My Advice on Google Sitemaps - Verify, but Don't Submit

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of SEO appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea. The logic behind the practice is simple, if you follow the steps:
Without sitemaps, a search engine visits your site's pages through links on and off the site, indexing and ranking those pages it deems worthy of being indexed and ranked.
When a search engine crawls your site and fails to index particluar pages, you have a signal from the engines that those pages lack the necessary components for inclusion, be they architectural, link strength, content-related, etc.
Sitemaps enables search engine to crawl and index pages that they might not ordinarily include in a normal crawl process.
If a page lacks the link juice, internally or externally, or has content that engines wouldn't normally deem worthy of indexing, Sitemaps may overlook these weaknesses and include those pages in their indices.

Why are so many SEOs recommending against submitting a feed to Sitemaps? Because the data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn't accessible, doesn't carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hinderance.

Enormously big sites, who will see more value from having thousands of extra pages included in the index, even if it means a few stragglers are left behind are exempt from this rule. So, too, are sites managed by a team who is unwilling or unable to take the time to detect and fix omissions.

Don't get me wrong - Sitemap submission is an amazing and valuable tool in a webmaster's arsenal, but it's also one that should be wielded with careful knowledge of the side effects. I'd love to hear your opinions on the subject.

BTW - Full credit to DaveN for first introducing me to this idea back in Chicago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expert-advice-on-google-sitemaps-verify-but-dont-submit

Vista Transformation Pack

Overview

I’m pretty sure you must know and have seen Windows Vista before. It looks really nice for major GUI updates. Many people who have seen it wish to get Vista-style looks for their operating system. It might sounds stupid to say this since you all know what it is but just bear it

This program will transform your Windows user interface to ultimate Windows Vista alike looks that everyone will never notice it’s the same old Windows XP (or 2003)

Features

Vista Transformation Pack will replace many of the resources in Windows XP/Windows Server 2003. It can change such things as:
» Boot screen
» Welcome Screen / Logon Screen
» New msstyles files (visual styles)
» New desktop and file icons
» New toolbar icons
» Progress Dialogs
» Sounds scheme
» System Tray icons
» New Wallpapers
» Windows Media Player Skins
» And much more



Changes in Version 6.0

-Added additional Vista related applications:
|-thoosje’s brand new Vista Sidebar
|-VisualTooltip (Taskbar thumbnail view and also have docking mode)
|-Styler with Kaye Irene’s Vista Perfection X4 Styler Toolbar
|-Blaero’s Start Orb (fix cutting edge start orb in msstyles)
|-Stianu89 and Blue Eyes’ Vista Live Messenger RC skin
-Added applying Vista setup screen transformation in setup integration
-Added browsable System files source for uninstallation so user can restore original system files from setup CD during uninstallation
-Added display configuration for the best view of machine’s display
-Added fixing file’s PE checksum after resource patching to keep files more secure
-Added Launch & Maintenance Center in transformation destination in case user already have transformed the system
-Added missing modifype.exe for Windows XP operating system
-Added partially x64 support for Vista visual stuff but not for system files (experimental)
-Added option to reserved updated system files after uninstallation or not
-Added skipping system file verification patch on setup integration
-Added Vista RTM system applications transformation:
|-Photo printing wizard
|-Remote Desktop Connection
|-Volume Control
|-Windows Task Manager
|-System Restore
|-Connection Manager
|-Windows Update Client
|-Media Center
-Fixed bugs caused by deleting important files from integration after transformation
-Fixed bugs in file-patching engine for uxtheme.dll and resources data
-Fixed missing files during the installation caused by setup integration
-Fixed resources patching failure during setup integration
-Fixed themes uninstallation problem (Themes still exist)
-Fixed user picture’s frame border disappearance in logon screen
-Fixed uxtheme.dll patching system (now I use patched files to avoid possible patching problems)
-Removed additional boot screen resources removal
-Removed manual transformation and let user decide to modify system files or not instead
-Removed un-neccessary system files operations
-Removed unattended transformation and servicces stopping for Norton Antivirus and System Restore (obsolete)
-Updated license agreement dialog (User must click “I accept” radio button before clicking Next button)
-Updated system files transforming method to use PendingFileRenameOperations trick
-Updated updating the transformation to act like never applying the transformation before
-Updated Vista RTM boot screen
-Updated Vista RTM icons
-Updated Vista RTM logon background
-Updated Vista RTM screensaver
-Updated Vista RTM sounds scheme
-Updated Vista RTM system dialogs
-Updated Vista RTM wallpapers
-Updated visual styles
|-Changed theme’structure to be the same with different shellstyles
|-changed visual stylees’ name to match with Vista RTM
|-Fixed CaptionButton alignment problem when maximized in Vertical shellstyle WindowBlinds theme
|-Fixed ToolbarBackground sizing mismatched from real Vista style
|-Fixed shellstyle background color mismatch in some areas
|-Updated frame border in Windows Aero visual style
|-Updated StartGroupToolBarButton
|-Updated TaskBandButton back to default ones
|-Updated TaskBandGroup’s backgroun and button

Screenshots

Download & Discussion

Declutter Your Desk

More

Google Launches Apps Premier Edition

The day that everyone knew was coming has arrived with the announcement that Google has launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft.

Michael Arrington posted this afternoon about an undetermined major announcement from Google set for tomorrow, now the Wall St. Journal reports that Google Apps Premier is being launched.

"We offer editions of Google Apps to meet the needs of different organizations. So whether you're a small business looking for key IT services or a Fortune 500 company that needs email accounts for your remote workers, Google can power up your organization with the right services, the right support, and for the right price. to: We offer multiple editions of Google Apps to meet the needs of different organizations. So whether you're a small business looking or a Fortune 500 company, Google can power up your organization with the right services and support, for the right price."

The service will include the existing Google Apps tools - GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and IM as well as the Google Docs applications that were just integrated into the suite today. Webmail will come with 10 GB of storage and Apps Premier includes service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support. A full comparison of the standard and Premier services can be found here.

The service costs $50 per user per year, dramatically undercutting Microsoft’s offerings. Google’s package does not currently include a presentation tool like Power Point or a CRM application.
The good news is that you can try it for free until April 30th, 2007.

written by Florin C.

Radius 320 monitor: Three screens in one.

Ever wondered where those James Bond villains — with their lairs full of high-tech gizmos and monolithic screens — get their computer gear? After seeing this the Radius 320 monitor, I have to think one of their suppliers is Seamless Display. The company, founded by engineers from Oxford University, combines three LCD screens into a single display with triple the area. Need to refer to a photo while you write a report with a browser at the ready? No need to put application windows in behind others when you've got this baby — just drag them over to one side. Unlike other attempts at merging screens, the Radius uses special lenses to keep the display continuous between panels, except for a "very faint" shadow of a line. The result is a 50-inch (diagonal) screen with a massive resolution of 4,800 x 1,200 pixels that you can use with any machine — Windows, Mac, or Linux. The downside is you'll need a video card that will support three DVI outputs at 1,600 x 1,200 pixels each. The Seamless site says the Radius 320 is available for order now, though it doesn't list any pricing. Not that you supervillains ever pay retail.

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/08/28/radius_320_moni.html

Russian start the pig in cosmos

101 Ways to make money online

Disclaimers

There's no catch and I'm not trying to sell you an ebook. Or anything (read about conmen who do). I'm not even signing you up for a newsletter. This list was put together more as a laugh. It may change your life. Or it may annoy you enormously because of its er, brevity. I hope it does both.

