Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Many of my readers come here because they are frustrated by their jobs being in jeopardy, or even going away, due to that “scourge of the “00′s”, Outsourcing.  You know all the letters to the Congressmen and all the beers drunk and bitching performed down at the local AHBA (American Honkytonk Bar Association)(Thanks, Garth) will not make outsourcing go away.  Business has always been in a state of change and always will be.  Good management demands change.

So, what’s the average guy/gal going to do about it?  Some of you are searching the ‘Net, day after day, wondering where the magic solution might be to make yourselves independent so you never have to worry about outsourcing again.

Well, I have the solution for you.  It’s totally free and it is 100% an information source … there is no high pressure sales letter and no product sales of any kind involved.  And it will help virtually anyone who wants to achieve a level of independence, bar none.  Spent all your life in a “rust belt” industry and don’t have special technical training?  No problem, there are answers here.  Stay at home mom with 3 kids, no money and the only jobs open to you don’t pay enough to cover the day care costs?  Got some answers.  Got a thousand ideas for making money online but no way to get organized?  Again, here’s the answer.

Hmm, just what is this magic, one size fits all tool you are touting, Dave.  Sounds like smoke and mirrors or “snake oil” to me.  Can this be for real?  yes, I believe it is … and what is it?

A book about outsourcing!

I know, I know, this can’t be you are saying.  But trust me … I read this thing and I am completely fascinated.  making yourself independent requires a lot of skills, no matter what course you chose, but there is now a place to outsource everything … or to be an outsourcing provider for virtually anything.

Well worth a read, for sure.  Read it and think what you could do better than the old way …

Popularity: 1% [?]

If You Even Think About Making Money With Software

One of the things I don’t cover much here at Talar Business Systems is producing software products for fun and profit.  Yet it is one of the most profitable patch to make a good living, online or off line.  Don’t kid yourself that becuase of the Open Source revolution there is no market for paid software … or for highly profitable add-on service to the users of that free software.

A guy who has been an entrepreneurial hero of mine for years, Joel Spolky was once a mid-level guy at Microfot … well on his way to the normal corporate career.  he parted company with the big M and set off to build his own software company the way he felt it should be built.

He never looked back and he’s been making money ever since.  Check out CoPilot, CityDesk and FogBugz (which I highly recommend) for just a few samples.

Joel has jumped into the conference world and this one sounds good enough to put on anyone’s calendar.  If you want a place to spend a really great labor Day weekend and then put the rest of the short week to good use, you can’t do better thna Boston in early September.  When I was in the government/corporate world I could go to Silicon valley on business … that is on my employer’s dime … virtually at will, but trips to Boston were hard to swing.  Once I had been there, I found out why … Boston is a great torurist destination as well as a fantastic business environment … Google Route 128, and put this conference on your schedule:

Registration is now open for Business of Software 2008 (the first ever Joel on Software conference). Neil has lined up great speakers:

SETH GODIN, Business Week’s "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.

ERIC SINK, founder of SourceGear, author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" and the person who coined the term "Micro ISV"

STEVE JOHNSON of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year’s Software Idol competition

RICHARD STALLMAN launched the development of the GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment

PAUL KENNY is one of the UK’s top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of others.

DHARMESH SHAH is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com

JESSICA LIVINGSTON is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator

JASON FRIED is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger

JOEL SPOLSKY, aka, "me," noted DJ, has over 600 karma points on the social news site "Reddit."

BoS2008 is in BOSton, September 3-4. Boston is absolutely beautiful in September. The weather is usually perfect. You can go kayaking on the Charles or take the duck tour if you’re unambitious. Over 250,000 college students have just arrived, full of completely unjustifiable hope and optimism. The summer tourist crowd has mostly gone home so you can get into museums and historical sites. There are plenty of coffee shops that aren’t NASDAQ-listed.

   http://www.businessofsoftware.org/

Popularity: 2% [?]

Thinking More About Domain Names

My friend Stuart at Pimpmypagerank wrote an interesting piece about plurals a few days ago.

Pretty simple really, just drop an instance or two of the plural for your main keyword, and double your chances of picking up some extra search traffic…. (read his whole article here)

In addition to the keyword pluralization issue you should always consider the possessive form of names … as well as the country code issues we talked about recently.

One of my fav channels on cable TV here is the Australian Broadcast Network.  They carry some of the shows I miss from US PBS and some excellent "home grown" programming.  One of their frequent advertisers is a real estate venture near Melbourne called Martha Cove.  I’ve also seen this outfit advertising on the Discovery Channel, Asia … in other words it is not a "nickel-dime" operation.  their messages always include the fact that their properties are approved for foreign owners/investors and, since much of their expensive TV ads are placed outside Australia it is clear they are marketing to the world and not just folks who live near Safety beach, Victoria, Australia, where their property is located.

Each of their expensive commercials proudly lists their web site … a decently done site, I might add, at www.marthacove.com.au … so what’s wrong with the picture?

In my book two important things.  people in other countries are liable to forget or neglect to include the country code of .au at the end of the URL.  The vast majority of people online, even those from countries which routinely use a country code, do not sit by the TV with a pen and paper in hand.  They are going to we going to note that the web site intelligently is the same as the property name and when they are ready go to their computer and type in www.marthacove.com .  when they do, they will get a one page parking site loaded with every form of real estate advertising under the sun … but they won’t get to the site of the property they wanted to know more about buying.  Do you think the folks managing martha Cove would have been smart to spend a grand total of about $9 more dollars and register the .com extension as well as the .com.au URL?  Seems like they made a very foolish economy decision here.

