| - by Colin Delia |
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The following is the "Building an Empire" series written in early 1999. It is actually the sequel to the original written in 1997. The two sets of articles, originally posted at Ynot over one-week spans, were enourmously succesful in influencing and inspiring webmasters. I never expected the response I received after writing them and feel fortunate that they had the positive effect they did. Even today, I still receive requests for the original copies. More than anything, I had a good time thinking them through and writing them.
If you profit from some of the advice here, I would appreciate a link in return from your webmaster area. Feel free to contact me with any suggestions, comments, links, or material you think might "fit in" here.
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Building an Empire 1999
1. Most importantly .. Treat your business LIKE a business. CEN IS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE. These guys are running a BUSINESS .. not a fly by night operation .. not a series of sites with no direction. When you have a problem, no matter what it is, it gets taken care of with efficiency and grace. These guys would borrow money to expand, take on private investors, make outside investments, etc etc. They make very strong business contacts, they schmooze, you visit them, they buy you drinks .. show you a good time. They didn't start their pay programs until they KNEW they could pay every webmaster ontime and without a hitch. I know this concerned them tremendously when they first opened. If you run a program .. you MUST pay everyone ONTIME and HONESTLY. The others fall fast and go out of business. They treat their employees VERY well. I can honestly say they people that I know that work there are taken care of, they really likethei jobs, and they are rewarded for very hard work. (Sorry to use you guys as an example JoeE and John). Know your banker, accountant, sponsors, competition .. 2. Give yourself as much protection as you can. Setup in two servers in different parts of the country. Back your files up weekly (not in the same place). i.e. tarzip the whole hard drive once a week and download to your PC. MikeFold can attest to what its like to have to rewrite 2000 pages of HTML from scratch (sorry to use you as an example Mike). Get some non adult investments. This is risky business. Know your local laws and the history of obscenity prosecutions for your area. Get a lawyer. Know how to run free sites and paysites (I'm just getting started on the second but I've been grilling my friends that are paysite operators for a long time getting every single tender morsel of knowledge). Run. run. run kiddies .. you can retire fast in this business if everything goes your way. 3. Knowledge is king. Learn EVERYTHING can you about your business. How much money do you make per site? .. what is the difference between those sites? What is the difference between the links that go to those sites? Own a freesite .. want to open a paysite? How big do you want to be? What will be your costs based on that? Is it worth it? How do you know? Are you sure? Get someone to share their numbers with you. Return the favor. Are you better doing niche sites or general sites? If a niche site - can the industry support another niche site of that type? Will it support another after you? Are you getting a shrinking piece of the pie? If so - how can you stay ahead of your competitors? Who ARE your competitors? Who can you do business with? Is it better for your company to have a public presence? or to "hide in the shadows?" Do you know UNIX? If you don't - get a UNIX book and learn one new command every day. Learn some minimum commands like: ls, top, df, cd, mkdir, cp. You can do some really useful stuff with grep. You will be rewarded MUCH more than you think. Can you communicate with a programmer if you hire one? learn how to program enough to be able to ask for what you want. How do you learn? Take a class? Read websites? Buy a book? Do it. How will you react when everyone copies your great idea? How will you stay ahead? What twist will you add? Run experiments. I've had a lot of failed ideas. A LOT .. I don't care. I don't expect success every time out. I plan to WIN THE GAME .. by whatever rules I have chosen for myself. Been in this business for 3-6 months and not making any progress? Ask yourself why? Maybe your idea is not as good as you first thought. Time to try something else? "Old Man" Dusty comes to mind .. he struggled for a while and then suddenly shifted gears and is now one of the top earning adult webmasters. All this goes with ... 