Some ideas here are nice and have halos, others smell of dog urine ... but all these methods allegedly generate lotso dosho, and every single one is legal at least somewhere. There's overlap in everything so some ideas may be repeated (and some may not be covered at all) but I'm still maintaining there are 101 ways, partly because it makes a good headline. No, solely because it makes a good headline. It sucked YOU in, didn't it?

No, you won't get anything for nothing but there are a lot of things you can get for nearly nothing. Like getting to pick holes in my list. Go ahead. Pick holes and then link back here to show people how stupid I am.

I've put together a lot of these ideas from thousands of hours discussing businesses for sale with their owners. They've shared with me how their businesses operate, how they make money, how they built their businesses up etc. They've given me access to their traffic stats, their earnings and accounts and tax figures. Many even gave me access to their Adsense or other "main earner" accounts. Some of those businesses were so irresistible that I bought them. And sold them. And bought others. It's a game. I love it.

Most of these business ideas can be run from anywhere in the world, even the United States, Australia and other non-English speaking countries. For consistency sake all figures are quoted in US dollars.

Each method is summarised in a single small para so appreciate it's not the complete unabridged version. And, no, I haven't tried each one so out of the 101 business models here 102 may be completely dud. But, I do intend expanding - in due course - on some of the ideas that worked for me.

More disclaimers will come when people sue me (suing can make you money, see #66)

Finding business ideas:

1. Spend all day browsing Site For Sale forums (like the list we have here) for the myriad ways people earn money. People looking to sell their sites actually tell you how they make money! Pick one that suits you. Research it a bit, and away and start your own business.

2. Use a search engine to find ways to make money online. It seems to be so easy that it's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't know how to do it. (But why stop at one search engine (SE)? Most people get to less than 1% of the top qualify info they're seeking because they use just one SE like Google, don't have the vaguest of ideas of the advanced search features available, and don't know the benefits to be had using specialised SEs, local SEs etc. )

3. Bundle the two above to tell other people how to make money online. They always want to know. It doesn't matter if you don't know yourself, you can still charge them for it. I obviously don't have a clue as I'm giving it all away. You can now ignore everything else I say. But don't go spending money on internet cons promising to make you a millionaire and here's how to spot them.

4. Be more inventive with your search. Look for small business franchise newsletters. Or for home jobs in your particular niche or hobby. (And check point #2 above for those specialised SEs). You can also go through the appropriate DMOZ categories (examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12)

Domains

5. The dot com gold rush made many millionaires but there's still plenty of money in domain real estate and still some good catches available. A good dot com may be difficult to find now. But there are a lot of gTLDs and ccTLDs from the .info to .eu to .tv to .co.in and they all present opportunities being discussed in several good forums. Put your thinking hat on, buy a famous word domain for a few dollars and put it up on the domain selling sites.

6. Lost your thinking hat? Hang out at SEDO. DNForurms, Afternics and other places where domains are bought and sold. Provided you learn enough about the market to recognise bargains you could make a living from just buying existing domains and reselling them.

7. If you're smart you'll run dictionary checks against available domain names and auto-check them against search volumes (using OST, Wordtracker etc.) for that term and Pay Per Click (PPC) rates in the major ad networks (example) to work out which ones are likely to be more profitable. If you can pick up the domain for a profitable term that's searched for often you can use a domain parking program. Or post a little bit of relevant content and get a link or two ... and the search engines will start sending you traffic. If the phrase people are typing in coincides exactly with your domain name it gives you a great head start with SEs.

8. If you're smart AND a linguist you'd be doing that in multiple languages.

9. Misspellings. Massive opportunities still exist in the misspelling/typo market. People trying to get elsewhere land on your site instead ... and you sell them stuff (or use the domain parking idea). Just don't tempt fate by buying something too close to someone else's trademark. Micro-soft.org.uk wouldn't be advisable. To make life easier for you there are many tools that will find misspellings for you. How easy can it get?

10. Domain parking and type-in traffic: People sometimes guess at URLs. If they want a plumber they may try plumber.com though they've never used that site themselves. Find terms that people may be typing in (I will provide a detailed guide to this when I get a chance), buy the domain and populate it with ads. There are several ad programs to monetise your parked domains. Or combine this with the previous idea to buy plummer.com or similar typo domains.

11. Drop catches. People sometimes forget to renew their domains and these expire. Picking them up will give you some remnant traffic from sites that link to this domain/people who've bookmarked it etc. In some cases the traffic can be pretty high. Provided you're fast enough to replace the copyrighted content that was there with something else you can make quite a profitable business from doing nothing else but this.

12. A variation on the above. Sell the domain back to the previous owners. Note that you may want to tread carefully and get familiar with the rules for that TLD before you start sending off ransom notes. For example, with ICANN (domains that end in .com, for example) the moment you send the previous owners an email saying you've got their domain and you'll give it back for $10K... you've lost. It can't look like a ransom demand. Be reasonable and read the small print of the UDRP. No UDRP required if you're sitting hostage on myspace.com/theircompanyname. LOL, watch them kick themselves and abuse their web advisors who told them about taking the "dot info" but omitted to mention the importance of protecting the brand by owning the associated myspace directory! And it costs you nothing!

13. Run a domain management service. Hundreds of thousands of webmasters (or more) have a large portfolio of domains. A lot of them would like the boring bit taken out of their domain management. You can run their DNSes or just a service reminding them when each domain comes up for renewal. Or an automated monitoring service to tell them when one of their domains/sites is inaccessible.

14. Start a directory to list domains for sale. That's what people like SEDO do. You can get money just for allowing domains to be listed in your directory.

15. If you're running a service putting buyers and sellers of domains/sites in touch with one another you could get money for add on services (like providing escrow facilities). For ideas have a look at what existing domain intermediaries offer.

16. Run a domain research service. Wonder what happens when a manufacturer is looking to name a new model car? Or starting a new range of clothing? They need trademark and patent research but now they also need some domain research. Which of the literally thousands of combinations and misspellings (+ sucks.com) are taken and which do they need to buy? With a few of the free domain tools discussed on this page and one or two more - like free DNS tools - and a little time you could provide them a service they'd pay a lot of money for.

17. Start your own country: Whoa! yes, you're reading it right. If you've heard of Sealand (what is Sealand) you'll know that starting your own country is not that far fetched. Once you have your own WhackyCountry you can apply for a .wc (yuk) TLD. Sell millions of domains. Keep some for yourself. Ever wanted a Google.___?

18. Perform domain services for businesses and then send them a proforma (even if they've never heard of you). Explain that it's free this time but you'll gladly keep acting for them for a small fee. For example, there are thousands of big businesses whose half-wit webmasters/ developers didn't put in a redirect from the non-www to the www versions of their sites (or vice-versa). One entrepreneur made a few thousands just from pointing out to businesses how they were losing hundreds of customers every year who were landing on http://xxx-companyname.com and finding nothing there.

I'll talk about domain opportunities some more on this page when I get a chance.

Buying and selling internet businesses

19. Many sites runs on "auto-pilot". A common price these sell for in site-for-sale forums is 12-24 months' worth of net earnings (silly price, but it's true). Provided you don't mess the site up you can recover your capital in as little as 12 months and then ... sell the site to recover your capital again. Double your capital every year. 100% return. Sack your stockbrokers. It really is a crazy world!

20. Site flipping doesn't require as much capital and expertise as many people believe. Like property flipping, you buy one that needs a bit of TLC. Do it up, then sell it on for a whacking great profit. And, the beauty is you never have to deal with tenants!

