Greg Vandagriff

Just a heads up, I’ve got the fever again to change the appearance of the blog. You’ve been warned.

So I’ve been sort of delving into the world of business-to-business marketing and behavior at work and it’s been an interesting ride so far. I haven’t been able to do any deep research on the subject yet, largely due to what seems like a lack of good, solid business to business resources online.

I did realize that many enterprises which cater primarily (if not only) to business clients apparently have poor functionality on their websites. While it is true that many b2b deals aren’t likely to be settled via mouseclick, it would seem lazy to use this as an excuse to neglect one’s web presence. Businesses should explore ways to involve their clients with  the company’s websites. After all, if you give your customer reasons to come back to your site, it will increase the likelihood of your company being the first to come to mind when they have a need that you can meet.

So I won’t be getting my hot new MacBook as soon as I was initially hoping; maybe in a month or two. We’ll have to see. While it is true that I probably could stretch myself to get the computer, the question on my mind when considering the proposition was whether I should.

I’ve spent the last year or so using my brother’s online financial management system, Banzai, religiously. I’ve been diligently setting aside 10% of my income to my “reserves” and they’ve grown relatively sizable. If I were to get the MacBook now, it would require, among other things, a complete depletion of my hard-earned reserves to do so. Now, if I were in a situation where I had absolutely no computer, then I might feel justified in purchasing a Mac with my reserves, but as it stands, I’ve surprisingly seemed to have developed the financial discipline to say “no” to my immediate wants in this case.

My exact thoughts were “I refuse to compromise my financial integrity for a computer”. There’s some sort of psychological connection between my self-respect and the level of discipline I exercise in my daily decisions, I think. Regardless, I do have a substantial amount of money which I’ve set aside for the computer, and I will be increasing that pile over the course of the next few paychecks. Eventually I’ll be able to have what I want without having to give into the impulsive desire for immediate gratification at the expense of what little financial security I have.

If passive, effortless revenue is your goal, I’m fairly convinced that scalability is an integral part of any realistic plan to achieve that goal. It isn’t enough to make a cool website that caters to a market need; it needs to be a “fire and forget” solution that has a built in system for automatically generating free, unique content that caters to a market need.

An excellent example of this philosophy in action is craigslist: the content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods. So far, so good: we have a source of free content. Now comes the scalability; craigslist takes the formula and adds a scalable spin to it: content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods LOCALLY.

Suddenly you have an avenue for more than one craigslist. Now you can potentially have an instance of your formula for every state, heck, every CITY. Throw some sort of passive revenue system on there and you’ve got a recipe for money.

Similar to franchises being pre-packaged business operations that can be duplicated for success in any of a wide range of locations, a self-sufficient and scalable website template can be deployed successfully over and over again, each time catering to a slightly different niche. Individually, the earnings of these websites may be modest at best, but in aggregate you can reap substantial profits from a potentially limitless empire of microsites.

For those unfamiliar with it, the “Sandbox Effect” is the name given to the mysterious force which prevents newly-created sites from being able to rank for competitive search terms until said site has been indexed for a certain period of time, some speculate that this effect lasts anywhere from three to six months.

Regardless of how long it lasts, the Sandbox effect impedes efficiency in the market for information online. Serving as a barrier to entry, this effect penalizes new sites that may have better information or resources for a search term from being able to rank for that term, regardless of the number of links pointing at that site.

As a result, you may rest assured that the first page you see on google’s search results may not necessarily be from the most relevant or informative site on that subject, as the most informative and useful site may have actually been relegated to the “sandbox” if it is new enough.

Just my thoughts.

I have to say that I was pretty excited when I saw that I could do all the necessary steps to get my car registration renewed online. At first I was skeptical, because I thought that the government would still want hard copies of the safety & emissions statements from the mechanic, but lo and behold, evidently the information was already in their system! That’s what I call handy! I just filled in my license plate # and the PIN that came in the letter, then entered my credit card information and presto, I was done.

It really makes me wonder about those people who are still trapped in the stone age and insist on performing even the most rudimentary transactions via check. Especially when there are policies in place which heavily penalize such behavior, such as the 10-day waiting period we have at Sewell before a check clears.

So a number of factors have led me to think about computers lately:

1) I work in a computer-heavy environment, surrounded by computer experts. In fact, one of my co-worker’s mothers had the audacity to label us as “a bunch of computer nerds”! The nerve! If it wasn’t at least 95% true, I would have been highly offended.

2) The power supply on my desktop burned out about 2 months ago, thus I currently have no desktop.

3) The power supply on my laptop which I use for all my work, including this post, will glitch out if I so much as look at it funny. These power failures are growing increasingly common with the passage of time.

Thus, it doesn’t take a mastermind to determine that I’m currently in the market for a new computer, in spite of General Sherman’s best efforts to destroy my financial welfare. Consequently, for the first time in approximately 7 years I’m actually studying computer hardware and the market in general.

The result?

I’m not really interested in the guts of the machines anymore. I don’t do anything on my computer that demands substantial horsepower, like gaming, these days. Additionally, two people whom I trust a great deal, my brother and my boss have recently “switched”. You know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t made up my mind for certain about what I want to do, but I’m thinking about all my options.

I think a key attribute in fostering entrepreneurial thinking is learning to adjust one’s perception of risk to include an awareness of the opportunity lurking behind that risk. I think an individual becomes an entrepreneur when he starts to fear his missed opportunities more than he fears the risk in front of those opportunities.

As far as I’m concerned, a failure to pursue an opportunity for the sake of “security” is nothing more than an illusion created to comfort those who are afraid of facing failure. Do I fear failure? Yes. But I’m also becoming a lot more comfortable with it as I stumble through my experiments and learn from the outcomes.

I feel somewhat validated in maintaining this blog now that it finally ranks in first place (as of 6:09pm) for the name “Greg Vandagriff” according to the useful rank checking tool available from Aaron Wall over at SEOBook. It took long enough, you wouldn’t think it’d be that tricky to rank for such an uncommon name, but it just goes to show that it takes more than a perfectly matched domain name to claim top spot on Google for that term. Another example of this phenomenon? Utah Magnetic Signs. Go figure, although I am starting to rank higher on that particular term than ever before (big money here I come!)

After doing some research and thinking about it, I’ve elected to keep my personal blog right where it’s at. It’s simply not worth the headache for me to move this to a subdomain, even though Guy Kawasaki does it. Maybe once I’ve harvested a few successful business ventures I can start to worry about having subdomains branded with my name. Until then, branding be damned!

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