With a billion people on this planet connected to the Internet and the barriers to entry relatively low, the Internet has created unprecedented opportunities for people to create unfathomable wealth. What is interesting and remarkable about many of these particular success stories are their coincidences:

• Most of the people grew up moved to the San Francisco Bay area
• Most sites were created for personal, selfish reasons
• Many are started by two people: a business guy and a tech guy
• Most of these sites became more valuable as more members joined
• Most of the sites had addictive qualities – reasons to return frequently
• Most of the sites were viral or self-promotional by nature

Start	Sold	Price	Founder	Company Description
2003	2007	$10M	Graham Hill	TreeHugger – media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream – acquired by Discovery
2006	2009	$15M	Johns Wu	Bankaholic – a financial portal provides consumers with up finance tips, credit card rates, etc. – acquired by Bankrate
2000	2008	$20M	James HongJim Young	Hot or Not – Rating site that allows members to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted by others – acquired by Avid Life Media
1998	2008	$22M	Derek Sivers	CD Baby – Online distributor of independent music – aquired by Disc Makers
2005	2008	$25M	Tony Conrad	Sphere – tools for publishers and bloggers – aquired by AOL
2004	2004	$28M	Joshua Kopelman	TurnTide – an anti-spam technology company created as a spin-off corporation from privacy technology firm – acquired by Symantec
2003	2005	$30M	Joshua Schacter	Del.icio.us – social bookmarking site – acquired by Yahoo!
2004	2005	$35M	Caterina Fake Stewart Butterfield	Flickr – Image hosting website and online community for users to share and personal photos – acquired by Yahoo
1996	2006	$100M	Richard Rosenblat	Great Domains – secondary domain market – acquired by VeriSign
2007	2009	$170M	Aaron Patzer	Mint – free online personal finance service that is aimed at being “easy and secure way to manage and save money online” – acquired by Intuit
1999	2000	$350M	Joshua Kopelman	Half – a fixed price marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music products – acquired by eBay
1996	1998	$400M	Sabeer Bhatia Jack Smith	Hotmail – a free web-based email serviced – acquired by Microsoft
1994	1999	$565M	Richard Rosenblatt Craig Pickering Mark Comer	iMALL – provides name brand products at great prices to give customers a convenient shopping experience – acquired by Excite
2006	2009	$750M	Omar Hamoui	AdMob – mobile advertising marketplace that connects advertisers with mobile publishers – acquired by Google
2005	2008	$850M	Michael Birch Xochi Birch	Bebo – one of the world’s most popular social networking sites – acquired by AOL
1995	2002	$1,500M	Max Levchin Peter Thiel	PayPal – an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet – acquired by eBay
1999	2007	$1,600M	Marc Andreessen	Opsware – web browser – acquired by HP
2005	2006	$1,650M	Chad Hurley Steve Chen Jawed Karim	YouTube – online video sharing site – acquired by Google
1996	2005	$1,850M	Garrett Gruener David Warthen	Ask – search engine that responds to plain English queries – acquired by InterActiveCorp
2003	2008	$1,900M	Niklas Zennstrom Janus Friis	Skype – free peer-to-peer Internet telephony (voice over IP – VOIP) service – acquired by eBay
1994	1998	$4,200M	Marc Andreessen Jim Clark	Netscape – web browser – acquired by AOL
1995	~		Pierre Omidyar	eBay – connects millions of buyers and sellers, world’s largest online marketplace
2004	~		Marc Andreessen Gina Bianchini	Ning – online platform for people to create their own social networks -
2004	~		Mark Zuckerberg	Facebook – the world’s largest social network
2006	~		Jack Dorse Biz Stone Evan Williams	Twitter – a real-time social networking and micro-blogging service
2006	~		Richard Rosenblatt	Demand Media – online media company operating two strategically-linked businesses: an integrated content and social media platform
2009	~		Dennis Crowley Naveen Selvadurai	FourSquare – mobile app that combines social networking and gaming elements where people check in with people and places

In another fine example of how non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are leveraging social media and viral videos to get the word out as part of their public outreach program, check out this…

Blue Man Group: Earth to America

Why do we become entrepreneurs?  What is the American dream?  For most budding entrepreneurs, we dream of becoming financially independent.  We want to create a business that runs like a well-oiled machine, so we have more time in our lives, so we can live a life by design, not a life by default.  For many small business professionals, it’s usually the opposite.  Usually, we end up working so much that we have no life, no time for our families, no time for ourselves and no time to travel.  But, for the few lucky ones, they are able to live the dream life.