21. How about cornering a little market? There are DMOZ categories with grandfathered sites (sites that have been listed for many years) which aren't being updated. If you can pick up a few sites in the same category and merge their content suddenly you "own" that niche. That opens a lot of possibilities.

Actual work

22. Several jobs exist on a pay per hour basis but the better paid ones are probably contract jobs. Some examples of both: Copywriting; proofreading of web content/ebooks/newsletters etc. (elance, guru).

23. Email or phone answering: Be one of the first line support staff manning a company's phone or email answering service. Filter out the easy questions by pointing the user to relevant sections of his manual and escalate those that seem genuine problems. You are saving the company's engineers' time and providing a valuable service - that they pay for. A variation of this is chat help where you actually sit at your PC and text chat to users who've reached a firm's website and clicked the help button. Sometimes a bit of training is involved.

24. Good at web design, HTML, CSS? Create designs (templates) and flog them. You can sell each one multiple times to webmasters who don't have the time or patience to get familiar with the intricacies and quirks.

25. Monitoring Wikipedia/ forums/ blogs for mentions of a particular name, brand etc. A recent expose showed that several Wikipedia entries were being manipulated by a US political party who had several stooges signed up for just this purpose. Wouldn't their opponents want to know each time they're manipulating some facts? Find someone who needs some news "managed" or needs to know when news is being "managed" and get paid for it. You need to be "proactive" as these jobs aren't "advertised" but the fact that they aren't advertised means that others don't know about them, you have an advantage. And there are opportunities in almost every language.

26. Directories: start one. Webmasters pay to be listed in your directory. The better your directory the more you can demand. Niche, hand compiled directories are a million times better than the SERPs dross and both companies and users know that.

27. Filling in surveys. True, there are a lot of duds around but there are still some programs that pay you for doing mind-numbingly dull tasks like filling in surveys. If you aren't fussed about privacy and are willing to disclose all your personal details (or fictional personal details) there's usually someone willing to pay you, From YouGov to Ciao.

28. Get paid to read email. Why would companies pay for that? Plenty of reasons, not least that a human eye can spot SPAM that even the best program doesn't catch. Even the best anti-spam program has some false positives and some companies can't afford to have any.

29. Do other filtering. There are people who'll pay money to have you filter through those millions of ebay listings to find them the specific objects/ curios/ stock/ book that they really, really need.

30. Another filtering idea: Businessmen looking to buy sites regularly visit the Site Buying/Selling forums and trawl through thousands of listings a week. Get talking to one or two of them, offer to get familiar with what they are looking for and to do the looking for them.

31. CPA = Cost per Action. Apart from filling in surveys people pay for all kinds of other things. Like clicking on links (though you may want to check that you're not participating in click fraud).

32. Posting in Forums: Like hanging out in forums and chatting to other people? Owners of new forums have a problem. If there aren't a lot of conversations going then people don't stop to talk. So they get the chat flowing by paying for posts. So, jump in, start chatting and get paid.

33. Do something silly. The milliondollarhomepage guy got famous for selling worthless pixels on his page. But, because he was in the news/having his 15 minutes of fame people focused on that and paid money for what they would normally have realised was fairly worthless links. Yes, people are stupid. ClickHereYouIdiot.

34. Do something more useful and less silly. Find a need in a niche and fill it. People complaining in forums about how they can't find replacement parts for a certain type of car? Find someone who'll make it and be the broker. People complaining about limitations in a particular niche software? Find a programmer to design a solution and start selling it.

35. Have expertise in a particular subject? Write regularly on that subject and give away your knowledge for free. People will bookmark your blog and visit regularly. The money is in allowing companies to advertise their products and services to your very eager audience. There are third parties like payperpost, blogvertise, creamaid, Blogitive, reviewme, loudlaunch etc., who handle the finding of advertisers.

36. Don't have expertise in a particular subject? That doesn't stop bloggers. Some of them blog on the most mundane things - from what they had for breakfast to how they spent their day. And still the advertisers come. So, don't blog to demonstrate your expertise. Blog to demonstrate your camera obsession and show all the stupid pictures you take everyday. Or blog about breastfeeding your kids.

37. Join the myspace bandwagon, build up a lot of "friends" and bulletin advertise (what?!) the hell out of them. Send them to pages where you promote affiliate programs and you could walk away with five figures every month. There are people who make a lot more.

38. Or use tools like myspace to promote your offline activities - like the music you create. The Arctic Monkeys were record label/ talent scout/ music agent free.

39. Sell trinkets to myspace users. They love them. Especially shiny ones. Myspace backgrounds, templates, animations, scripts, icons and other "myspace resources" are a multimillion dollar industry.

40. Writing a newsletter. Building a mailing list is a long term plan and it pays dividends but don't expect immediate results. If your newsletter is good and you promote it well you can collect hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who all get the newsletter for completely free). The more subscribers you have on your list the more advertisers pay to feature in your newsletter.

41. Find something that won't sell, let your imagination run wild. Be willing to think the most outrageous thoughts, the most impossible items to sell. Who would have guessed there'd be an active market for urine. Yes, that stuff you flush away. No, I'm not taking the ... mikey. But, start selling your outrageous item and you may find that a market already exists.

42. Build a community. While some webmasters see lower returns from forum-type sites it's probably because they're using contextual programs like Adsense. One of the biggest webmaster communities (forum) is free to join and free to use though it's very busy, uses massive bandwidth, and costs its owner a bomb. Yet, he makes a very profitable income from organising conferences/tradeshows. His "community" ensures every one is a sell-out.

43. Be a link monkey. Webmasters want people to link to them. It makes them feel loved. And it helps them rank higher with search engines. But they don't have the time to go begging. You do that for them and get paid per link. If you're smart you'll find shortcuts and charge people a lot of money for identifying and approaching possible link "partners".

44. Related to the link idea above - start a directory submission service. There are lots of directories around like the ODP. Many take free submissions but you have to do these by hand. When you're familiar with the submission process at a few of the top ones it takes you a lot less time to make submissions. Webmasters have to register, wait for a reply, jump through other hoops etc. They'd rather outsource it to someone who can do it faster and has the time.

45. Another flavour of link-building: Dropping mention of your client's site in forums, blog comments etc. Yes, clients pay for it. There are spamming ways of doing it and some more decent ways. If you can make relevant posts, posts that contribute to the discussion, and provide only those links that are beneficial to that thread, you'll be in high demand with webmasters looking to spread the word about their good content. For example, if you genuinely feel that this list of 101 ways to make money is the dog's testicles - and you participate a lot in webmaster forums - you're bound to come across threads where dropping a link would help your forum mates. Some website owners pay for that.

46. Press release websites often need people to screen user submitted releases for profanity etc., before running the "news". Well known blogs often require the same kind of vetting service for user submitted comments to blog articles. Niche directories that take automated submissions need to prevent against SPAM so could use a human review of each submission. There are numerous such opportunities. Spamming site owners with offers of your service may not get you anywhere. The key is to identify a site that looks like it could use this service and make a personal approach.

47. Write an ebook. It's as easy as falling off a chair. Know something about something? Whether it's about growing cabbages, writing PERL, plucking nose hair or being a good cop - if you're a good marketer, or pay a good marketer, you can probably sell a few thousand copies of your ebook. People pay online and download it, no publisher, printer, book shop or other cumbersome details to worry about. In fact, you don't even need to do the selling. "Affiliates" do it for you (on commission). And, there are ebooks telling you how you can write and sell ... ebooks!

