End of Poll: 2 To 9 Domain Names Prevails

We reach the end of another poll, and this time I’ve let this run only for 15 days - a bit shorter than the last poll which ran for a whole month! Anyway, we’ve seen the largest amount of voters (44 in total) thanks to an increase in uniques and traffic which means a wider range and correlation of results. So thanks to all who took the few seconds to give their opinion.

The question I asked was “How Many Domain Names Do You Own?” These didn’t have to be developed sites, just simply the domains that you’ve bought and that you still own. The results can be seen below:

• 1 Domain - 4 votes (9%)
• 2-9 Domains - 20 votes (45%)
• 10-20 Domains - 8 votes (18%)
• 21-49 Domains - 4 votes (9%)
• 50-99 Domains - 4 votes (9%)
• 100+ Domains - 2 votes (5%)
• No Domains - 2 votes (5%)

As you can firstly see, we’ve had a wide range of results, and this has really helped to gain a more accurate description of the types of reader Im getting here at Blogtrepreneur.

What really struck me was the amount of readers (45%) who can already be considered at Internet Entrepreneurs or “Webpreneurs” as the phrase has more recently been coined. You guys are the people who’re getting your hands messy in the domaining world. For the readers who own more than 21 domains, I can see that you may be experimenting with the purchase and sale of domain names which can bring about a good rate of return if done professionally and with the right knowledge. For a great series on domaining head on over to Erik’s Series on Domaining.

Im yet to try this type of online income stream but I’ve heard good and bad stories. If you’ve done a bit of domain flipping for yourself, or if you have a nice portfolio of TLD’s then drop us a comment about how you’ve become successful at what you do.
And to the 2-9 domainers, Im glad I’ve got you on board because my soon to be released written eBook on entrepreneurship online is right down your street!

Finally, in terms of registering domain names, I’ve always found NameCheap to be quick, cheap and efficient at securing my purchases. They even offer a free WhoisGuard if you buy a domain name. Many also use GoDaddy but I can’t recommend them as I’ve never tried them out for myself. Again if you’ve got another domain registrar who you think needs mentioning, then drop in a comment! Watch this space for the next poll on websites.

Blogtreprelinking - 23.2.07

I don’t do many of these. In fact, the last Blogtreprelinking session we had was all the way back in August of last year. But I think its time for me to step back and reflect upon the blogosphere and the amazing amounts of mouthwatering posts that have been coming out in the past few days - visit these links, perhaps drop the author a comment and tell them what you think of the post:

• Yaro has a nice piece on the Top 16 SEO tips he talked about with Darryl Peddle, a Yahoo! guy. This is a comprehensive list of all the things you should be doing to your blog to help it gain the maximum amount of possible exposure from the search engines. With my next domain registration, Im gonna register Blogtrepreneur.com for 3 years because I reckon that should boost my rankings, Mark’s post helps to explain this as well.
• Tom talks about how a website launch should be done!
• Kumiko writes an extremely amusing (but amazingly relevant) post on 6 lessons Britney can teach you about blogging.
• Darren has another of his pillar articles on How To Correctly Run a Blog Competition. This is something I need to work on after the less than spectacular $10 in cash or $60 in links competition I tried out earlier in the year.
• Twilight Pics has reviewed Blogtrepreneur based on Design, Usability, Accessibility and Content and gave the site an impressive 71 out of 100. Im second only to YGG who just had a site redesign, so Im chuffed! Submit your site for a free review.

There’s not too many links there, so they should be digestable. Enjoy and feel free to post more in the comments if you feel I’ve left some out!

The New Venture Decision: A Defense of the Always-Moving Entrepreneur

This is a guest post by Brian Lash who can be found at his entrepreneurial blog BrianLash.com (feed).

How do you approach new business opportunities?

Perhaps you’re the type who performs some due diligence, but then enters the marketplace with a try-a-lot-of-stuff-and-keep-what-sticks attitude. You define entrepreneurship, from your willingness to pursue your reward in the face of grandiose risk, right down to your street-smart practicality and shrewd eye for the bottom line.

Yet I bet that in other intervals of your lifetime you’ve found yourself wildly excited about business opportunities, ready to “grab the bull by the horns,” eager to “redefine the way X population does Y”

…but shirked.

