A blog about anyInput, experiences running it, and thoughts about my day job

Definitely, a website that has a lot of contents impresses visitors, this is because they come back again and again to see updates on articles, news, tutorials and a lot more.

But what about websites that sells products and database driven sites like anyInput.com, anyAssets, anyUI and anyInfos?

While product based websites contains things to sell, and mostly database driven sites, it should also contain description, promotional articles that would support the integrity of the product you are selling, maybe a dummy site or subdirectory that will contain marketing techniques that points them to the products you are selling like promotions, discounts or other things that explains the beauty and strength of the products could be made. Otherwise, your site will be found dead, NO visitors, NO sales.

Another tips for creating content on your site is to make an appeal to the buyer or visitors that will drive them to visit your site again and again. Be sure not to copy other sites’ content, which some owners or even writers and webmasters do to save money and time. You could derive thoughts and ideas from them, make an original article and claim them as your authored one, besides you don’t want to face infringement and plagiarism issues, right?

A good content shows the writer’s own personality and flavor. But an informative contents should be based on what really had happen or is happening and not a personal opinion. It can be based on what you have experienced especially when talking about problems that you have solved or technique and tips you have discovered.

Make sure what your site is explaining should be understood by many. Use the English language as much as possible, since it is the primary business language the world understands, although there are a lot of language translation tools available for those who can’t. This ensures that people knows what they are reading and will not be mislead, since you are promoting your site internationally.

Remember to check your grammar everytime a content is published, this will increase your site’s integrity and will tell people that you are serious in your internet business and that you are really professional.

Last thing here, always make sure you do daily or regular updates. People will be more excited to visit your site again and again to see the newest content and updates. This will avoid being tagged as a boring site.

Many people I have talked to over the years essentially say to me focus on a niche when starting a business. A family friend, Don, said that I should focus anyInput at a niche such as stamp collecting, comic collecting, coin collecting or etc. My uncle said I should focus on a niche for monthly subscription fees such as “hotel inventory software.” Further, there are countless examples of successful websites that have a niche market. There is a wine collectors forum and a php developer forum and forums about anything imaginable. You need to start out in a niche first.

Once your business has a good chunk of a niche market, then you may decide to go after another niche. If you keep growing you may discover that you now own a general market. A perfect example of this is facebook. They started with colleges and were in that market for years until recently they took on the general social networking market. Another example is Amazon which began as an online book retailer.

Even though, I knew about the importance of niche markets, I never applied the idea to my sites. They are all general sites about a vague topic such as “free online storage” or “maintenance software.” These ideas are not focused and will probably not pick up steam. So I have finally decided to use a new strategy based on niches for new sites that I created moving forward.

These are the summary of the things you need in preparation for your web-treprenuership

1. Research for the Best Keywords for your services, products or ideas you want people to search that will drive them into your site. You can use thousands of tools that can be found in the internet to discover them for you. I am sure Google has it that is free and ready to use. Give it a try to search them. Proceeding to your on-page optimization, use your keywords as part of the title tag, say if you’re site is about programming, include that phrase in your titles too.

2. Include your search keyword in the header of your web page, the spider would love to see them there, they are attracted with the headers, so eventually, if your keywords are included in the headers, you will get indexed easily.

3. Use your keywords in the body text, since spiders are also looking for keywords in the body of the web page.

4. Do not limit your mind setting to keywords only, the relationship between the context of the body with respect to your search keyword term are also important, so get around the whole thought and try to be creative in writing articles perhaps.

5. Use H1 tag for your keywords. H1 is used by webmasters to intensify attention for a particular word, same way as spiders, they are paying attention to those words in big and bold letters, so why don’t you start to present your keywords in a highly regarded style?

6. Use Keywords in domain and URL. Search engines are looking for links that is matched with the search term that is queried by the users, and if your keywords can also be found in your domain and URL, for sure you will be indexed by search engines in a speedy way.

7. The reasons why SEO people are submitting their links to thousands of Directory Submission Sites is because of Link Popularity.

8. When submitting to Directory Submission Site or doing link exchange, make sure to post your link to relative topics or sites.

9. The age of your site is also considered in search engine indexing and Page Ranking procedures.

10. The number of pages that are indexable in your site are also being taken into consideration.

With all the list above, I am sure you have a lot of ideas on how to start your own site that is search engine friendly and are easily be indexed.

Good Luck and have a great day ahead of you! We’ll see you you later.

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what my criteria is for starting a business. Why did I choose the software field for a business? Some people I know run “conventional” brick and mortar, business to consumer, type businesses such as stores and hotels. I could use their expertise, contacts and advices in starting a Subway, Quizno’s, Marathon, Super 8, or Liquor Store. Sure, in those types of businesses I would probably make money and more importantly be self employed.

However, starting a conventional brick and mortar type of business gave me an uneasy feeling. I don’t think I would like it. It is important you like the business you run. The criteria I have for a starting a business I like is as follows.

Starting a Business Criteria

• Must leverage my software background and expertise.
• Must use the internet, databases and web servers.
• Must “piggyback” on another companies success
• Does not require constant customer attention. Customers can be really high maintenance.
• Has the potential to incorporate “data analysis” into the business model.

• Must not cost a gazillion dollars to start up. Especially, does not need venture capital to start.
• Does not cost to much to run the business.
• Does not require a business plan to start. Just a hunch or intuition.

• Allows me to continue to work at a job while working on the business.

Financing for a startup is not very easy to acquire. But it is not impossible either. Some financing methods are fairly easy, while others are extremely difficult to obtain. First, I will define some methods of obtaining financing and rank them as Hard, Medium and Easy:

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In my last post, I talked about how work reinforced my an idea. I saw a problem and dreamed of a solution. The job is also useful for other learnings as well. On the technical end, work taught me about the tools and techniques I applied to the development of anyInput. For example:

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In a previous post, I called co-workers on the job and the job itself mediocre. While that statement is true, I am NOT saying that employement is a bad thing. Having a job is useful since you gain experience and may learn a thing or two. Sure, the learning may be slow, but you still learn a few useful things. After all, I did and still am!

I once was told by a seasoned entrepreneur to “continue working at your job and you will see many unresolved problems. These problems spaw ideas, potentially ideas that you can start a business from.” On the job, while learning about many aspects surrounding a device, I noticed that my company still uses paper records to log information about indivdual devices. Often times they need to search through large file cabinets to find a particular device’s history. Sometimes, they are unable to find the records.

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An open source project called anyInventory provided inspiration for the development of anyInput. See the anyInventory homepage here. anyInventory seems to be no longer maintained as of March 2005.

anyInventory is very similar to the first product that I made. It had alerts, multiple users, was customizable and was very simple to use. Here is a testimonial for anyInventory:

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Merry Christmas! …….I mean happy holidays (politically correct) Anyway, the idea for anyInput was growing in my mind for about 4 years before I decided to begin developing anyInput about 10 months ago. The sources of the idea are work, anyInventory and my first product attempt.

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One of my main reasons for starting my own thing is so that I someday I may be able to escape the life of corporate mediocrity. By ‘corporate mediocrity’ I am calling many people at my job mediocre.

One seasoned entrepreneur I talked to a several years ago made the statement, “The world is full of mediocre people. So I hire people late and fire fast.” Later on, while at work, his statement started to make sense.

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