48. Become an expert in a particular niche, perhaps affiliate programs for kids' products, or mailing list services ..and charge for your advice either at online webinars ... or even at local business events. The great news is that this is the internet and becoming an expert in a niche often requires nothing more than spending lots of time (online) reading and absorbing. No school to attend, no fees to pay.

49. Data sorting and other mundane jobs usually pay by the hour. This is the online version of envelope stuffing except that there really are opportunities to do these jobs online. It's a matter of looking in the right places and avoiding all those scammers looking to part you from your money by asking for upfront fees.

50. Good at graphic design? Design and offer logos and icons downloadable for free (and without watermark on payment of a fee). Good icons sell for several hundred dollars a set. And each set can be sold again and again.

51. Create an award and some fancy logos to go with it. The more credible they look the better. Award them to websites you like ... provided they pay you an "admin" fee every year to continue using the logo. Giving awards used to be a useful way to get backlinks. But when people's egos are sufficiently stroked they'll pay to continue boasting about how good the "rest of the world" thinks they are.

Work, but not as you know it

52. Affiliate programs can be great fun and very lucrative. The trick is learning to generate traffic, funnelling it to your merchant and hiring expensive accountants to handle your massive tax returns. It has made more millionaires than you'd believe and I've personally met many of them. I hope to write a lot more about making money from affiliate programs in the months to come.

53. But if fine-tuning ad CTRs and monitoring ROI is too much like hard work ... be your own affiliate customer. Credit card companies, mortgage companies etc., pay anywhere upto $100 per form filled on their site (per valid lead). Go apply for some credit cards and mortgages BUT do them through your own affiliate links and make a few hundred dollars per day. Sign up in as an affiliate in your wife/husband/dad's name to get around the occasional restriction that applications in the affiliate's own name don't generate the commission.

Pure fun

54. Like playing computer games? There's money in gaming. Top players get paid handsomely for participating in tournaments, attending gaming fests and endorsing products. OK, Tiger Woods does make more but does he have as much fun? I mean, have you ever seen him happy? Like deliriously happy ... and shouting for joy? No. Because his club don't have no buttons.

55. MMORPG, or multimedia online role playing games are virtual worlds where otherwise sane humans lose all perspective and all sense of reality. Or they pretend they do. They spend money on invisibility cloaks, virtual machine guns, characters and even virtual money! It's hard to explain how it works but Be The Seller, there's a thriving economy there worth millions of dollars every year.

56. Adult entertainment: Like dressing up kinky? Do it frontIt smells

No, I'm not endorsing any of the plans in this section but this article wouldn't be complete without mentioning these unmentionables.

65. Has someone has violated your online rights? Perhaps they don't have a privacy page on their site as required by law. Or haven't made their site disabled friendly (illegal in some parts of the world). Sue them. Particularly if you can get one of those no win-no fee vultures to act for you. A guy called André-Tascha Lammé kept getting calls from salesmen selling him stuff. He sued them in the Sacramento, CA, small claims court (easy to do). Guess what? Apparently the law in the US awards you $500 each time a telesales person makes an unwanted call to you. Lammé walked away with $6,000. What's the law where you are?

66. They haven't violated your rights? Sue them anyway. Why do you think so many people sue Google on the most unlikely pretexts: giving them incorrect results, showing anti-Christian sites in the results, having advertising, being racist, not being racist? Find something unusual enough to sue them about and some dumb tabloid editor somewhere will pay you for an interview. Even if they don't you'll generate publicity, get column inches, get people to your site...Ka-Ching.

67. Sell photographs: Live in a big city? Hang around at celebrity watering holes, click some photos. There's always someone online willing to pay for interesting ones - there are sites specifically for the buying/selling of photos like these. Get "lucky" and click the UN Secretary General picking up a hooker and you can buy that dream home in the Bahamas quicker than he can say United Nations Secretary General. Find Paris Hilton in another compromising video and.... you can buy Bill Gates.

68. Perform domain hunting services for businesses and then send bill them (even if they've never heard of you). Some businesses will pay up. A 0.01% success out of a million could be worth $100,000 (at a modest $10 each). For example, you could setup a program to extract company names from a Yellowpages database, run them through a misspelling generator and automail each company a list of domains you've identified that it would be in their interest to register as these are very similar to their company name. That's a service, right? The UK authorities have been clamping down on a lot of these operators... but that's only the UK based ones!

69. Exploit people's soppiness. Once upon a time there was a site with lots of lovely pictures of a beautiful little bunny who was very, very happy. And his owner loved him very much. But he needed money so he asked for money on the site and promised that if he did not reach his target he'd eat the bunny. He provided graphic recipes with bunny dish mock-up pictures. Donations followed, fast and swift.

70. Relationship Marketing: Who said relationship marketing was about companies building relationships with their customers? It's about marketing to relatives. About pimping products to your friends. Whatever the "network marketing" opportunities there ever were offline - from Amway to selling water filters - there's always a lot of stuff you can "personally recommend" to your friends online. People who don't open junk mail will open mail from you, because they trust you! And you can get paid for endorsing all manner of rubbish. (Till you lose all your friends, of course)

71. Become a volunteer editor in places like DMOZ and then take bribes to list sites. Is it illegal? In many parts of the world it probably is not, and so it does happen a fair bit. But, the less said about this bribery the better..

72. Petitions: People are constantly petitioning their bosses, their politicians, the rest of the world. Some of those petitioners pay for people to join their cause. Signing up again and again and again has proven lucrative for some, particularly those who know how to proxify their IPs.

73. Email SPAM. Nobody likes it, it's illegal in some countries, ISPs get very upset, recipients get even more upset but no list of how people make money online can be complete without a mention of this. What do you sell when you spam? Have a look at what type of spam YOU are getting, it will likely give you an idea of what pays. But that's about all the help I'm giving you on the subject.

74. (But wherever there's a big problem there's an opportunity: Run an free email service like Hotmail etc., but with a good SPAM filtering system. High startup costs, sure, but if you get enough people signing up you could be worth a few million very quickly. Google tried this with gmail and got about 4% of the market without advertising the service at all; accounts were given by invitation only)

75. Start a HYIP and do a runner. See page 5 for more details on what this is.

of a webcam and adult webcam sites will pay you. (John Prescott need not apply.) Like chatting dirty? Are you a balding man who likes pretending to be an 18 year old blond, female model? The online equivalent of the premium rate phone lines is where you can earn money all day just having fun. I won't provide links - use a search engine and find them yourself.

57. Or get paid for promoting other adult sites. This is like other affiliate programs except that you get to give away stuff on your site (usually cut-down/lower quality versions of videos and pics) for free. These entice visitors to click through for the larger resolution version which requires a small subscription. So, free content for you and - if you can get enough visitors to click through and subscribe - a healthy commission cheque at the end of the month.

58. Mystery shopping: Shopping on behalf of firms to see how staff on the floor are treating customers. Buy products, have holidays, eat at restaurants and have the tabs all picked up by your employers... as long as you provide them some feedback on what the service is like in-store. There are worse ways to earn a living. Some sceptics say they have fun but don't earn a great deal. Others disagree.

59. Spend your time entering competitions. Despite the name "competitions" rarely require skill, they are nothing but glorified lotteries/ sweepstakes. The most challenging question they are likely to ask you is, "What's 1+1?" Try searches like "competition entry" and "win a prize".