On a recent business trip to Colombia South America, I met a guy at my hotel.  He was one of the happiest guys I’ve ever met.  He was care-free and having a great time.  First, I noticed his beautiful Land Rover Discovery.  It was all decked out with extra fuel cans on the roof, a tool chest on the hood, a pull-out canopy (awning) and a snorkel in case he had to traverse flooded roads.

This man (I don’t know his name) told me that he was from Paris and sailed his Land Rover across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since then, he has spent the last 2 years traveling South America. He was heading in the direction of Cartagena, where he planned to take a ferry to Panama Canal and spend another couple years traveling through Central America and North America. I asked him if he’s doing it by himself and he told me he is with his wife and baby.

By the way, I highly recommend people read the following books if you are an entrepreneur or want a life by design:

• Life by Design by Dr. Rick Brinkman
• The E-Myth by Michael Gerber

Operating an online business requires that you learn new tactics for promoting your business to online communities and your target market. But not all promotional efforts should be done solely online. There are several tangible materials you need to have on hand even without a brick and mortar business to promote.

Here are 5 business essentials you still need to have to promote your online company:

Business Cards

Networking is very important to an online business. You never know who you will meet that can be instrumental to your business. Create business cards that feature your company name, website URL, contact information, and logo. When you get to discussing your online business with others in person, be sure to pass along your business card. Remember the cards can only work for you if you have some to present.

Personalized Materials

Even working exclusively in the online market, it is important to have consistent and professional-looking materials for correspondence and invoicing. The more you get your name and logo in front of people, the more memorable your company will become. You don’t have to spend a lot of money having professional stationary made either. Design a template on your own computer and use it for all communication. It is sure to give your business a professional, reputable image.

Press Releases

When promoting your online business, you have many opportunities to spread the word about how your company is doing to the public at large. You can create and submit a press release that details exciting news about your business, such as personnel changes, awards, or events being sponsored or attended by you or your staff. Press releases can be submitted to local, regional, or industry-related newspapers or magazines and can also be distributed internationally via online resources such as i-Newswire .

Print Ads

This marketing avenue can be expensive but there are many opportunities available to advertise your products or services in print. Local and regional newspapers offer display advertising opportunities where you can advertise your company URL, logo, and contact information. Industry-specific magazines may also be used to reach your target audience. Consider other creative (and less expensive) opportunities such as sponsoring local events that include business advertising in their fliers and press releases.

Person-to-Person Networking Opportunities

Online you may be a master of promoting your services or products through a blog or interaction on social media sites but it is essential that you still mingle with real people. Locate industry-related events such as conferences and conventions where you can meet people face-to-face and promote your business. Too often people are comfortable behind a computer screen but forget how to relate to people on a personal level. Step outside your comfort zone and seek out networking opportunities that can make a difference.

Tisha Tolar is a freelance writer, entreprenuer, and co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC.  She is also a blogger at EmpoweringMomBlog where she writes about small business and entrepreneurship.

It seems that with the rapid explosion of social media over the past few years, a lot of attention has been focused on the concept of “branding,” extending beyond the domain of the business or corporate entity and now encompassing the individual. Increasingly, anyone and everyone in the working world is told that they must have a “personal brand,” regardless of whether they are planted in some corporate cube farm, they are running their own micro-business, or simply another “reality” show aspirant seeking 15 minutes in the limelight.

