August 11, 2008 by Colin Temple, in Self-Employment
I’ve had dreams of entrepreneurship since I was a kid. I’ve always wanted to own my own business — to be my own boss, and make my own ideas a reality. Now that I’m doing it, I never stop thinking about new business ideas. Some of these ideas come from reading — there’s no shortage of books and blogs on making money — but the best ideas I’ve had come from identifying opportunities around me.
I was working with a friend today on a website for his new business. We got to talking about business ideas, and he told me a story about one business case that arose from recognizing and seizing an opportunity:
A worker in a sawmill noticed the huge amount of wood shavings that were being shipped off as waste. Any bit of log that didn’t divide nicely into lumber was deemed useless, and discarded. What’s more, the mill was actually paying to have the discarded bits of tree taken off the premises.
But those shavings were far from worthless, and this employee recognized that. He offered to start picking up the wood shavings for free, saving his employers some cash. He then took the wood shavings and sold them to local pet stores as litter. Consumers would then buy the litter for their hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs.
There’s nothing revolutionary about what he did, but he saw an available resource and recognized the opportunity to do something with it. He satisfied a need for both his employers, who didn’t want the wood chips, and a market that did. He also made a respectable amount of money in the process.
So while reading about the latest business idea can help you learn what’s working for others, sometimes nothing beats finding a new opportunity a little closer to home. All you need to do is keep your eyes wide open.
One Comment
August 11, 2008 by Colin Temple, in Blogging, Wordpress
I recently came across a situation where I needed to display the contents of a page in a Wordpress sidebar. Essentially, my client needed an easy way to edit a sidebar that appeared on multiple pages. Editing a Text widget wasn’t an option: they needed the flexibility of editing a page.
It took a few tries/revisions to find the best way to do this, so I thought I’d share my solution. All I did was create a page with a specific slug (”sidebarpage”) and echo its content. I used it in a sidebar widget, but you could use this anywhere in your Wordpress Theme if you’d like to have an additional editable area.
<?php
$sidebarpage = new WP_Query(“pagename=sidebarpage”);
while($sidebarpage->have_posts()) : $sidebarpage->the_post();
the_content();
endwhile;
?>
Be sure that you’re creating a seperate WP_Query object ($sidebarpage in this example) — otherwise you’ll modify the query on the page itself, and your sidebar content will show up in the main body of your posts/pages as well!
The down-side of having this content stored in a page is that the page will appear in page listings, so be sure to exclude it if these are used in your theme.
2 Comments
July 29, 2008 by Colin Temple, in Search Engine Optimization
Everybody seems to want to talk about Cuil, the new search engine in town. So here are my two cents.
Like most publishers, I started searching for some of my own sites, including my company site. If you search for “XAdvance web” (searching for XAdvance alone seems to ignore the “X”), you get this in the results. I have one question for Cuil — who is this woman?
I don’t know her. She’s got nothing to do with XAdvance. So what’s the deal? It might be interesting to learn how Cuil chooses these images. Also, the title and some of the content are several months old.
As I write this, I can see another publisher, Patrick O’Keefe is going through something similar. He points to his blog (via Twitter) where his sites are also paired with irrelevant images.
Cuil, pronounced “cool”, surfaced yesterday with claims of an index larger than Google’s. It’s been developed largely by former Google employees, along with some from IBM, eBay and others.
We’ll have to see what happens as the search engine takes shape–after all, it’s brand new. But for the moment, I don’t see its format or results replacing Google anytime soon.
I wonder who will be the first to publish some new SEO practices for it. It looks like there’s already enough spam on there.
7 Comments
July 29, 2008 by Colin Temple, in Marketing Strategy
If you’re a Web marketer/designer/developer/enthusiast like me, A List Apart has a survey for you! It’s fairly quick–it took me just a few minutes to complete. They’re just a few questions about your skills, what your employers/clients expect, and how you price your work. I’m looking forward to the results, but they’ll only be useful if enough people take it.
So if you make websites, take the survey now! (Thanks to Sara for pointing it out.)
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July 28, 2008 by Colin Temple, in Blogging, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Note: This is my second and last post imported from my old blog at
colintemple.com. After this, it’ll be all-new content. (Wow, I’d better start writing!)
Everyone’s really excited about Web 2.0. Still. That in itself isn’t a problem: there’s lots to be excited about. All this Web 2.0 stuff — social media, network building, picture posting, wiki writing, Twitter tweeting and all the other things bloggers do while high on AJAX — is making the Web into a much more collaborative, open and accessible medium. That was pretty much the point of the Web from the get-go, so kudos to them for the job well done.
But, talk has been growing over the past year about the future of this utopia we’re all building together — or at least, its business future. The analysts say the tides may be turning yet again: that Web 2.0 is forming a bulge of a bubble that’s about to burst at the seams.
And they’re probably right. If you look around, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a lot of noise going on. Of course, we’ve had Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Flickr and the great big blogosphere for a while now. But every day it seems I’m learning about some new Web 2.0 app and how it’s the best thing for me since sliced turkey. There are way too many social media sites out there, and I’m afraid that sitting in the middle of this with my Web Marketer and Web Developer hats on has gotten me awfully dizzy.
And while wearing those hats — yes, I wear actual hats — I’m often browsing freelancer sites looking for fun and exciting projects to work on. Without fail, there are daily postings from investors looking to build the next MySpace, Digg or i-silver-bullet. If not, they at least want a new Facebook app that will create the viral marketing their business always needed to get off the ground.
After the 2000 dot-com burst, this kind of if you build it they will come smack in the face of rationality came to a grinding halt, and the executives who didn’t smarten up were politely asked to die in a hole somewhere. Now, it seems like the coffers are opening up again to buy a piece of Web 2.0 pie.
Of course so many “Web 2.0″ companies are living off of traffic and ad revenue alone — but what about those using the Web to sell something tangible? My friends over at Sitebrand paint a brighter picture for those involved in online retail, where the Web may actually be the safer bet as the U.S. economy slows down.
Meanwhile, the clients I work with have all increased their online marketing spending over the past year or two — but every single one of them has become obsessed with their web metrics. Conversion rates, cost-per-lead and ROI are on the tops of their minds, and rightly so.
So it seems that at least some people have learned from the first dot-com burst, which is great because they’ll need to use that kind of sense again to search for new marketing tactics when the bubble bursts and Internet users worldwide simultaneously fall into comas.
I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is “smarten up, Internet”, because if everything goes to hell again the Web won’t be any more fun and I’ll have to get a new job.
2 Comments
