Yahoo Finally Discontinues MyBlogLog

February 24, 2011 Blogging

It looks like Yahoo has made it official . . . on May 24, 2011 the MyBlogLog service will be “discontinued.” While I haven’t used the service in some time – about 2 years ago I saw this coming when their business development team all but completely blew off several attempts I made to connect [...]

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Why You Shouldn’t Nickel & Dime Your Customers

December 8, 2010 Commentary
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This story can be applied to any kind of business, so pay attention . . . Almost a year ago we found a local company to clean the house. They worked on a few homes in the neighborhood and did a great job. Unfortunately, that relationship came to an unfortunate and abrupt end today. We [...]

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New Paid Directories and Other Online Products: Chicken or Egg?

November 30, 2010 Entrepreneurship
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We just launched a new product on BiggerPockets, a hard money lenders directory, and I’ve been pondering the challenges of getting a product like this off the ground. Lucky for us, our site has a nice built in audience of over 60,000 members and we’re approaching 200,000 monthly uniques, so I’m confident that we can [...]

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Slideshare – Are you using it?

November 22, 2010 Website Tools

The following post, from David at twago, details how businesses can utilize the Slideshare social media platform to drive their marketing efforts. Utilizing the benefits of Social Media is difficult for any company. Whilst the prospect of expanding the online presence of your company into new markets to reach potential customers is intriguing, getting the [...]

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Have You Tried mod_pagespeed to Speed Up Your Website?

November 17, 2010 Website Tools

Since reading about its introductionfrom Google on November 3, I’ve been asking people about mod_pagespeed, a module for the Apache HTTP Server. According to Google, it: perform(s) many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing [...]

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Yahoo Clues is Born: Does Anyone Care?

November 16, 2010 Yahoo

Apparently, after years of simply giving up anything having to do with search to Google, Yahoo has decided to get into the game. Today they announced the birth of Yahoo Clues, a tool that looks to be an alternative to Google Trends. Clues provides a great amount of data on search results, including: search volume [...]

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My Reconsideration Request: A Prayer To the Google Gods

November 15, 2010 Google
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Over the years since I launched this site, there have been periods of highs (when I was highly motivated) and lows (when I was just too busy), but overall, I’ve been committed to sharing my thoughts, insight, ideas, and some tips with all of you. I never paid too much attention to the traffic or [...]

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Skype 5.0 Beta Review: Video Conference Calls are Sexy but App is Buggy

November 14, 2010 Technology

I’ll admit it . . . I’m seriously addicted to Skype. Not only is it a childhood dream come true (video calls are AWESOME!), but it has become an incredible tool for connecting with business and personal connections. Before getting on a Skype conference call yesterday, a friend suggested we try out the new Skype [...]

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How to Find a Good Rails Developer

November 12, 2010 Web Applications

Before I get into the details of finding your next rails developer, I thought a bit of background would be worth sharing. One of the earliest tactical mistakes I made as I developed my web platform at BiggerPockets was to convert the application from PHP to Ruby on Rails. I was fairly skilled in PHP, [...]

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Using Convertible Notes for Financing a Startup

March 17, 2010 Startup Funding

I’ve been doing some research on the use of convertible notes for the purposing of financing our startup, BiggerPockets.com. If you’re also doing research on this financing option, I hope you find the info helpful — if you’ve got some great articles that you want to share, please do in the comments below. Without further [...]

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Stop Making Commitments When You Can’t Live Up to Them!

March 12, 2010 Entrepreneurship

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. On almost a daily basis, I run into a situation where someone made a commitment to me, and didn’t live up to it. It is tiresome, annoying, and flat out rude. I don’t pretend to be perfect, and I’m sure I’ve made my share of commitments that [...]

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Reputation & Crisis Management Rockstars: Where to Turn When Things Get Crazy

March 10, 2010 Commentary

Brett Borders – Online Reputation Management I just finished responding to a bunch of interview questions about community building from a good friend, and social media rockstar, Brett Borders. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out his site before, I strongly recommend going through each and every post, and of course, when the [...]

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Planning for the Unexpected and Startup Team Building

March 9, 2010 Entrepreneurship

Today was supposed to be a new beginning, but sometimes we have to deal with headaches from our past, and that appeared to be the case this morning, as I learned of a security hole that was causing bots to be able to spam parts of our site. The hole has since been closed, but [...]

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Catharsis

March 8, 2010 Entrepreneurship

According to Wikipedia, catharsis means a “cleansing”, “purging”, or “clarification.” I hope that today’s catharsis marks a new beginning for myself and my company, BiggerPockets. With that in mind, I hope to share the journey moving forward with the rest of you. I’ve ignored this blog for a long time, and I’ve really come to [...]

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