Perhaps this is all an unavoidable extension of our celebrity-obsessed culture and the increasing inability of many people to distinguish between public and private personas, as their entire lives are more or less a performance, but there’s no avoiding the fact that as many institutions increasingly treat their hirelings as little more than interchangeable commodities, and capital seeks out “efficiency” (i.e. low cost to create product or service, high productivity and maximum ROI), one ignores brand-building at one’s own peril.

Brand Must Stand For Something

So what is a brand anyway? In its simplest expression, Merriam-Webster offers up the semi-helpful definition that it’s “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.” That’s important, but any competent marketer will tell you that it’s often the intangibles surrounding the product or service which make the Brand. More often than not, brands sell emotion, or aspirational hopes and dreams, which is one reason why celebrity endorsements are so often sought out. One running shoe made in China, Vietnam or some other Southeastern Asia workshop is probably not terribly different from a competitor’s brand, but if a highly-paid celebrity athlete is paid to wear one and not the other, which do you think is perceived as being more valuable or more effectual?

For a brand to be effective, regardless of whether it has a catchy slogan to accompany it (although this never hurts), it must represent a quality or qualities that others want to have. For a company or individual, undertaking the discovery process to understand what that elixir is and how to capitalize on it is paramount.

Repetition Is Important When Building the Brand

With the proliferation of digital technology, in addition to the traditional media channels of the “old establishment,” virtually everyone is bombarded with thousands of messages each day, designed to inform, entertain, and more often than not, sell something. It’s easy to get lost amid this signal to noise ratio, especially when in the infancy stages of establishing a brand.

Repetition is critical, because it often takes the human mind several exposures of information for it to register on a conscious level. When appealing to increasingly short attention spans, you have little time to “get out the message,” so you must focus on ideas that connect on an emotional sub-conscious level as much as possible. It is also critical to know your core audience, and to go after early-adopters vis-à-vis the marketing channels they tend to listen to first, and then start worrying about “total addressable markets” and other fancy lingo.

Consistency Is Even More Important to Establish the Brand

Say what you will about most fast food joints, but one thing these franchise operations understand  is the importance of consistency – a hamburger consumed in Boise from a specific chain is more or less a clone of one consumed in Bangor, whether the latter is in Maine, New York, or Pennsylvania, to name but a few. For a brand to take hold, it must deliver a consistent experience, which necessitates that quality control doesn’t drop the ball.

This means that whether you are selling a physical product or delivering services, the buyer knows what to expect and gets exactly that each and every time the wallet is opened. If this doesn’t happen, the brand-building starts taking on negative connotations which may cause irreparable damage.

Perception Often Trumps Reality When It Comes to Brand

There’s an old expression among marketers that you, “sell the sizzle and not the steak.” While it always helps to have a higher quality product or service than your competitors, there are numerous examples of inferior products or services becoming market leaders, if only for a time, because of the ability to influence taste-makers and those on the “tipping point.” For example, my personal point of view is that Starbucks does not have the best coffee amid the profusion of vendors exploding onto the coffee purveying scene in the 1990’s. What it did understand better than most was how to sell an experience surrounding the acquisition and enjoyment of coffee, which it was wildly successful in exploiting.

At the end of the day, many products and services arguably are largely interchangeable in many applications, so it’s vital that you create the perception that all empirical evidence aside, this is simply not true. As a service provider, it is critical to understand what aspects of your own brand’s story are compelling enough to suggest that the service you deliver will better fit the needs, stated or implied, of the party you are selling to so they don’t cozy up to the competition.

Be True To the Vision

Companies by definition need to be started by entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, by definition, must have a vision or they would never have gone into business in the first place. Successful brands are often harnessed to the shared revelation of what drives (or drove) the founder(s), emphasizing why these values or principles or desires are important to the would-be consumer. Effectively communicating the vision, and sharing in the journey towards its realization is a powerful tool in the right hands, and as Joseph Campbell revealed in his pioneering exploration of mythical story structures, connects to humans on a fundamental level.

Be inspired. Refine your vision until it’s crystal clear. Share this vision. And most importantly, deliver on this vision, each and every time. There are no shortcuts to establishing a brand, but hopefully these hard-won truths will help.