“I’ll know enough about the business after I read this book,” you’ve said.
“I just need to learn more about the industry. To read more trade journals. To attend another industry event.”

I won’t pretend to understand why you’ve stalled in the face of opportunity – I can only guess as to my own reasons. Anyway, that’s a topic for another forum.

Instead, I want to highlight the dynamics of new venture creation, and to make the case that when we adopt the roles of entrepreneurs-in-waiting, we risk barring ourselves from valuable business opportunities. And that we do so by design.

Following is a model of what we’ll call the New Venture Decision – or a model of the choice an entrepreneur faces when she must discriminate among varying business opportunities.

Read more

Living In An Instant Gratification Society

I want, don’t get. That’s what my parents used to say to me and whilst it may be referring to manners in general, I think its also a good representation of how society used to be 30 or 40 years ago. However, everything’s changed now and its turned into a world where if you want something, you get it - no questions asked.

So how did the original mentality come about? In life, there is general knowledge that you must work for reward. The more reward you’re after, the further you must go to attain it. 40 years ago, the only way you would earn a half decent salary was to study hard at University and take up a draining job which was strenuous but which would give you a good return.

But the rules have changed. The dotcom boom helped to fuel a rising trend for enterprise and business around the world. Whilst its easy to say that these CEO’s did little work, the reality is rather different. Michael Dell had to go through the stresses of starting his computer business “PC’s Limited” out of his dorm room. Richard Branson managed to launch Virgin despite his poor, East-London background.

But as a result of a boom in business and economic welfare, people can now afford to work less for the same amount of money. Not only this, but we expect instant gratification for any work we do, or for any money and time we invest. Consumer goods are a great example of this - want a Mars Bar? Go to your nearest newsagent, pay 40p and walk off with a nice chocolate bar. Now instead of saving this 40p, we’ve all become spending maniacs, wanting to live the high-life whenever possible.

Advertising hasn’t helped this at all. Big budgets for advertisers encouraging consumer spending is causing savings in banks to dwindle, and loans, overdrafts and cases of debt to soar.

Most entrepreneurs are different. We don’t mind investing money into that domain name. We don’t mind paying for a year’s hosting in advance. We don’t mind spending time writing articles when we’re getting no traffic in return. The difference here is that we can see the future return and benefit we’ll be getting after all the hard work. The hard part is retaining the motivation to persist at what we do.

Living in an instant gratification society is hard for us entrepreneurs. Every day, our minds are bombarded with messages that not only can we instantly get what we want, but that we deserve to instantly get it. This may be true for some cases, but if you want to expand and be the next Bill Gates then working for the long-term is vital to future success. Having an investors attitude, being happy with what you have in the present and making peace and harmony your goal with ultimately help you overcome short term gratification.

Google and Feedburner - A Happy Ending (For Me Too!)

In my usual morning routinely login to the site’s admin and homepage, I realised something very significant. My Feedcounter was showing that I had 176 subscribers - a new record for this site! I was in awe and wanted to get to the bottom of the sudden jump in subscribership numbers.

I checked my website stats in Feedburner and saw some referral traffic from Darren Rowse - awesome! I participated in a speedlinking post and managed to get my article on More ReviewMe Reviews onto Darren’s site. However, he had only sent me 30-40 more uniques and this definitely couldn’t have risen my Feedcount (which previously hovered at around 110).

After reading around the blogosphere for a bit, I found some news on Blog Herald, that Google Reader and Feedburner had finally joined forces. Previously Google only reported 1 subscriber which was odd. To quote from the Official Google Reader Blog:

“Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.”

In total, I gained an additional 61 subscribers that had previously been hidden from all publishers. For your knowledge, the new Bot is called “Google Feedfetcher” so look out for that one in your Admin panels.

Looking around the blogosphere, I can see that this great news has made an even bigger impact on Problogger, as his Feedcount has jumped from 10,000ish to 18,000 and on Yaro Starak, who saw a feed jump from 1600ish to 3000 which is amazing, so I’m glad that this change has benefited most if not all bloggers. Congratulations Google and Feedburner on the collaboration - it’s made my day!

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