4. Schmoooooze. We're fortunate enough to have quite a few great conferences every year in various parts of the country. Go and MEET PEOPLE .. make business contacts. Get their numbers .. email them, call them. It is so much easier to establish a relationship with someone once you have met them in person. It's all about people, baby .. Contrary to one's posts earlier in the week .. there are some BRILLIANT people in this industry. True Innovaters. No - it doesn't take a genius to figure out this is a great industry but some did. I went to an elite school and saw enough of them to know. There are some truly brilliant people out there. Listen ... Get a small core group of people in your circle and share ideas. Ask yourself all the time: how can I make more money with them? Kinda secretive? Is there an idea that you have that you're not going to use yourself? Trade it. Give it away. As Serge said the first week I ever read this board (early spring, 1996): "Give first. Ask later." I'll end this post with a quote from my very first post from that Spring of '96 - from that very same day. "Argue from a position of strength" 5. Give 'em what they want! Ask yourself: What would *I* if *I* were the consumer want? And then ask yourself am *I* a fair example of what someone else might want? Sam Walton was a master of this. He visited every single one of his stores AND many of his competitors stores. He stopped to ask them what they wanted, what they could do better, imagine .. a billionaire asking his customers what he could do to make their shopping experience better. What was most important to his customers? Price? Short lines? All night shopping? Number of product brands? Own a webmaster program? When was the last time you did anything to find out what your webmasters might like improved? Have you called them lately? Sent them an email? Send a questionaire out with the last weekly paycheck? If they make more money, so will you. We're bringing a webmaster program out in a few weeks and the first thing we did was ask a bunch of people what they liked best about their programs and what they didn't like. And we've included every single thing anyone recommended. It's a dream program. We went through every single one of our sponsors stats programs and asked -- what is good here? What information do *I*, as a webmaster need, in order to maximize my profits, and in return, my sponsors? Once upon a time, webmasters were paid 2 cents a click and Cybererotica became the number one pay program on the net at the time by paying 3 cents a click. That's what people wanted at the time. I remember CEN once asked me what would most improve their program for me, the webmaster, and I said, weekly paychecks. A few weeks later they had weekly paychecks. 'Nuff said. 6. Wheel -n - Deal! This can be thought of on two different levels. When I first started in this business in early '96 I was fresh out of college and flat broke. I had job offers in New York and in Orlando working for American Express, Dean Witter, and Gruntal. But I took my $75 and found a way to make it happen. What could I do? I needed hosting .. I made a deal with a guy. For every person that I could get to use his hosting service, I received x amount of space and y amount of bandwith free per month. I was up and running. I needed graphics .. I traded banner space for graphics. And on and on .. So you really can get up and going really fast with very little capital. You can trade just about anything including labor to get what you want. Another viewpoint -- preserve your capital for maximum investment. Last week we needed some pics and were quoted price x. We asked if we could pay half that amount. Why would the seller agree? We made our point .. we're a company that is growing at a prodigious rate. I would rather use the capital to increase our growth rate and be able to order MORE pics from the same vendor in a quicker amount of time. It's a win-win situation. Now - almost anyone will cut you a better price on something .. next time you lease some server space somewhere see if they'll cut you a deal on set up price. No? How about breaking up the payments over 3 or 6 months? More investment capital now = faster growth rate. but there is an unstated assumption in asking for a deal .. your intent to do continuing business with that entity. Sure, you get a "bulk deal" if you order a ton of pics from a content distributor - but why? Cuz you're a player .. they're HELPING you grow faster so you will in turn, return the favor later with continued business. Think of it as an interest free loan. And don't forget to repay your loans. 7. Integrity - You ARE your reputation. The nature of this business attracts a lot of cheaters. They attempt to make quick money by cheating top 50's, using other people's content, cheating sponsors, trading passwords, and now, stealing domain names. I have not yet seen a reformed cheater. When we had a policy of letting cheaters back into our programs after they appeared to straighten out, they always went back to cheating. Sure, on the one hand, criminal activity takes a bit of cleverness, but it takes a lot more intelligence to run a succesful honest programs than it does to cheat. Webfather has spoken a few times over the past few years about trying to make as much money per minute as you can - I think this is one of the more brilliant and fundamental ideas we have seen posted here, and it is a model I follow. Consistent income. This model allows a continually growing source of income for expansion and future investment. As a cheater, this is not a possibility, you make your money in little quick bursts but keep getting terminated from programs. In the retail business, they