60. Or enter contests of skill. Good at SEO? There seem to be a lot of SEO competitions around. Good for nothing? I tried Google on a search for Good for nothing competitions and I get a lot of results. :-) Weed out 99% as junk, and you should still have some good 'uns there.

61. Good at poker? You can make a living from playing it all day long (or go broke).

Like surfing?

62. Become an estate agent. Not a real one; in places like the US that's too much effort. No, you can act for buyers without all that formality by being a buying agent. Clients have a clear idea of what they want but you have the time to keep hitting rightmove -or wherever your local listings are - to find them that special property. In the UK "buying agents" charge 1-3% of the property value.

63. Concierge services: If you know the exact type of bra you want but can't find it would you pay someone a few dollars to find it for you? You'd be surprised how many busy people would. Whether it's a list for the supermarket delivery or a bathroom tap unavailable locally - for some people the hour or two hunting is not worth the $10 you'd charge. Maintain preferences for your signed up customers - so they can tell you to order "milk" without having to specify semi-skimmed, 2 litre, cardboard packing etc. - and close relationships with local businesses and even I'd sign up.

64. Be a researcher. At places like answers.com people pay for you to go research an answer to questions they don't have time to answer themselves. Like, "How do I choose an SLR camera?" and "What's the name of the theme song to the TV program A Bit of Fry and Laurie?" Note: Google has now closed the answers.google.com service but if you're that good at hunting things out you'll find that there are other places where people pay for answers. And, I'm not just talking paid homework help.

Big bucks

76. While most webmasters use PPC to refer to Pay Per Click old timers use it jokingly to refer to P*rn (where *=o), Pills and Casinos. Those are probably the three biggest money areas on the net and have probably made more millionaires than any others. But they are very competitive and are difficult markets to er, penetrate. However, there are lots of legal, legitimate opportunities here some of which I'll expand on in due course.

Arbitrage/brokerage

77. Example of a pure arbitrage opportunity: For a while buying traffic via Google Adwords and sending that traffic to pages of little content and Google Adsense ads generated reasonable profits when done astutely. Sure, Adwords and Adsense are two sites of the same coin. But I did say you needed to be astute to recognise where the opportunities were and you need to test, test, test. There are still lots of contextual arbitrage opportunities about. Especially when you work across programs (e.g., buy traffic from MSN, sell to Yahoo).

78. There are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in the finance world as discussed below but if economics and finance talk bores you to death, there's sports arbitrage. Different online bookmakers may offer different odds on a sporting event. By taking the better odds at each bookie you could come out ahead irrespective of the actual outcome of the event. If you're really clever you could make a program to do this for you. Why don't the bookies adjust their odds based on what their competitors are offering? Because they have to balance their own books. Their prices are decided based on how their own punters are betting.

79. Hosting: You don't need to buy a lot of server hardware to provide a web hosting service. Many big hosting companies allow "reseller" accounts where you sell hosting plans to customers and the hosting company will host them all for you under your Reseller account umbrella. You get to charge customers as much as you want. Some Resellers provide value added services and charge more for these. At places like WHT you'll find that resellers sometimes sell their customers as a "bundle" i.e., you can pay some money to buy a reseller "business".

80. Related to the above is free hosting where you provide small website owners free hosting and in exchange you serve ads to all their pages to make the revenue to pay the hosting company and yourself. Early pioneers of this model are well known names like Geocities and Angelfire.

81. Being a broker can be done in a thousand different ways. There are some entrepreneurs making healthy profits just by bidding for projects on places like elance and guru and farming them out to a bank of writers/programmers they use on a regular basis.

Finance

82. Trading from home is really catching on in many parts of the world. You don't need to be an expert on stocks & shares. You can trade on commodities, currencies, lots more. Trading futures allows you to leverage even small $100 amounts of capital into huge fortunes (or bankruptcy).

83. Gambling is a far cry from trading futures but a route to riches for many. No, not the traditional horse racing type of gambling where the only long term winner is the bookmaker. I'm talking gambling against other gamblers, I'm talking the numerous ways of gambling online (search). And there are a million books and ebooks that claim to "teach you how to win".

84. HYIP, or High Yield Investment Programs are just what they say on the tin. They are also highly risky. You invests your money and you takes a chance, but some pay as much as 100% per day. How do they do it? A very few are putting your money into investments with even better rates of return. Others are simply going to keep paying out the first few customers with investments collected from later ones.... and then they go bust. Pyramid style. Maybe the ones who make the money are the ones who get in early... or actually start HYIP programs.

eBay/Amazon etc.

85. What's it with eBay? You just can't get away from them. Their bulk "dictionary purchase" of ad terms from the Google Adwords/Adsense system means you find ads for eBay no matter what you're looking for, even if it's for toenail clippings or dead pets. Whatever the reason for their success you can join the bandwagon and sell your rubbish on eBay and convert a garage of old junk to hard cash.

86. And when you've acquired a fair amount of experience with selling your own rubbish, start selling others' rubbish. How to get your hands on enough trash? Place an ad in your local paper to do house clearances, or just buy stock from wholesalers in - yes, you guessed it - eBay itself. You can get anything from unused toasters to umbilical cord containers. A lot of ebay sellers are actually shopkeepers; they buy stock new from wholesalers and sell them in eBay instead of a physical bricks and mortar shop... and make a healthy living doing so.

87. You've now got a lot of experience buying and selling in eBay. It's time to write a book or ebook on how to use ebay to generate millions. It doesn't matter that you haven't made millions yourself. People still buy these books even if it's just to learn their way about ebay which can be quite daunting for some. And you can sell it on ... you guessed!

88. Don't fancy writing? Then set yourself up as an eBay assistant. eBay itself will send you people who need help with their complicated system. And you can charge them a commission.

89. Alternatively, setup a shop to accept goods from those who can't list them themselves. Yes, a physical shop. There are lots of them springing up all in big cities. The operation is simple. You take something in from somebody, sell it on ebay and retain a percentage for all your efforts.

90. Think building an ebay business is too much like building a normal business? If you've got the capital you can take the easy route. A lot of ebay "shop" (businesses) come up for sale in site-for-sale forums and with business brokers. The ebay username and feedback generally accompanies the business so you continue to benefit from accumulated goodwill (though the "transfer" is something that eBay may not approve of).

91. Opportunities to make money in eBay are limited only by your imagination. There's money in everything from making connections (putting people in touch with other people) to coming up with or commissioning software to make the average ebayer's life simpler or more productive (thousands of such programs already exist). There's even a business model involving just searching for and finding items that have been misspelt in the listings.

92. It's not just eBay. Any merchant big enough or third party affiliate manager program - from Commission Junction to Clickbank - has opportunities. For example, you can create an Amazon affiliate site.

Others

93. Set up a proxy. People seem to want to surf at work AND access sites their IT system blocks them from viewing. A proxy allows them to get around that restriction. Some proxy services get by just on the advertising (as it's easy to get enormous page views in the proxy business). A very good one will even have people paying a few dollars each. There are several ways to monetise a proxy.

94. Enjoy networking? Social networking Web 2.0 style? If you build up sufficient reputation in places like Digg people will start approaching you to start some buzz on their company or their new product. At one point Netscape offered top "Diggers" a sweetner to move over to their competing service.

95. Selling databases of parts/directory listings/modified or value added DMOZ data/ email lists. The DMOZ directory is a massive directory put together by volunteer editors. And they give away their content for free. Kind of. You can download their database and combine it with other information - like phone number and postcode from Yellow pages- to add value / enhance those listings. You could then sell the enhanced product.