Jonathan S. Ross is the founder of Los Angeles based Black Rock Consulting, a boutique management and communications consultancy offering strategic planning and development, project management, marketing strategy and copywriting, and creative writing and content development services to start-up, early stage and more mature ventures. He is also the originator of Tao of the Zentropist, a business and personal development blog fusing universal truths found within Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.

Content is king when it comes to building a viable website. Web content can make or break you, especially when it comes to turning sales into profitable leads. Your words need to have the power to convert the ‘just looking’ visitors into ‘here’s my credit card information’ loyal customers.

One way to start the process of adding to or upgrading the content on your website is to take some time to view other websites in your niche. Make notes about what you like, what you don’t like, and what draws in your consumer mentality. Chances are good you have picked one company website over another when making a purchase. Why did you go with the one you did? What did their site offer that the others did not? Keep your notes on hand when you are building your own content for your website.

How do you write good web content that generates profit? Here are 5 quick tips to help you write what people what to read:

Use Your Voice

Drop the formality. People want to feel a connection with you so use a narrative voice, letting them know ‘we’re’ in this together. If you stick with a more formal business tone, your company may be viewed as impersonal and distant.

Speak to Your Audience

Consider how you approach people in real life conversations. You want to address your readers in the same casual way. Let them know that you are focused on them and their needs specifically.

Speak Normally

Big vocabulary words will not always impress the reader. Visitors want to understand what you are talking about if they are going to relate to you. Write in plain language so readers can understand your point within a few seconds.

Keep It Simple

Sure we want people to understand we know what we’re talking about but too much information in this case can be bad. Keep your web pages at 2-3 paragraphs to make it easy to read, rather than easy to skip over.

Attention to the Reader

The one point you want to drive home to your readers is that you have the solution they are looking for. You can describe your products and services until you are blue in the face but it doesn’t mean people will buy them. You have to use the power of your content writing to let people know how your products will benefit them and why they should buy from you. Let readers know you are customer-focused and already understand their needs better than anyone else.

Tisha Tolar is a freelance writer, entreprenuer, and co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC.  She is also a blogger at EmpoweringMomBlog where she writes about small business and entrepreneurship.

Social media marketing is proving to be an effective way of targeting people with special interests in particular subjects. The problem is that there are so many different social media venues out there and it takes time to set up, brand and manage these sites, that it becomes necessary to decide which one (or two) social media profiles we should invest our time and energy.

As of this writing, there are four predominant social media venues – each with their own unique purpose, sets of functionality and community:

1. Facebook
2. Linkedin
3. Twitter
4. YouTube

Factors that influence a Social Media Strategy

In order to pick the right social media platform, you should consider some of the following attributes:

• Popularity of a particular social networking site
• Demographics of a social media platform
• Accessibility to the website from various locations
• Purpose of social media site
• Functional requirements of your organization

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin Popularity

According to Alexa, which gauges website traffic and is an indicator of popularity, Facebook takes first place on the social media stage:

Top Social Media Sites according to Alexa on 16 Dec 2009:

1. Facebook – Connect with friends, share photos/videos, update status, share links
2. YouTube – Video sharing site
3. MySpace – Social networking site among artists, teens, genX, genY
4. Twitter – Micro-blogging, instant messaging, SMS service
5. Linkedin – Networking tool among professionals – jobs, resumes, groups, discussions

Compete comparison: Facebook vs. Linkedin

2009 Facebook vs. Linkedin growth rate:

• Facebook + 160%
• Linkedin + 86%

Unique visitors (Facebook vs. Linkedin) according to Compete:

• Facebook: 128,339,156
• Linkedin: 14,468,718

Reputation/credibility Facebook vs. Linkedin

Many CIO’s in the government and private industry

• Block Facebook
• Do not block Linkedin

Most people’s impression of…

• Linkedin is “professional”
• Facebook is “social”

From a demographics perspective, the fastest growing group on …

• Facebook: women over 55 connecting with their children
• Linkedin: unemployed men over 35 searching for jobs

When discussions are started

• Linkedin seems to have more meaningful conversations
• Facebook seems to have less conversations

From a professionalism perspective

• Linkedin seems to have more serious, professional connections/conversations
• Facebook seems to have less serious, professional connections/conversations

Google Site Search Facebook vs. Linkedin

When I performed a Google Site Search for the following terms, I observed these results

To replicate the results, go to Google and enter, site:facebook.com search-phrase and repeat with site:linkedin.com search-phrase.

