Video: Guy Kawasaki on Using Twitter

posted by   Ian Wyatt   |    June 30, 2009

Posted in   New Media   |   Comments

I've been personally using Twitter for nine months, and now I'm looking for ways to enhance my content and use of this platform to better engage and communicate with my business audience of subscribers, readers, business partners, and colleagues.

I was recently emailed a link to a presentation from Guy Kawasaki @GuyKawasaki about how to tweet and use Twitter as a marketing platform for your personal brand or company. Watch Guy Kawasaki's presentation to the Vancouver chapter of Entrepreneur's Organization by clicking here.

Guy Kawasaki is the founder of Garage Technology Ventures and founder of Alltop.

Here are a few key take aways from his presentation:

• Ignore the A-list of influential users, and instead focus on bottom up relationships. You never know who will be your biggest evangelist.
• Need lots of followers, because if you don't have lots of followers, you can't achieve the reach required. It's a game of big numbers.
• Follow everyone who follows you, using SocialToo.
• What is the goal of your use of Twitter? How can you get the most re-tweets? Re-tweets show quality content. Re-tweeting is the best form of flattery. Use Retweetist to track and monitor.
• Quality of links is the best way to get more Twitter followers. Use StumbleUpon and Alltop to find interesting links to post on Twitter, using shortened links.
• Use Tweetdeck for managing your Twitter accounts, search functions, re-tweets, and direct messages.

Lots of great tips in this video for taking Twitter to the next level - from a personal communication tool, to a proactive platform for engaging with an audience. Looks like I have my work cut out!

Paid Content vs. Advertising Supported

posted by   Ian Wyatt   |    March 16, 2009

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I've been thinking more about Plenty of Fish, entrepreneur Markus Frind and Internet business models as a follow up to my blog post from the weekend, Plenty of Fish: $10 million revenues & 50% profit margins.

In March, 2006, Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind wrote a blog post titled "How I made a million in 3 months" on WebmasterWorld. The post begins with "Lots of hard work, and a billion+ pageviews." The second point of his post is more insightful: "You have to create sites that will bring in repeat traffic. If you think you will get rich off SEO think again. If you create a Free jobs site you could net 30 million + a year if you got big. Club listings site, free religious personals etc would all be big money makers. Look for established markets and offer a service for free and support it with adsense."

Other sites have done exactly this. Think about Craig's List, which for years has taken market share from newspapers by offering free classifieds to a growing online audience. Do newspapers still have print classifieds? Who pays hundreds of dollars to list a job in the local paper? While Craig's List today charges a nominal fee of $25 for job listings in major markets, much of the site is completely free - and was for years, which allowed Craig's List to steal market share.

Want to be the next Markus Frind? Start by asking, "what do people pay for online?" Music. Games. Porn. Dating. Job ads. Investment advice. All opportunities for free sites to topple the paid sites. Start a simple free site, add Google AdWords, and let the traffic and profits begin.

Will paid content fall by the wayside, with more entreprenuers like Markus launching free sites to undercut the paid content providers? Perhaps in some areas but not in others, such as music and games, where copyrights will keep that from happening. There is definately a trend toward more free content, as users launch free sites and Internet businesses extending the free line, giving away more for less (or free). Nobody pays for online news, gossip, restaurant reviews, recipes, or searching job listings.

The advertising model can work very well online, and my company's growth in recent years has been a direct result of growth in online advertising, and our ability to build a large and captive audience. But ultimately, businesses have to be selling a product or service, and users must be buying. If users never buy, busineses won't advertise.

I continue to believe that paid content is here to stay. Paying for content means that the user views it as being valuable. If it is free, users sense that it is worth little. The paid content barrier establishes a sense of exclusivity that everyone seeks. In a challenging economic environment where advertising rates are declining and media spending is slowing (even in the online channel), I believe Internet companies will continue to add products or services that they can sell to their users to offset declining ad revenues.

The Business of Domain Names

posted by   Ian Wyatt   |    February 16, 2009

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Domain names are the real estate of the dot com world. Like real world real estate, the market for domain names has hit the skids as well, with prices falling from the highs of 2008. With transaction volume and prices falling, a recent article by industry publication Domain Name Journal reports that domain name industry insiders are increasingly focused on developing high quality, generic domain names into web sites.

I bought my first domain name in 1998, and been building a domain name portfolio for the past decade. My portfolio of +600 domain names is comprised of domains that I originally registered, as well as those purchased at auction or through domain resellers. I favor .com domain names, the most prized domain extension (as compared with .net, .org, .info, .me, to .mobi, etc). Most of my domains are in the financial or investment area, some of which have been developed into web sites. I also have bought domains related to health, wellness, media, beer and wine.

Given the economic slowdown, I've been giving some thought to my business. My company, Business Financial Publishing, is an investment content company that provides individual investors with investment insights, analysis and research through our various free and paid e-letters and investment services. But are we also in the domain name business? We acquire domain names, and develop them into products and services that can be monetized.