Now, to finish up on this thought, recall that the name of the property is Martha Cove … as is it were named after a girl called Martha.  When we see names like this, as English speakers, we almost all, unconsciously add the possessive form of the name in out mind.  No matter what out eyes see, our mind thinks of the place name as "Martha’s Cove".

For the small sum of $5.99 at Name.Com, a little more or a little less at other domain registrars, this big-buck marketing effort could have captured the substantial trade in folks who will unconsciously type www.marthascove.com instead of www.marthacove.com .  Certainly seems that it would have been a wise investment to me … they wouldn’t even need a web site at the secondary address, most registrars will forward a domain name to another domain name for free.

Well they chose not to register www.marthascove.com, so I did.  Time will tell if I can earn $5.99 from this domain, but one thing for sure, I can safely say they will lose a lot more than $6 if someone with money in their pocket clicks on my URL rather than theirs while thinking of buying 6 or 7 figure investment properties.

Moral?  When setting up a marketing site, cover the intelligent bases … don’t be too cheap to spend $6 or $8 of misspellings, plurals, possessives and, above all, if you are trying to attract buyers?  USE THE .COM!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Thinking About Domain Names

I’ve been doing some reviewing here, going over my list of domain names (i have about 20 of them, just to put our discussion in perspective).  It is time to get each and every one of them pulling its own weight … and I plan to buy a few more in the near future as well.

My friend Brendon wrote an update on his blog which taught me a couple facts I didn’t know about about .au (Australian) domain names and the piece got me thinking about some specialized (Tld CC) (Top Level Domain name Country Code) URls that I see on a daily basis and which serve as good object lessons in what you all should be thinking about any time you are thinking about a domain name, new or old.

As an America I naturally default to plain and simple .com names for all my domains.  If I was really in love with a certain keyword or keyword phrase that wasn’t available as a .com I might consider a .net or .org version, but I would only make such a purchase realizing upon going in that my value would be limited to 10% or so of the .com name’s potential, so it would have to be really, really profitable or the .com owner would have to be doing a really, really poor job before i would even think about it.

Now there is a US-specific Tld CC for the United States … .us  I think about .0001% of the website owners in the US perhaps use it … I really would be interested in one if you gave it to me, unless it perhaps helped spell something like the eponymous but really hard to type social bookmarking site, http://del.icio.us/.

Virtually nothing that I would build online would be limited to US-only customers, so there’s almost never a reason for me to think about excluding the rest of the web population from my offerings.

Now some other countries, often for reasons I can’t fathom seem to operate in exactly the reverse manner.  In the Philippines, for example, the country where I currently live, .com URL’s cost the same as they do in the US … that is from about $6 a year on up.  Country code specific addresses (.ph for the Philippines) cost the regular buyer abut $35 USD per year … quite a hefty tariff and one that Filipinos, who can afford to, seem all to eager to pay.  I guess national pride is worth something, but let me give you a concrete examples about why jingoistic pride often runs counter to e-commerce.

The Philippines, like most countries, has an active Department of Tourism.  Like other tourism efforts they discovered the web some time back.  Did they establish the site ‘www.Philippines.com’ to take advantage of the most common "type in" web address people are likely to use to find out information about the Philippines? 

No, not hardly.  That address exists today as a one page MFA (made For AdSense) site which probably makes a small income for the owner, but is hardly the highest and best purpose of the site name at all.  Did they register the next most common type-in name for strangers looking for the Philippines, www.philippines.ph 9after all, they, the government, directly control who can and can not own .ph URL’s. 

Nape, they left that to a commercial business processing outsource company in Manila to scarf up.

What they did do was come up with a pretty catchy sounding tourism slogan to interest people in learning more about the Philippines and perhaps visiting here . "Wow Philippines".  Not bad as slogans go.  What domain did they register?  hmm … www.wowphilippines.com.ph .  Great idea … lousy execution.  To people already living in the Philippines, typing .ph at the end of an address is fairly natural, although and extra step.  But this is an international tourism campaign … they aren’t trying to get Filipinos to learn about their own country, they are trying to attract visitors from around the world.

How many people in the US, in the UK, Germany, France or any other country are going to sit down and search out the Tld CC, .ph, for the Philippines in order to get themselves to a sales pitch page?  I mean, did you know that .ph was for the Philippines off the top of your head before you started reading this post?  Of course you didn’t.

I’ve got some more to say about this subject, but people don’t like overly long posts, so I am going to wind this one up with an object lesson right now and then post again on the subject.

What do you think is being done with the very logical www.wowphilippines.com domain, the one you would get if you neglected, or didn’t know you had to add on the extra .ph for the Philippines country code?

Did you already type it in and see?  Yep, it’s a very successful commercial e-commerce site … and not only does it get traffic in its own right, every time the government of the Philippines spends money top advertise their successful "Wow Philippines" tourism campaign, www.wowphilippines.com gets free traffic, simply because the original planners refused to realize that the ‘Net is international and must be made simple … not nationalistic and complicated just to prove a point.

When you think about a URL, keep simplicity and universality in mind … don’t try to maker your users do something you want them to do … make things work the way they expect it to … e-commerce is not the place to show off your control freak tendencies.

Popularity: 3% [?]