Site Search keyword: Business
	Facebook	32,300,000
	Linkedin	22,800,000
Site Search keyword: Nonprofit
	Facebook	366,000
	Linkedin	128,000
Site Search keyword: Events
	Facebook	16,200,000
	Linkedin	6,470,000
Site Search keyword: War
	Facebook	5,040,000
	Linkedin	107,000
Site Search keyword: Peace
	Facebook	4,200,000
	Linkedin	240,000
Site Search keyword: Bush
	Facebook	1,510,000
	Linkedin	60,000
Site Search keyword: Obama
	Facebook	4,890,000
	Linkedin	51,000
Site Search keyword: Jobs
	Linkedin	3,310,000
	Facebook	1,670,000
Site Search keyword: Economy
	Facebook	2,130,000
	Linkedin	188,000
Site Search keyword: Music
	Facebook	513,000,000
	Linkedin	5,950,000
Site Search keyword: Professional
	Linkedin	15,600,000
	Facebook	2,350,000
Site Search keyword: Expert
	Linkedin	1,710,000
	Facebook	860,000
Site Search keyword: Doctor
	Facebook	2,350,000
	Linkedin	607,000
Site Search keyword: Organization
	Linkedin	8,000,000
	Facebook	881,000
Site Search keyword: Sale
	Facebook	8,020,000
	Linkedin	426,000

Have you ever wondered how or why certain information shows up on Google when you Google a certain phrase?  This blog post briefly explains how Google gets its information to display on its search results page.

Start by Googling a phrase, any phrase, just Google something. In this case, I was doing some subject matter research for a client of mine, World Bank.  The subject matter is Gender.  So, the search term is, “World Bank Gender.”  This is a snippet of what I get from Google:

If I were to pick any of these links and then click on them, I could view the source code (or HTML) of the web page and see how this information gets pulled directly from the website and displayed on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

The very first line, Gender, that is in big bold blue letters and underlined comes directly from the page title.  If you are the coder or webmaster for the website, you would go to to the HEAD section of the page code and at the top is a bracket called <title>.  Within that bracket, you will see the word, Gender.

The title tag is important for two reasons:

1. Google places a LOT of weight in the page title.  So, you want to make sure that the page title is both relevant to your site plus meaningful to your prospective web visitors.
2. This title will be one of the most prominent things that people see when they Google a phrase.  So, the page title needs to be catchy, almost like a newspaper headline.

Below the title is usually 1-2 lines of text that further describe or elaborate on the page title.  You can control this text by placing it within the meta description tag, also within the head section of the code.  In the absence of a meta description tag, Google will just grab the first couple lines of content that it sees.

The meta description tag does not carry weight on Google’s algorithm.  In other words, you cannot trick Google into displaying your website because you have stuffed a bunch of keywords in the meta description tag.  However, this area does carry weight with your potential web visitors.  These one to two lines are often what convince, compel or trigger a web surfer to click or not to click onto your site.

So, your meta description tag needs to be like a 30 second elevator pitch.  It should be compelling, sensational and perhaps a call to action.

Finally, you have the URL or the web address of the site.  This is taken directly from the page address on the website.  The URL includes the domain name, the file/directory path and sometimes the final page name of the selected page.  The URL is important for a couple reasons:

1. Like the Title tag, Google actually indexes the URL and gives it some weight in its algorithm
2. Many people who choose to link to you or share a link to your website will copy and paste your URL.  So, the URL should be descriptive, contain the keywords that would be relevant to a prospective web surfer’s Google query and be somewhat friendly and readable – it should help to reveal the content behind the URL, if possible.