Historically, we conceive a product or service first, and then acquire an appropriate domain name. Most domainers, or those engaged in the business is owning, developing, and selling domain names, take the opposite approach by buying high quality domain names, regardless of the sector or topic.

Domain names can be registered with companies such as NetworkSolutions or GoDaddy.com for about $10 a year. But with many good domains already registered, more and more people turn to the domain name aftermarket to purchase domain names. The aftermarket refers to domains that have already been registered, and are being re-sold. Both individuals and companies such as BuyDomains and SEDO have acquired large portfolios of domain names, which they then re-sell or auction off to those seeking already registered domain names.

With the cost of buying and maintaining a domain name so low, domainers acquire portfolios of thousands of domain names with hopes of monetizing the domains through the resale of the domain, developing the domain into a web business, or monetizing direct type in traffic through Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Adwords (type-in traffic refers to someone navigating directly to a domain name such as IanWyatt.com - for one-word generic domains such as Beer.com, type-in traffic can be significant).

Business Week magazine wrote a great article on the domain name aftermarket business, titled The Domains Of The Day: How two Boston entrepreneurs are making millions from names as simple as chocolate.com. The article profiles Andrew Miller and Michael Zapolin's company - Internet Real Estate Group - and their strategy for turning generic one-word domain names into multi-million dollar businesses.

The interesting thing about Internet Real Estate Group is the company isn't focused on any single industry. The company buys one or two word domains such as Software.com, Phone.com, Jeans.com, SportsFan.com, and WeddingGifts.com, and either develops these into web sites or sells the domains or businesses to others. Internet Real Estate Group bought the domain CreditCards.com in 2003 for $100,000 and sold the domain and credit card comparison shopping site in 2004 for $2.75 million to Austin Ventures. CreditCards.com was slated to go public under the leadership of Elisabeth DeMarse, former CEO of BankRate (Nasdaq: RATE), before the credit markets came to a halt in 2008. (I've known Elisabeth for years, and followed BankRate in my Growth Report newsletter starting in 2002 when the stock traded at $1.00 - it is now at $26 a share, down from a high of $55).

The Domain Name Journal or DNJournal is the best source of information on the domain name aftermarket business, reporting with feature stories on domainers and aftermarket sales. DNJournal in January published a good article, The State of the Industry January 2009: 15 Leading Experts Break Down What Went Wrong in 2008 and Predict What Will Happen in 2009.

Today I find myself thinking about which of my domains could be easily developed at a low cost into self sustaining businesses?  While I don't have any one-word generic domains like Chocolate.com, I have plenty of domain names ripe for development.

Twitter for Business

posted by   Ian Wyatt   |    September 17, 2008

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Social networking site Twitter has been on the up and up, with currently more than two million users. While Twitter's business model remains in question by Silicon Valley outsiders (and perhaps insiders alike, although the company has raised $20 million in venture capital), the question arises as to whether this startup will prove a helpful tool to businesses.

Since learning about Twitter from Jason Pontin, editor and chief of the MIT Technology Review, while attending the Entrepreneur's Organization Masters in Entrepreneurship Program at MIT in May, I've been playing around with the micro blogging site on my own and for fun (if you're not already doing so, you can "follow" me on Twitter by clicking here). It can be quite addictive, and I find myself sending short (less than 140 characters) updates answering the question, "What are you doing?"

While I find Twitter to be lots of fun, my fiancée sometimes finds my distraction to be annoying; particularly when I feel compelled to update my network of 27 followers that the braised lamb shank I just ate was amazing, or of my spotting of a bear crossing the road (which was actually pretty cool).

One of the questions I began thinking about was whether there is an application for Twitter in my business - investment content for individual investors. While Twitter may be a small medium of communication today (compared with email, for example), I believe its popularity is likely to grow. After all, Twitter is really just an interface for web and SMS communications. And if we can get in on the ground floor of "tweeting" about the financial markets, that might put us in a good position down the road, allowing us to capture an active audience of younger people who are interested in investing.

We set out to give it a try with our Small Cap Investor web site. Our editor-in chief (Bob) and assistant editor (Crystal) jumped on the opportunity and have been tweeting away. Our Twitter user SmallCapTweets post 8 - 12 updates on small cap stocks throughout the day (today has been a killer, with the small cap Russell 2000 down nearly 5%).

The good thing is that it isn't very time intensive, since the messages are short, and we're just summarizing highlights from small cap stocks throughout the day. The bad news is, our following is really limited (10 followers). Granted, we've done no marketing. We plan to integrate our feed directly into our web site in the coming weeks, and to begin to encourage our audience of +150,000 e-mail newsletter subscribers to also signup to follow us on Twitter.

I'm not sure we'll ever make money directly as a result of our Twitter feed. And we're not alone: MIT Technology Review, CNN, MSNBC, and Forbes are all active on Twitter, and not making a dime (as far as I can tell).

But I really view Twitter as being an extension of our communications with our audience - yet another way to reach out and connect with them and build a relationship in the digital age. Down the road, this perhaps becomes a way for us to send stock trade alerts to paying subscribers or to promote new products or special discounts to our users.

However, right now we're just having fun.

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