keep "Beat Last Year" books. This week's income should beat last year's income for the same week. All weeks are not created equal. X-mas week will have a different income potential than the week after it. Our business is a little different. We should have "Beat Last Week" books. Keep a spreadsheet with all your income data in it on a day to day basis. $x from sponsor 1, $y from sponsor 2, $z from a new source of income. Can you increase your income every week? This method has many times allowed me to make a small change and have huge increases in income. A year ago February I switched primary sponsors and had a 100% jump in income because for some reason my income from sponsorone wasn't keeping up linearly with the growth of my traffic. But back to the main point ... The road to riches is through honesty. This is NOT a question of morality, it is a matter of fundamental business sense. There are WAY too many people here willing to share their wisdom with someone that works hard and has something to offer. 8. Adaptation This business changes fast. In 3 short years I have seen many many site models come and go. Link sites, link exchanges, Top 50's, circle jerks, pic posts, thumbposts, straight sites, niche sites, search engine spams, and on and on. While some things remain relatively constant .. such as the popularity of link sites .. other things change .. such as click through percentage and signup rates. When I first started for example, click through rates were much higher for a site's top banner and sign up ratios were MUCH better. When the top 50/ circle jerk craze many of the "old timers" (pre-1996 webmasters) refused to participate for a variety of reasons one of which was that they believed the CJ industry was short lived. Well, a lot of us "circle jerkers" agreed with that in both private conversations and in public but our point was this: We could take advantage of the then very easy CJ money and use the capital for further investments and expansion capital. The humorous part to me was that the industry could be ROUGHLY divided by the length of time they had been in the industry. The players that had been around a little while and the very new players of which it was the very new players that seemed to do all the circle jerk innovating. Now I understand that some didn't participate because of religious reasons .. errr .. moral reasons .. don't jerk off the customer! But I also feel some of it was a dinosaurian approach. The common argument of the day was "Circle jerk traffic is worthless." I can tell you for a fact that it wasn't worthless .. at first it was difficult to achieve the same signup ratios as non-CJ sites but in time, we were able to get the same ratios. Millions of dollars were made and "empires" started. Some of the major players are HUGE but somewhat silent players now .. preferring to work on their latest marvels in semi-obscurity rather than risk being copied from. I was one of the first big top 50 players to leave that industry and here is what I reasoned. After a while it seemed that all there were was top 50's .. so I started developing "quality" sites because I figured it would almost surprise the surfer to actually find pics. So I built a series of cut and paste little 10 pic sites and then a little later 20 pic sites. The surfers ate them up, sending me a pile of thank you emails every day. It was the perfect move at the perfect time. One of those sites, The Fuckshop, immediately became 25% of my income back then. The overall point? Pay very careful attention and realize that the things being espoused in public are not necessarily true. When you see that, say, 8 of the top 10 sites on WSS or Sextracker are CJ sites .. something is up, even if the majority of the industry is saying they can't make money with it. Someone is. Within each model are mini-models. People treat the search engines in different ways, for example. There are many ways to succesfully profit from SE's. They change unbelievably fast. We have about 5 different programs designed inhouse just to monitor our positioning, etc in SE's. Every day someone does a series of checks to see what small changes might have occured. I personally have the results for the top 10 searches for a search term memorized so that I can monitor in a very crude way what might have changed since yesterday. There is no time to beat an old site model to death .. or to fall behind. If your assessment of how things work is just a little off .. you are probably missing a huge chunk of the profits you could be making. Just as site models come and go so is what's popular? Though teen sites are still popular there was a TEEN SITE CRAZE for a while. And recently, it seems as if incest sites have heated up. Transvestite stuff became very popular a few months ago. And something new will be popular very soon I'm sure .. something that was just in the shadows all this time. One can make a LOT of money just by following the trends. There are those that follow (more or less) "timeless" models and are quite successful at it. But there is a much larger group of people, a lot of small time operators for example, that could get their initial investment capital for bigger profits just by keeping a very close watch on what's popular and profiting from it while they can. A final note and I think this is the most important point of all today: Whan I graduated from college I asked myself "where is the easiest money? Where can I make the quickest profits? The answer was: The internet. And then further: adult sites. Very low chance of failure .. good chance of huge success. If someone were starting their first site today and asked "What kind of site should I start?" I would answer with the same criteria: where is the easiest money? Where can I make the quickest profits? Where is the lowest chance of failure? What's popular? think Risk / reward ratio. 