Hope that helps.  If you have any questions or comments, please contact us or leave a comment below.

Derek Sivers sells CD Baby for $22M

The cat’s name is Derek Sivers and back in 1998, he created the website, CD Baby, as a personal need to help fulfill his personal passion (making music) and selling that music online to make a living.

A professional musician (and circus clown) since 1987, Derek started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. Reference – wikipedia

By the way, speaking of creating successful websites by accident – read the story about Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

• Wikipedia – Craig Newmark
• Craigslist founder personal blog

After he got this website up and running for himself, his other musician friends asked if he could sell their music on his site and boom! – a business was born.  Turns out that musicians are good at making music but perhaps not necessarily the tiny little details of selling their work and making money.  Hence the agency business.

But, if you have ever read Mike Gerber’s brilliant book, The E-Myth, you will have already known that most people who start businesses are not business people.  Instead, they are technicians or artists or designers or service providers.  For that reason (among others), most small businesses fail. See: Michael Gerber and read The E-Myth (Revisited).

Crush It!

I haven’t read Crush it! yet, but I gather the jist of the book is that if you love what you do, with true passion and almost an obsession, then if you can create a business model out of that and focus your niche then you have a chance at being really successful.  It’s those passionate people who become thought leaders and innovators.

Crush It! Do you have a hobby you wish you could do all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take those passions and make a living doing what you love. In CRUSH IT! Why NOW Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed in this book, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, any reader will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

From what I have read and understand, Derek Sivers has a true passion for music and leveraged that passion into a $100M business, that he ultimately sold for $22M.  His timing was important because as iTunes is taking over the online music market and the sale of physical CDs continues to plummit, if Sivers hadn’t sold CD Baby by 2008, I’m not sure how much it would be worth in 2010.  CD Baby seems to have mirrored the growth trajectory of AOL.

Internet millionaire gives the money to charity

But what really caught my eye about this sale is that Derek Sivers put the money in a irrevocable trust, draws only 5% of the money for personal living expenses and is giving the rest of the money away.  He explains it in a couple of brilliant blog posts:

• Why I gave my company to charity
• Know when to sell your company
• Internet entrepreneur sells company for $22M

Johns Wu – million dollar man

Johns Wu is another interesting cat.  He has a BA degree in Neurobiology from the University of California in Berkeley.  But, brain surgery was not his passion – it was business and finance.  He took that passion, along with his newly acquired skill in blogging and SEO (search engine optimization, search marketing) and founded the website, bankaholic.com, and sold about 2 years later for $15M.  For about a year, this 21 year old “kid” was a one man show,

An empire of one, which is the 21st century small business revolution made possible by the proliferation of the Internet.

Like Sivers, Wu’s timing was perfect.  Had Wu waited another year for the recession to kick into gear and allow all those finance people who were in recession denial to come out of denial … he probably would not have sold his WordPress blog for $15 million dollars. But he did sell that content and its associated traffic, PR6 and backlinks for $15M and it was a coup.

Nowadays, many people are realizing that raw traffic and SEO is not THE answer.  It may be part of the solution, but not without some qualifications.  Indeed, it is QUALIFIED TRAFFIC that we should be targeting.

Get Rich Fast or Slow

Derek Sivers was a case of getting rich slowly, it took him 10 years (1998-2008) to create an opportunity to sell CD baby for $22M.  It took Johns Wu only 2 years (2006-2008) to make $15M.  Timing was crucial for both sales.  Passion and an almost obsessive commitment and attention to detail was crucial.  And, of course, without the Internet as the vehicle or venue, I’m not sure if these two entrepreneurs would have been so fortunate.

History of the Internet

Please follow my series on the History of the World Wide Web.  In there, you will find other success stories, benchmarks and milestones for entrepreneurs and technological breakthroughs.  I am particularly interested in those millionaire entrepreneurs who have leverage the Internet to create their unfathomable wealth.  If you know of other people, companies, case studies and success stories that you would like to share, please contact me or leave a comment below.