Hey All . . . sorry about the lack of posting lately, but I’ve been on a much needed vacation! I’ll get a few occassional posts in before getting back, but I just wanted to give you all a head’s up here!

I’ll be back in July so get ready!!!

See you all then!

It seems that every day I’ve got a new lesson to share about “playing well with others.” Today’s lesson involves dealing with people who get in touch with you in order to forge a new business relationship. Over the past few weeks I’ve been working the phones very hard, making new contacts, and trying to establish new business relationships. In most occasions, I’ve been forced to leave a voicemail or email with the potential partner letting them know who I am, my website URL, and what I’m interested in.

Sadly, in many occasions , I’ve been able to get these people on the phone after a few days or so, but they have no idea who I am or what my website is about . . .

You would think it would be logical to find out more about someone who contacts you in an effort to partner with you, but I guess it is not that obvious. I’ve got to tell you that it is really difficult to have a conversation with someone and pitch something to them if they keep asking what your website does. It has happened twice today already!

Since it apparently not obvious to everyone out there, I’ll put it in easy to understand words:

Always do your research on potential partners before talking to them!

What do you think?

Everyone these days has a webcam, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t really use it too much (outside those of you voyeurs & teenagers out there). I actually use mine almost daily making video phone calls through Skype. It’s great! I keep up with my family, friends, and business associates by making these video calls.

There are, however, other great uses of these cameras. I did some exploring yesterday and found a bunch of cool resources for doing online broadcasting via your webcam. These tools can be used to start your own live online TV show, to create a video blog, or to just make interesting web-videos. All are worth checking out!
Live Web Broadcasting Tools

• Operator11
• Stickam
• USStream.tv
• YouCams

Scheduled and On-Demand Web Broadcasting Tools

• Kyte
• SplashCast * My Favorite *

Thanks to Masternewmedia.com for putting out a great web broadcasting guide and list of web broadcasting tools!

Ok . . . maybe it wouldn’t be a tragedy for most people, but yesterday I lost 7,000+ emails from the past 6 months or so! If these had been personal emails, I would not have been so upset, but these were emails for my business. Actually, not only did I lose my emails, but I lost all of my contacts and all of my appointments. You see, Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) went on the fritz yesterday.

I was having problems with Excel and tried to reinstall it. Once I did that, I began to get errors from Entourage telling me the version of Entourage I was running was not compatible with my data files. Just a note: I still have the files containing all of my data, but I have no way to access these. . . .

I tried everything! I un-installed Excel . . didn’t work. I un-installed and reinstalled Office 2004 . . . didn’t work. I figured that I had to check my emails and decided to use Mozilla Thunderbird to at lest see what was going on. When it loaded, I noticed that there were only 113 messages on my server. There should have been many thousands! I quickly logged into the server to see that every message that should have been there was gone!

I’m not sure if it was Entourage or Thunderbird, but I’m now missing backups of every email I wanted to keep for the past 1.5 years. I can’t access my old emails because Entourage is on the fritz, and I’m flipping out! Any thoughts? Any ideas?

Some people might say that it offers a fresh start, but the amount of data I’m missing will certainly affect my business for weeks or even months to come.

I’m just at a complete loss of words now . . .

I was reading a few posts over at Digitalpoint Webmaster forums and came across a post asking if a niche was necessary for a blog. The person asking this question had asked the same question only a few weeks ago, but seemed to be unconvinced.

If You’re Blogging for Money, You Must Have a Niche.

If You’re Blogging for Fun, Do What You Want!

I, like other serious bloggers, use feed readers to keep up with all of the blogs that I subscribe to and read. In order to speed my way through the list of around 100 blogs (reduced from several hundred – it was simply too much), I categorize them by topic. Some of the categories I use include: real estate investing, seo, blogging, technology, politics, and entrepreneurship.

I don’t have the time to play around on unprofessional, unfocused blogs. I want to find informative articles or newsworthy posts and I want to do so quickly and easily. If I go to Problogger or DoshDosh, I know I’m going to read about blogging; if I go to AsktheVC, I’ll read about venture capital; at the Instigator Blog, I’ll read about startup company advice. You want your blog to be predictable so people can come to rely on it as a source of information about whatever niche you cover.

But . . . TimeforBlogging isn’t Completely Focused

This site does cover a variety of topics, but I actually do it for fun, not for money. I am too busy with my other sites to truly focus on this one . . . it serves more as a diary of my experiences, infused wit some helpful tips for others. If I wanted to truly monetize this blog, I’d operate it in a completely different manner than I currently do. I would keep it focused to either blogging, entrepreneurship, my personal politics, or something else.

What do you think? Is it absolutely necessary for a blogger to focus on a niche to be successful?

How A Simple Forum Conversation Got Ugly

Some people just make no sense to me. Yesterday, a situation came up on our real estate forums that I had not seen before. A member who was relatively new (less than 2 months) made a post where he was trying to find buyers for properties that he had. In his post, he said, “I have properties for sale in PA, IN, OK, TX, TN, AR, LA. Please contact me for more info,” which I found to be pretty vague; I asked that he post more information (after going through this with him before, mind you).

In responding, he replied with a somewhat rude “Do you have a way for me to post a spreadsheet? Because I have 100 properties scattered! Are you interested in buying? No?”. As a result, I had to let him know that I was in charge of the site (which everyone can clearly see from my signature) and that he would need to be more clear in his posts if he wanted to use our site to make deals.

From there, things went haywire! Another member inquired about another issue that his post presented and he just went off. He started to insult me personally and began to act completely rude, picking apart my posts and challenging me by demeaning me. He also was nasty to the guy who challenged him.

I just don’t get it . . . did he think that by insulting and berating me that I’d allow him to continue posting on my site? Did he think that he would attract people to work with him by acting that way? It simply makes absolutely no sense to me.

Once this was brought to my attention, I found it most interesting that he had gone ahead and posted information about the properties he had available after all the posts where he was nasty. I kept the entire thread as an example for our members (but removed his posts where he posted the property info as I felt that he was not deserving of getting any exposure for them after his previous actions – btw. he tried to insult me again in the titles of some of those posts) of what not to do on our site, and have left it unlocked to see what some of them had to say about it all. It has been fun to read their thoughts!

While I’ve had to ban people many times before for breaking our rules or spamming, I’ve never had a situation come up where someone starts to attack me personally for no reason. It was completely unprovoked, and absolutely uncalled for. As a result of all of this, he was banned from our site. Normally, I’ll ban someone and move on, but I was so shocked by this one that I had to share.

BTW – I actually emailed the guy to see what his deal was, but it seems that he has not had the courage to respond.

I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!