Greg Vandagriff

As the internet grows increasingly pervasive, it’s influence being felt in most every industry in this day and age, what will happen to the author of old times? The one who writes books in hopes that a publisher picks it up and supplies it to bookstores and other distributors.

After discussing this briefly with my boss and fellow search engine marketer, In my opinion the changes of the internet are good for the talented author, as you can in theory remove the middleman (the publisher) from the equation.

There are different approaches to how a talented author could make money without a publisher:

1.) Writing free content which is backed by ads, in which case the primary revenue source would be advertising.

2.) Writing premium content which you charge users to buy, such as ebooks, site membership, and so forth.

3.) A combination of the above two, “freemium” content.

I don’t know what the future of traditional books is, but the enterprising author can, with a little creativity and ingenuity, conceivably make more money from the internet than they could through conventional book sales.

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.

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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So I think I’ve come up with the next big thing: a cross between American Idol, Professional Sports, and a Dance Contest. This revolutionary new sport would be called VoteBall, as this descriptive title will help the less observant among us to understand what it’s all about…

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Well, I’m working on it enough now that I might as well “officially” launch my credit education website, EquiDash. Right now the only thing that’s really on there is the Credipedia, an ever-growing glossary of credit terms, jargon, and laws. Expect more content to come online for it down the road as I continue to work on it.

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I’m wracking my brain trying to solve a seemingly unsolvable dilemma: a workable strategy for consistently and effectively growing an SEO firm. You see, one of my friends owns an SEO consulting firm and he is wrestling with this particular problem.

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For the benefit of others, I will explain exactly how I got fooled into wasting money on the magnetic signs utah domain: I relied on only one source for information. SEO book’s keyword tool is excellent, but I don’t think it’s smart enough to catch bots spamming a search query. When you enter “utah” into the keyword tool, the 4th or 5th result is “magnetic signs utah”, clocking in with roughly ~370 hits/day. This was where I stopped and ran off to buy a domain with $ signs flashing in my eyes.

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What is it about entrepreneurship that fascinates me so much? I admit there are a number of factors to it that I find attractive; the biggest ones being the feelings of independence and ownership. There’s something appealing to me about putting in hour after hour of painful work and seeing growth in something that you own; being able to say “Hey, I did that.” The sense of accomplishment as you face, and overcome, the numerous challenges associated with your enterprise.

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I’m still in the process of getting back in touch with “the digital world” since coming back from my mission, I think, because I was mostly oblivious to how huge blogs have become over the past few years. Regardless, I was reading one such blog and came upon an article describing how, much like one can “flip” houses in the real estate industry, one can similarly flip websites for a profit. I must say that this idea really makes my entrepreneur sense tingle like crazy! The real question is, if you execute such transactions successfully, are they truly profitable in an economic sense? What I mean is that, like house-flipping, one must be either extremely adept at web development themselves, or they must be willing to contract out those services to another; both require man hours. I wonder how good a developer one needs to be in order to obtain a good ROI with site-flipping, taking into consideration the hours you put into it and how much money you could have made in another sector with those hours of labor. My guess is that a seasoned siteflipper would be skillful at assessing websites prior to purchasing them, performing “due dilligence” if you will, and would be able to, based on his assessment, determine how many hours would be needed to optimize the site.

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I have recently become rather enamored with digital entrepreneurship, that is, making money off of the internet. I have the benefit, thanks to my current workplace, of the wisdom of several SEO experts, and they have encouraged me to jump into the online realm and start making websites. After doing a little research, I discovered that there is an inordinately high search volume for “Magnetic Signs Utah” and little competition, thus I have purchased a domain and constructed a basic site about magnetic signs in Utah. I’m not expecting to make an enormous amount of money, but I do expect to make back more than it costs me to have it. The beauty of the digital realm is that the capital required to launch a startup is tiny, although well-capitalized competition within the key terms you’re gunning for can greatly frustrate market penetration. I believe that SEO is one of the most interesting fields I’ve ever delved into. Although I can confidently assert that I know next to nothing about it, I hope to, in time, learn more. Thanks to google’s constantly changing algorithms, the field itself is constantly in flux, which keeps things fresh and interesting.