I’ve become a fan of a new website these past weeks. www.eBizMBA.com is a great site that keeps up with all the various tech industry blogs but categorizes them into various business categories. My most favorite tab is the ‘Advertising and Affiliate Marketing’ area. I am really fascinated with where things are going with online advertising. It has been predicted that online advertising will grow by more than 21 per cent per year to reach $62bn in 2011, making it bigger than newspaper advertising, which is expected to total $60bn in 2011. ft.com
I’ve always wondered if ads were really effective or not in generating actual sales. Sure, they can bring some traffic to a site but how often to people actually purchase a product or service because of an ad? I personally can’t think of anything I have actually spent money and purchased because of an ad. I did hear a friend once tell me that the reason they got a certain burger at restaurant was because they saw a commercial for it. I guess it works for some people. I’ve always thought of advertising as an immeasurable type of investment in a product. You can’t really tell if someone who bought a broom from Wal-Mart did it because they saw a commercial or if they just needed one and found the best one at the best price. However, online advertising does enable companies to track where a user came from, from which ad and what they ended up buying. I just recently interviewed with a new company called burstabit.com and they provide such a service along with some other very unique features. My guess is that online advertising will indeed make huge leaps in the next few years and overtake traditional channels that currently exist. I would definitely love to jump into this industry somehow.
I recently read a really interesting article written by Marc Andreessen. You can find the article here. He starts off by saying ”A startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success.” And concludes with ”If Thomas Edison didn’t know what he had when he invented the phonograph while he thought he was trying to create better industrial equipment for telegraph operators…what are the odds that you — or any entrepreneur — is going to have it all figured out up front?” Intrigued? You should be! I thought it was a pretty good article.
That blog article reminded me of another one I read a while ago that can be found here. This second article goes over some similar ideas. He suggests that you probably wont get it right the first time so it’s probably not a good idea to develop a whole idea in stealth mode and then try to release it to the world. He suggets that you develop some of your project, let users play with it, listen to their feedback, make changes that will keep your users happy and then repeat the process. If you’re trying to provide some sort of service to users, then best thing you can do is listen to what the user wants. That sounds like some good advice to me.
Yesterday, The founder of Xmission Pete Ashdown paid a visit to Neumont and I had the opportunity to listen to him speak. Pete shared various experiences on how he developed the idea for his ISP company and also how much work it took. I wish I took notes! He used some interesting terms that I heard for the first time. The one that stuck out was Sweat Equity. He used this term when he was talking about all the traveling and work he had to do just to run his first server. I suppose when you think about sweat equity it makes sense. There are businesses interested in paying you for something they didn’t want to do themselves for various reasons. Some reasons might be because the initial risk or startup costs are very high. Services that require the kind of work Pete put into his company are what makes his service different than something such as a new website idea. Anyone can copy someone’s great site idea (MySpace, Facebook, etc), but it takes a lot more work to start a company with tangible assets and services. This of course got me thinking more about what I really want to accomplish in the future. I think if I had a choice between developing some great site and actually starting a company with employees I would go with the later. It would be great to start something with employees and provide a valuable service and have something that I could invest some sweat equity into. It’s going to take a lot of work no matter what I choose to do.
Ok, so I got bored and decided to do some random searching on google and you won’t believe what I found. Apparently someone has written a book about how they retired by the age of 26. You can find it on amazon following this link: How I Retired at 26! What do you think about this book? Sounds like the perfect guide for me, ha!
