave to go up North to Manchester in the UK. We’re going because its my Dad’s brother’s wedding so hopefully it should be a good opportunity to meet close family and friends from across the country and from abroad.

Having just started school and finished the first week, I feel its also important to take a bit of time out this weekend to recover from a no doubt very busy week. After the relaxing Christmas holidays, going straight back into workmode wouldn’t have been very good for us physically and mentally, so I think its of the utmost that we take a little time out so we can adjust to the new level of work and determination needed this season.

So whatever plans you might have on starting that new site, revamping an existing one or creating bucket loads of content for your blog then postpone them and have a bit of “me time”!

Because Im only going away for 2 days, there won’t be anyone to moderate any comments made over the period so sorry in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. The same applies to emails sent through the Contact Form and I won’t be able to answer those until Monday.

Poll: Whats your best Online Entrepreneurial Skill?

Although the last poll finished a week or so ago, I started another one without posting about it. A few of you have voted so I thankyou for that, but thinking about it more recently, I decided that it wasn’t a very good question. So I’ve started another one instead.

It’s a pretty basic vote, whats your best trait as an online entrepreneur? Is it designing, coding, copywriting, marketing, advertising, monetizing etc etc etc. The list goes on and on, but I’ve only included a few in the right sidebar where the poll is. Please feel free to add your own answer as appropriate but make sure that it is relevant. Last time I had to do a bit of modification where someone had given a silly answer! You know who you are!

I want to do this to build up a better picture of my readers and where abouts they are on the internet – what parts of business they’re involved in and so on. In turn I can write more focused posts – for example if we’re all decent writers then I can write more about my copywriting side of blogging and tips to improve that.

Anyway get voting!

The Death Of A Forum, The Rise Of Paid Posting

It’s officially been taken offline. Yep we’ve probably all seen it coming – the Blogtrepreneur Forums are no more. There simply weren’t enough active posters and it wasn’t worth keeping a spammified space associated with my blog, not good for business.

But, I have learnt a lot with dealing with my forum and it is this which I will carry with me as I progress with my internet businesses:

1) You need to leverage to succeed – The rises of Steve Pavlina’s and Techcrunch’s forums tell us that you need to have a suitable backdrop to launch the community on if you want quick and instantaneous rewards. Both those sites had highly reputable blogs behind them, both of which had hoards of daily traffic, RSS subscribers and WOM (Word of Mouth), which helped to fuel the forum fire.

2) You need time to moderate, post… – At first, I thought that owning a forum would be a piece of cake. I would only need 5 minutes to set everything up and that would be that. Wrong. Forums are precious and require constant care and attention. Moderation is a must if you don’t want to be inundated with obscene posts and posting is the only way the Search Engines can find you. It’s an unfortunate Catch 22.

3) You need decent software to help you – Never again will I run with phpBB. The administration section just really isn’t advanced enough and what I found most annoying was that you had to go into your hosting and mess around with SQL to delete the spammy users. It was to much hassle for such a little job and hence I let the spammers sit. Next time its gonna be VBulletin as that’s the only one I know to be excellent. But this brings me onto my next point.

4) You need to spend money to make money – Sometimes, the only way you can diversify your income and add another property to your internet portfolio is to spend a little cash and invest. Do some research and justify your spending by all means, but paying for forum software registration or domain names or larger bandwidth allocations may just help get your forum off the ground. Or you could splash out on some new posters to help get your forum on its feet.

Yes, you heard me correctly. For once, I think the ReviewMe / PayPerPost fanatics have something to cheer about. Paid posting on forums is a reality and a seemingly good one at that. Let’s use an example here in my mate Andreas’ site GetaCommunity. All you need to do if you want to boost the content is to head over there and choose a package. This of course depends on how generous you want to be – and Andreas can even give you a custom quote for those extra large wads of cash.

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Tagged: Five Favourite Movies

Oh No! I’ve caught the bug again. This time its not 5 things about me, but rather 5 of my favourite movies which I prefer a lot more!
Thanks Ray for tagging me, I guess I’ll step up and say (in no particular order), my five favourite films of all time:

• Sleepy Hollow – this one stars Johnny Depp and is about the notorious Headless Horseman who likes cutting off people’s heads. Normally Im not a horror movie person, but this one made me both laugh and freaked me out with scenes of pure gore and blood!
• Bad Boys II – the second part of the famous sequel was really good and well made and featured two of my (nearly) favourite actors – Will Smith and Martin Lawrence (who was amazing in Big Momma’s House incidentally!) This epitomised all gangsta films.
• Billy Madison – Adam Sandler cracks me up! Without doubt he is my favourite actor and I don’t really know why. Maybe its that childish streak thats always brought out in his films, or maybe its his slapstick humour. Anyway, there was one particular “song” in Billy Madison that I remember the best, “Back to school, back to school, to prove to my daddy that Im not a fool”!
• Happy Gilmore – this is another Adam Sandler classic. Not only that, its about golf which happens to be my favourite sport (as you might have guest with GolfChum and ChipnChat!). Im sure you golfers that have seen it do the “Happy Gilmore” once in a blue moon on the driving range just to see how far you can actually hit it!
• Last but not least Blue Streak – another Martin Lawrence film which is pretty old. Nevertheless its one of the first films I really enjoyed and its one which I happened to catch on TV in Egypt when I was there.

I feel like I’ve left out so many really good films like the Spidermen films (with the 3rd coming out this year), the Harry Potter movies, the massively popular Lord of the Rings trilogy, Batman Begins, all the Scary Movies which are hilarious and all the Fast and the Furiousses (?). But Im happy with my list.

Anyway now it’s my turn to start the tagging so get writing the following people:
– Dave from Flush The Toilet and MindPetals.
– Rohail.
– Yaro from E-J.com.
– Mark from 45n5.
– Empress from BuildingMyEmpire.com.

And I’ll be a bit naughty and add a 6th in the hope that he’ll reply – David Krug from Workboxers.

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