A Dot Com Entrepreneur Speaks Out

Hello everyone..

I apologize for wasting your time, but wanted to point something out to all of you in this post.

If you ever want to start a company, and then in your first year you receive several billion dollar offers, then I highly recommend you take them.  You can do a lot of good with that money.  Don’t pull the old “I’m doing this right thing, sorry, I don’t need the money” crap -  Don’t pull a “Zuckerberg” by turning down the moneyon something that has no sustainability or future.  I mean, seriously… I was probably one of the first people on Facebook back in the day and I saw this coming all along.

Why Are They Going to Fall?

1. Their revenue model sucks.  How are they going to make any money to justify all of their hype?
2. Their costs are way too high.  Seriously, do you know what it takes to run a website like that?
3. People are realizing that content = money.  People make the content, and so they are one by one dropping facebook and monetizing the information they have to offer the world.  Why the hell would you help someone make money from your life, content, and information when you can do it yourself?  Seriously, think about it.  This applies to MySpace too!
4. Any time you get this many fucking college and high school kids in one place, it’s bound to be a disaster.  Drama Drama Drama…  for every couple on Facebook, one of them leaves because of drama at some point.  It’s just a matter of time before the drama affects you and drives you FAR away from FB.
5. Zuckerberg is pissing everyone on the West Coast off!  I mean, if your idea is great, but your company is failing and living off other VC’s cash, then why the hell are you walking around and talking like you have a shield around you?  I have news for Zuckerberg…  He’s pissed off the only people that can help him.. bloggers, and media.  Even Arrington is pissed off at him.  Don’t deny it Michael - He took half your staff!

Look, I’m counting the days until MZ is just another millionaire like the rest of this country.  Until then, he can have his moment… he already passed on the billion dollar offers.

This is worse than watching some retard get greedy on Deal or No Deal and have the 1 dollar box at the end.

Yes folks, you read the title correctly.  I said that you cannot beat good old fashioned HTML.  What am I referring to?  Try to remember the times before Google when everyone was using WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and Yahoo while almost all sites were static and hand-updated with quality, innocent information.  This was a time before affiliate programs and internet advertising was very young.  Yes, those were the good ol’ days.  Now, web content has a higher value than newspaper articles and affiliate links run rampant.

What is the point of this post?

I am going to admit, there are new alternatives in website design utilizing CSS and PHP that can outrank and out perform any static HTML site in a heartbeat, but people with old content-rich static HTML websites are still reaping some profits from the early days of the internet.  There is a reason these sites have done so darn well over such a long time!

Old school HTML is basic, static, and time consuming to make changes.  However, it’s so simple that all search engines can easily crawl and index any content.  Making the crawling easier gives you the first shot at rankings and improves your chances of getting ranked for existing topics and terms.

I’m not really sure how to word this post without pissing a bunch of people off, but basically what I am trying to say is - Based on my personal experience, and historical data, some of my static HTML sites are still outperforming my much larger and more popular CSS, PHP, and dynamically driven sites (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) that have several more hours of SEO work done to them.

I’d like to get the opinion of what others think about this?  Obviously I am not saying let’s all ditch what we have learned over the years and start creating static HTML sites again, I am just pointing out how successful my older sites have been and still are.  I think the old K.I.S.S. (”Keep It Simple Stupid”) strategy is at work on the internet too!

Within the past few months, Google has made some pretty wild moves to help their advertisers get more for their money.  But are they digging their own grave by worrying too much about the advertisers than the publishers?

The short answer to this question is - Yes.

Cause & Effect (speculation):

Cause:  Google changes advertising clickable region from entire ad to only text.
Effect:  A decline of about 7% in paid-click revenues from December 2007 to January 2008.

Cause:  Google updates Adsense display URL policy.
Effect:  Unknown.  As of this post, this change has not yet taken effect.  Effective date starts in April 2008.

While Google appears to be taking steps to clean-up the paid search results and quality of clicks on their ads, it is also hurting their bottom line.

Hopefully the ad-spending will rise in line with the quality of the visitors to their websites or we (Owners of Google Stock) are in for some hard times.  I am confident that Google will recover the short-term losses, but only time will tell.  I feel Google is mandating these updates so closely together so the effects are only felt in a single fiscal quarter before showing improvements through the higher dollar demands these better quality ads will demand.

Many search marketing professionals will echo that quality of content is a very important, if not the MOST important, factor in search ranking.  I strongly believe that you must develop sites and online assets with consumers in mind.  I don’t mean consumers as in people who will buy something, I mean consumers as in INFORMATION consumers.  People use the internet every day to consume information of sorts.  Even when someone is searching to buy something online, they are still trying to consume information on the best deal and the best product for their needs.  We need to start developing our websites with the information consumers in mind and not advertising or money.  The money and compensation for work will come no matter what, as long as you provide a great source of quality content.

This brings me to another topic:  How to monetize the traffic that our high quality sites and content have brought in.  I will be posting on this later.

Over the weekend, I decided not to post on my blog.  I wanted to see the importance of posting regularly on my RSS Feedburner Chicklet.  To my surprise, the number went up over night last night but went down on the first day without new posts.  I am unable to draw a conclusion from this and I will try again when I have a larger amount of subscribers.

Don’t worry; I will be posting more again as of today.  I built up quite a nice list of future articles to post.