96. Find jobs for your friends. An easy way into the personal recruitment business. Know a friend who's just right for a particular job? Make the connection between friend and employer and you could get up to $5,000 for a few hours work.

97. Get paid for your unused computer cycles. Is your computer sometimes on while you aren't actually sitting at it? Then it's using electricity but not performing "work". Joining a distributed computing group like SETI lets you use that computing power to help reach some worthy/unworthy goal. However, you can also use those cycles to earn money by selling them to companies who have large computing tasks then can't do completely in-house.

98. Take the cap around: Do something nice. Provide some information that helps someone, perhaps someone grieving for a lost partner. Or info on how to volunteer to help orphans in Africa, or find an internship. Make it useful. Or just make it very funny. Then stick a donation button on there for people to support your work. You'll be surprised at how well a donation button works on the right type of site. No, it won't work on this page - or any page promising to make you a millionaire.

99. Start an article directory. Giving away free articles (with embedded links) is one way for webmasters to build incoming links to their sites. For other webmasters these free articles are a great way to fill out their otherwise bare sites. Be the middleman. Popular article directories make a lot of money from the contextual ads they post on all the free articles they are displaying on their site.

100. Start a content site: The most common way webmasters earn money is probably contextual programs like YPN and Adsonar. But mainly Adsense. It's simple, quick, doesn't involve any complicated new skills. You simply put up a website with useful/informative content and some Google provided code, get a few links to the page and wait. Traffic will start flowing to it. The volume would depend on the topic and quality of content. Visitors would see ads served by Google and related to the content of the page. Each time they click on an ad you get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. I personally know at least 20 webmasters who earn in excess of $10,000 per month this way. There are thousands of others.

The 101st method is my personal favourite because I find it hilarious:

There was this bloke who bought an email list of one million email addresses. He sent half of them a stock tip that a certain stock was going up, the other half got the same message predicting that the stock would go down. 50% of them saw him proved right. He ignored the rest and split this 50% into two groups. Half got an email with another up prediction and the other half got the same email with a down prediction. He rinsed and repeated a few times till he was left with about 15,000 people who saw him get it right several times in a row. They were obviously very impressed. He then invited them to pay $5,000 each for a seminar with him on picking stocks! :)

CONCLUSION

I make a healthy living online, and with multiple income streams (no I won't tell you how much. Remember, I'm not trying to sell you anything). I put this article together originally because friends and family kept harassing me to show them what I did for a living so they could do it too. I collected some of the ideas for things I had done myself, got some more from the thousands of site-for-sale threads (and detailed conversations I've had with those sellers), and threw some more obscure/zany ones in here for good measure.

May money just flow to you. If finances are tight right now, take heart - money happens, it's easier than you think. I feel very privileged to live in these interesting times, times full of opportunity, times where I've been able to give up my day job, work at my leisure, enjoy my kids growing up, retire decades earlier than I normally would, and spend time writing this drivel instead of running the usual rat race. God bless the Internet and Good Luck. You CAN do it.

original of the article

10 the most small programs

Internet Maniac

site: www.networkspy.net/maniac.php
size: 97 kb

Features:

• Host Lookup
  
• Ping
  
• Traceroute
  
• Raw Connect
  
• Listen to UDP packets
  
• Network Time
  
• Finger
  
• Whois Active Connections
  
• Scanner
  
• Mail Check
  
• Speed Check
  
• Winsock Info
  
• Network Adapter Address

CPUiD

site: www.sura.ru/sphere/download.shtml
size: 5 kb

Features:

CPUiD - a program for determination of the clockrate, line of the identifier and some possibilities of your processor (there is possibility of the determination set instruction IA-64 and AA-64).


InqSoft Speedballs

site: www.s0m.narod.ru/speedballs.html
size: 43 kb

Features:

One more variant to subjects "speedups Windows"


OpenedFilesView

site: www.nirsoft.net/utils/opened_files_view.html
size: 57 kb

Features:

OpenedFilesView displays the list of all opened files on your system. For each opened file, additional information is displayed: handle value, read/write/delete access, file position, the process that opened the file, and more...
Optionally, you can also close one or more opened files, or close the process that opened these files.



FAIM

site: www.roticv.rantx.com/faim
size: 33 kb

Features:

FAIM is the most compact ICQ client among messengers.


MPW

site: www.micosyen.com/mpw.php
size: 40,5 kb

Features:

The Windoze decoder is designed to prove that an MP3/wave player can be small and simple. It need not take over your computer and your life. Yes, it is minimal and, no, it probably doesn't do what you want, but it is incredibly small, requires no Windoze install or support files and writes nothing to the registry. You can try it without worry.


ScreenShoter

site: www.rascalspb.narod.ru/ScreenShoter/SS.htm
size: 64 kb

Features:

Utility ScreenShoter is intended for "photographies" whole occurring on screen with given time lag.


Aml Maple

site: www.amlpages.com/dld_plus.shtml
size: 38 kb

Features:

Cursor displaying your keyboard layout (language) over working window.


fSekrit

site: www.donationcoder.com/Software/Other/fSekrit
size: 50 kb

Features:

fSekrit is a small application for keeping encrypted notes.
The real advantage of fSekrit is that notes are truly self-contained; the editor program and your note are merged together into a tiny self-contained program file, removing the need to install a special application to view your data.


EVE

site: www.goosee.com
size: 73,5 kb

Features:

The incredible shrinking vector graphics editor.

Simon Stevin's Problem

Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548-1620) studied the principles of mechanisms and machines. He had seen many perpetual machine proposals. One particularly interested him: a chain looped over a pair of asymmetric ramps. Some made the claim that it should move of its own accord because there were more balls, and therefore a greater weight on one side of the apparatus. They were sure it would move if only you could get rid of that pesky friction.

Stevin analyzed this and showed that the chain would not move, for in fact the system is in static equilibrium. In doing this he invented an important principle for the analysis of machines: the Principle of Virtual Work that may be found in engineering mechanics books even today. So important was this principle, that this picture of the ball-chain appears on the title page of Stevin's book on mechanics, and on his gravestone.

Stevin's achievement was an early example of how one can carefully analyze a mechanical system to determine whether (and how) it works. Stevin accomplished this long before the force analysis was understood, and before formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. Stevin also adopted the useful tactic of analyzing mechanisms in the "ideal" case where friction is assumed absent.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

What happened to digg?

original here

Yesterday, I wrote:

I'd like to say I'm sorry that I disrupted eleven seconds of everyone's collective day over there with my error, but I'm so fed up with the constant bitching and complaining at every fucking thing I do that gets Dugg, (not to mention the insults I have to constantly endure from the average 15 year-old Digger) I'd rather direct those children to that brick wall over there, where they can bitch and complain as long as it takes to justify their self-righteous existence . . . At this point in time, I've just about had enough of Digg, so it makes no enormous difference to me either way.

This morning, I was looking through my friends' submissions at Netscape, and saw this story about Digg users going on a rampage and hijacking Yahoo's message boards, and this observation that Digg users have the maturity of middle schoolers.

Before I go add any additional comments, I'd just like to make something clear: Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson are my friends. I like them very much, and together they've helped build an incredible feat of technological brilliance that's affected every tube on the internet (for better and for worse.) I've been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg's homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg's userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg's traffic away. What's Digg doing about this? Does Digg even care? If I were one of the public faces of Digg, I'd be pretty horrified that this sort of behavior was associated with me and my work, but as I wrote at Netscape today:

I've had to complain to abuse@digg twice. The first time, it took five hours to get a reply. The second reply never even came.

At the moment, Digg is unleashing a mob of unaccountable and out-of-control vandals on the Internet. I'm left to believe that Digg's owners are entirely happy to accept Digg's users acting like this, and don't especially care what reputation Digg has, because they have the numbers to effectively do whatever they want.

I've always thought that Netscape, Digg, and all the other social sites can co-exist; clearly the tribal nature of the average 13 year-old [Yeah, I wrote 15 yesterday and 13 today; having raised two kids who have passed both of those ages, there's not a significant maturity difference, despite what the average teen will tell you] Digger doesn't allow for that. They have the maturity of middle schoolers because they *are* middle schoolers.

I'm not going to predict the downfall of Digg, because Digg will always be a fantastic source of links and a great starting point for driving your truck down the internets. But the "social" aspect of Digg's "social news" is rapidly deteriorating into the sort of childish idiocy lampooned in xkcd's You Tube comic, taking John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory to its extreme (and seemingly inevitable) conclusion. Kevin is a great guy, and I'm sure he doesn't approve of or encourage this sort of crap, but he's also the public face of Digg. I'd really like to see him take a public stand and speak out against this childish, disruptive and destructive behavior. Even more, I'd like to believe that if he did it would make a difference, but at the moment, I'm not especially encouraged.

Update: If you care at all about this subject (whether you agree or disagree with my assessment) you will most likely find the comments on this post worth reading. I think there's an important and worthwhile discussion to be had about this whole thing: as people who frequently interact online, what can we do to prevent this Lord of the Flies world from taking over? I have no idea what the answer is, but I bet we can come up with some interesting discussion about it.

author of the article

10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed

Having been a non-employee for about 14 years now, I’ve made my share of stupid business mistakes. I’ve also coached a number of people to start their own businesses, and I’ve seen many of them make similar mistakes. This advice is geared towards small business owners, particularly people who are just starting (or about to start) their own business.

1. Selling to the wrong people.

While sales are important to the survival of any business, you don’t need to push your business on everyone you meet, including friends and family. Furthermore, it’s a waste of time to try selling to people who simply don’t need what you’re offering.

Selling to the wrong people includes trying to sell to everyone. Some customers are much easier to sell to than others. For example, my wife does web consulting for small businesses, and she’s learned that some clients are much harder to work with than others. If a potential customer is broke and obsessively worried about every nickel they spend, if they want a web site but don’t know why, or if they simply don’t understand the Internet well enough, they won’t be a good client in the long run. Feel free to say no to customers that are more trouble than they’re worth. Let your competitors sell to them instead. You’ll save yourself many headaches, and you’ll free up more time to focus on serving the best customers.

Just because someone is interested in doing business with you doesn’t mean you should accept. In my first year in business, I probably said yes to at least 50% of the people who approached me with a potential business relationship. I wasted a lot of time pursuing deals that were too much of a stretch to begin with. I accepted lunch invitations from random business people who just wanted to “see if there’s a way we could do something together.” Virtually none of them made me a dime. If you think a meeting is pointless, it probably is. Don’t network with random people just because you think you’re supposed to network. Today I accept such invitations less than 1/10 as often. If an offer doesn’t excite me right away, I usually decline or ignore it. Most relationships simply aren’t worth pursuing. Learn to say no to the weak opportunities so you have the capacity to say yes to the golden opportunities.

2. Spending too much money.

Until you have a steady cashflow coming in, don’t spend your precious start-up cash unless it’s absolutely necessary. I started my computer games business with about $20,000 cash (my own money), and it went fast; shortly thereafter I was using debt to finance the business. Unfortunately, the original business model didn’t work, and it took five years before the business was generating a positive cashflow. I soon learned that every dollar invested in the business was another dollar that eventually had to be recouped from sales.

In 2004 I started this personal development business with only $9 cash even though I could have spent much more on it. No fancy logo, no snazzy web design, no business cards or stationary. I paid to register the domain name, and that was it. That’s as much as I was willing to spend before I started generating a positive cashflow. All other business expenditures came out of that cashflow.

Your business should put cash into your pocket, so before you “invest” money into it, be clear on how you’re going to pull that cash back out again.

Obviously some businesses require lots of cash to start, but in the age of the Internet business, you can very easily start a lucrative business for pocket change.

3. Spending too little money.

It’s also a mistake to be too stingy with your cash. Don’t let frugality get in the way of efficiency. Take advantage of skilled contractors who can do certain tasks more efficiently than you can. Buy decent equipment when it’s clear you’ll get your money’s worth. You don’t have to overspend on fancy furniture, but get functional furniture that helps you be more productive. Don’t use an antiquated computer with outdated software that slows you down if you can afford something better.

It takes time to develop the wisdom to know when you’re being too tight or too loose with your cash, so if you’re just starting out, get a second opinion. Often the very thought of getting a second opinion makes the correct choice clear. If you can’t justify the expenditure to someone you respect, it’s probably a mistake. On the other hand, there are situations where it’s hard to justify not spending the cash.

4. Putting on a fake front.

Many one-person businesses refer to themselves as “we.” That’s something a lot of new entrepreneurs do, but it isn’t necessary. There’s nothing wrong with a one-person business, especially today. My games business has mostly been a we over the years, but my personal development business is still an I. My wife’s VegFamily Magazine business is a we, since she has a staff working for her, but her web consulting business is an I. It’s perfectly OK to refer to your business as an I when you’re the only one working in it. Pretending that you’re a we when you’re really an I is a bit silly. It’s not going to gain you any respect in a way that matters. Promoting yourself as an I may even be an advantage today, since people will know the buck stops with you, and if you make a promise, you’re the one who will carry it out. Promises from a we sometimes aren’t worth very much.

If you’re a newly self-employed person, don’t pretend you’re anything else. Price your products and services fairly for your level of skills and talents. Some newly self-employed people think they must become actors. The business they promote to the world is pure fantasy. Trying to fool your customers in this manner will only backfire. If you’re so desperate for business that you need to lie, you shouldn’t be starting your own business. If you can’t provide real value and charge fairly for it, don’t play the game of business. Develop your skills a bit more first.

5. Assuming a signed contract will be honored.

I’ve made this mistake more than I care to admit. I’ve had signed contracts with supposedly reputable corporations, and they weren’t worth squat when the CEO decided he wanted out of the deal, even for completely dishonorable reasons. Sure I was in the right, but did I want to go to court to enforce it? No, I’d rather continue doing meaningful work.

A signed contract is just a piece of paper. What’s behind a signed contract is a relationship. If the relationship goes sour, the contract won’t save you. The purpose of a contract is to clearly define everyone’s roles and commitments. But it’s the relationship, not the paper, that ultimately enforces those commitments. When I understood this, I focused more on relationships and worried less about what was on paper, and my business deals went much more smoothly. Once you start falling back on the paper, the deal is already in trouble. Creative (and lucrative) business deals almost always stray from the paper contracts that represent them. One of my attorneys, who had worked on dozens of game development deals, told me that no deal he worked on ever followed the contract exactly; most weren’t even close. And these were big money deals in many cases. Business relationships are similar to other personal relationships — they twist and turn all over the place.

Written contracts are still necessary, especially when dealing with larger corporations where people come and go, but they’re secondary to relationships. Just don’t make the mistake of assuming that the contract is the deal. The contract is only the deal’s shadow. The real deal is the relationship. Keep your business relationships in good order, and you won’t have to worry so much about what’s on paper.

It’s sad but true that there are loads of scoundrels in business. Many of them hold titles like CEO, President, and CFO. There are indeed people out there who seem to care about nothing but money, and they will lie, cheat, and steal to get it. In recent years some of the more despicable ones have gotten themselves indicted (or are already behind bars). But there are plenty of others to whom the word honor has no meaning. For example, in the computer gaming industry, it isn’t unusual for large publishers to feign interest in certain games and string the developers along. They give the developer every indication that a deal is pending, but all the developer sees are delays and false verbal promises. In reality the publisher only wants to keep the game off the market to keep it from competing with one of their own titles; they hope to cause the developer to miss the next Christmas season or to run out of cash and cancel the title altogether. It happens. Business, especially the entertainment industry, is not for the timid.

6. Going against your intuition.

Intuition is just as important in business as it is in other settings. You’d be amazed at how many gigantic corporate deals are green-lighted or red-lighted because of some CEO’s gut feeling. While you might think that logic is the language of business, that’s far from reality. If you base all your business deals on hard logic and ignore your intuition, most likely you’ll be in for a world of hurt.

We humans aren’t very logical to begin with. We simply don’t have enough data to make truly logical decisions because business deals depend on human beings, and we don’t have a logical system for accurately predicting human behavior. Not being able to predict how other humans will behave is a pretty big gap in our logic. And intuition has to fill that gap. The real performance of human beings is what makes or breaks business deals. But to assume everyone will perform as expected is unrealistic in the extreme. No deal ever goes perfectly.

It’s hard to say no to a deal that seems juicy by the numbers when my gut is saying, “You’ll regret it,” but more often than not, I later see evidence my intuition was right all along. Sometimes I just get a bad read on someone, and then years later, several people I know are complaining about being ripped off by that person.

Intuition is a critical part of the decision-making process in business. Since business deals depend on relationships, you need to get a read on the other people involved in any deal you consider. If you get a bad read, walk away. If you get a good read, proceed with caution.

7. Being too formal.

I’ll say it again. Business is built on relationships. In some settings a certain degree of formality is appropriate, but in most business situations being too formal only gets in the way. Business relationships work best when there’s a decent human-to-human connection behind them.

I think it’s a mistake to be too formal even when looking to establish new business relationships. If someone mails me a letter that starts with “Dear Mr. Pavlina” and then goes on to explain a long-winded business proposal, I’ll usually just trash it, especially if it uses the word “we” a lot. Better to fire off an email with a “Hi Steve,” and just ask me very informally if I’m interested in the kind of arrangement you’re seeking. It saves time and opens the door to a real human relationship. Human beings don’t want to build relationships with faceless corporations. They only want relationships with other human beings… sometimes animals too I suppose.

Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don’t foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall… except the one in China.

Formality is boring and tedious. People want to enjoy their work. If someone address me like a computer, I’ll respond in kind — by hitting delete. But if someone demonstrates they have a real personality and a good sense of humor, a connection is far more likely.

8. Sacrificing your personality quirks.

In the early years of running my games business, I took myself too seriously and assumed that I had to act “businesslike” … whatever that meant. Being self-employed was a weighty responsibility, and other people were counting on me. Sink or swim, right?

I started my games business in my early 20s, and people in their early 20s are invariably weird. But I assumed that as a business owner, being weird wasn’t appropriate or acceptable. So most of my business letters and emails looked like they were written by the same people who created Microsoft’s EULAs. The job title of “President” really went to my head. I learned how to function without a personality.

It took a number of years, but eventually I became comfortable just being myself, especially after my games business became profitable. Now that I’m a blogger, my personality quirks and unusual experiences are strengths. My personal oddities give this blog a unique flavor. If I were to take myself too seriously and write more formally, this blog would be very dull and would likely lose much of its audience.

It’s perfectly OK to be your own weird self and to inject your own unique spirit into your business, especially if you’re in your teens or 20s. Don’t be afraid to be more like Steve Jobs… and less like Steve Ballmer. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Ultimately you’ll enjoy your work much more if you attract the kinds of customers and partners that want to work with you for who you are — warts and all. Send the people who only want to work with androids to your corporate competitors. They deserve each other.

If other people can’t handle your weirdness, too bad for them. Focus your energy on the people who can.

9. Failing to focus on value creation.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the real purpose of a business is to create value. While it’s possible to make money in the short run without creating much value, in the long run it’s unsustainable. Even criminal organizations have to create value for someone. When you know your business is just sucking value away from others without providing anything in return, it will erode your self-esteem, and the business won’t be much fun to run.

Why does your business exist? It exists to provide some sort of value, both for you and your customers. The better you understand what value you’re trying to provide, the better you’ll be able to focus. The basic value provided by my games business was cerebral entertainment. The basic value provided by StevePavlina.com is personal growth. Too often business owners aren’t clear on what value they’re trying to provide. They just sell stuff and hope for the best. That’s a lousy business model. The world doesn’t need more selling or more stuff. But it always needs and wants genuine value creation, and that’s where you should direct your efforts.

Presently this web site contains over 400 free articles. That’s a lot of value creation. Thousands of people visit each day to receive some of that value. Helping people grow is the business’ primary aim.

10. Failing to optimize.

Although value creation is essential to a sustainable business, it’s equally naive to assume you can simply focus on creating value, and the rest will take care of itself. You may build a business that provides good value but loses money. As a business owner, you need to find a way to deliver your value in a cost effective manner. Most likely your first attempt will be very suboptimal. You’ll waste too much time, money, and resources trying to produce and deliver your value. That’s OK though. Many businesses start out that way. Just don’t let yours stay that way.

Once you have a particular business process in place, pull it apart and re-optimize it from time to time. Look for ways to make it more efficient. Can you get it done in less time? At less cost? Can you do it less frequently? Can you outsource it? Can you dump the process altogether?

I used to process credit orders for my games business manually. I started the business in 1994, and when I’d receive an order through the mail or via my web site, I’d use some software to input and run the orders by modem. At the end of each month, I’d manually tally the sales. That worked fine when sales were low, but it became burdensome as more products were released and sales increased. Several years ago I upgraded the process such that online orders were fully automated, including instant delivery of the game download. All orders are recorded in a database, and I can view real-time reports to see how sales are doing for each product. It took some work to set this up, but it was well worth it. That one optimization saved me a lot of time and effort, and I don’t have to pay high fees for a third-party order processing service.

Don’t fall into the trap of using archaic methods for doing routine tasks that could be automated, including inventory management, billing, accounting, order processing, communications, and marketing. If you find yourself doing the same repetitive tasks month after month, make sure you put some effort into optimizing them. Not optimizing is like throwing time and money down the drain. It’s often much easier to save time and money than it is to create them.

An Internet business has abundant opportunities for optimization because it’s so easy to try new things and measure the results. In the first year after launching this site, I experimented quite a bit with Google Adsense. Many people don’t like the ad layout on this site, but it’s the most effective layout I’ve tried so far. I use it because it works. Adding the donations page was another optimization. Some people click ads, some people donate, and some do both. So even though value creation is the primary aim of the business, this is still a for-profit business and needs to generate income in order to be sustainable. If I don’t eat, I don’t write. More money means more resources for ongoing value creation. So value creation and optimization go hand-in-hand.

It takes significant effort to build a successful business, but it’s also a tremendous growth experience. I know many people who have quit their jobs to run their own businesses. Many of them didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but I don’t know any that regretted taking the plunge. There’s simply no substitue for holding the reins of your own destiny.


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