9. Stealth vs. Net Fame A topic that is a constant consideration to us is how visible of a presence we want in the industry. When I first started in this business, I wanted very high visibility. I ran a link site, posted at Ynot a lot, went to conferences, and called people I didn't know. The reason I wanted this high visibility is that I wanted to establish a large network of business associates. I did .. and I still reap benefits from that decision today. In time, our operation has become more and more secret and now, there are very few people that even know what sites we run. There are no public counters on them and we can grow them as large as we want while keeping the effectiveness of our best ideas to ourselves and away from our competition. Over the past 6 months we have done a considerable amount of research on "what's going on out there?" What we have found is that there are some brilliant, very big players in this industry that have almost no public presence at all. Only through the shear number of hours we spend on research have we found them. They go through great lengths to hide all their domains registrations, never post their url's and often use ficticious information if they post at any of the adult webmaster boards. They do this, almost positively, not because they wish to remain anonymous, but because they have knowledge to hide. In any industry there are corporate secrets .. not the dirty secrets like "JIB Co. had an orgy and 37 employees were brought up on charges of public lewdness" but rather those that would harm the holder of the secret through increased competition. And every company has very careful decisions to make in this regard. Among our network of close business associates we must choose which of our new ideas and technologies are tradeable. There are too many great ideas out there for one lone organization to find and as a result we trade. With whom? With those we know that our secrets are safe of course. Too often over the past 3 years I have shared an idea and watched it proliferate through the entire adult industry almost instantly thereafter. But with a few select individuals, I notice their activity in that particular area, but it never proliferates. There are a few individuals and companies in the business that spend a considerable amount of time researching what others are doing out there. It is many of the individuals that run these companies that I have been fortunate enough to have as associates. There are those that run highly visible programs that must have an opposite approach to the stealth one. JoeE, RB, Fantasyman, Serge, et al have highly visible public presences. It is in their best interest to do so. They have their company secrets too of course, but for the most part -- everyone knows them and their companies and it is in their best interest that this is true. We too are now shifting to a position of higher visibility as we focus more on webmaster programs but we will of course, still run our more stealth-like operations. If anyone were just starting out today with little or no business background this is the one issue I would say to make VERY careful decisions on. Remember - "You can observe a lot just by watchin'" - Yogi Berra 10. Know your statistics One of my favorite tools is the Poisson Distribution. A few years ago I joined a pay program that had this rule: If you don't have a signup within 2000 hits sent, you will be kicked out of the program. Needless to say, I missed the mark. Is the 2000 hits, 0 signups rule a good one? The Poisson distribution is used to calculate probabilities when the time between events is distibuted exponentially and the events are independent. Paysite signups are a good example of this. The formula for calculating probabilities with the Poisson distribution is for the value x is: Probability = e^-m * m ^x / x! where m is the average value of x. I'll explain : e^ -m means .. e raised to the -m power. To get e^-2 for example. Take a scientific calculator and press -2. Then hit the e^x button. You should get .135 .... ! = multiply by all integers down to 1 .. so 3! = 3*2*1 and 4! = 4*3*2*1 , one exception: 0! = 1 So, if you normally get 2 signups in 1000 hits, what are the odds that you will get exactly 0 signups in 1000, 1 signup in 1000, and 2 signups in 1000? this is the case where m=1 and x = 0, 1, and 2. For x=0; P = e^-1 * 1 ^0/ 0! = .37 For x=1; P= e^-1 * 1 ^1/1! = .37 For x=2; P = e^-1 * 1^2/ 2! = .18 meaning .. There is a 37% chance of obtaining 0 signups, a 37% chance of obtaining 1 signup, and a 18% chance of obtaining 2 signups. That totals 92% so there is an 8% chance of getting better than 2 signups in that time period. You can use this for all sorts of possibilities. A few shortcuts and points .. if you expect 1 signup in any amount of hits, the odds that you'll get exactly 1 signup in that amount of hits is 37% and the odds that you'll get exactly 0 is 37%. Also .. since 0! =1 and anything to the 0 is 1 .. if x = 0 the formula simplifies to P(x=0) is just e^-m so you can easily calculate the odds of obtaining exactly 0 signups for any signup ratio. Here are some values of e^-m:
Back to my original question, say the average signup ratio for the site in question was 1 in 500. That would mean I expected to get 4 signups in 2000 hits. So the odds of getting 0 in 2000 purely by chance (bad luck) is e^-4 or .02. 2%. You'll have to decide for yourself whether this is reasonably low or not. How much difference would it have made to wait until 3000 hits? You would then expect 6 signups and since e^-6 = .002 there is about a 1 in 400 chance this was purely by chance. Comparing the two, you'll see that you will be about 10 times more certain that you haven't thrown someone out of your program that would have actually been productive by a 1 in 3000 policy than a 1 in 2000 policy. Statistics are the KEY in this business. An example of what I am talking about; learn how many hits you need before something becomes statistically relevant. Etc, etc. It seems there is more negativity on the boards over the past few weeks for some reason. People posting that there isn't any money to be made here and that everyone is wasting their time. I assure anyone just starting out that there are riches to be made here, that it is a truly fun industry to be involved in, and that some of the most interesting, unique, professional, and brilliant people are involved in this industry. If you're just getting started out and you're struggling, maybe that big idea of yours isn't working. Take the time to seriously assess whether your first idea is a mistake and maybe try another. This IS an excellent business if you get it right. 11. What to do wit' yo money! A lot of first year businesses fail, especially in certain sectors such as the restaurant business. We are fortunate enough to be in a business with such low start up costs and such high possible returns. The risk/reward ratio for this business is very low. Still, there are pitfalls. One of the main reasons any business fails is lack of reinvestment. I knew a guy here in town that ran a bar with a profit of $2000 a month before he took his salary. He then took a salary of $2000 a month. He left himself no money for growth, and furthermore no money for keeping up with his competition. About a year ago he closed his doors for good. If you're running an adult internet business, you can achieve gaudy monthly returns. Serge has been quotes as saying that his monthly revenue had increased 9000% from his first to his last Ynot post. We, Platinum Net, are achieving 50-100% growth per month and there are signs over the past few weeks that we might even be heading towards faster growth than even that. If you run a business with such fast growth, the best place to invest your money is with yourself. Keep your salary as low as you possibly can and ask yourself this question: with $x of reinvestment capital coming to me next month, what can I do with it that will best increase the amount of reinvestment capital I will be receiving in 2 months? It's one of the most important and fundamental business decisions one makes : how does one best reapportion their investment capital? 12. Inherent Risks There is, in game theory, a concept called "expected return" or "expected value."weighing all possible outcomes against their associated probabilities and summing them. In a simple example, the odds of winning New York's "Lotto 54" are about 1 in $13 million. If the jackpot is $6.5 million, your expected return is (1/13)*6.5 = .50 = 50 cents. If it costs one dollar to play the lotto, you can expect to lose $1-.50=.50 .. not a good play according to game theory. If you wait until the lottery is say, $26 million then your expected return is (1/13)*26 = $2 .. a profit! An excellent return. But wait! Now you have to scale this by the expected number of winners because if 2 people win, they SHARE the prize. This means you'll have to know the expected number of players at various jackpot levels. (I haven't taken the time to do this but I bet you'd learn a lot about psychology by doing so). From personal experience, once the lotto gets to about $50 million the line goes out the 7-11 and around the corner. You can combine factors also: say my web site will increase in traffic by 300 hits if factor A, but it will decrease in traffic by 1000 hits if traffic factor B. The odds of factor A are 8 in 10. The odds of factor B are 2 in 10. Do I expose my site to these factors? Well, the expected return is: 300*(8/10) + -1000*(2/10) = 240 - 200 = 40 hits .. a positive result. According to the associated game theory you would expose yourself to the factors. With your business, there are of course deeper considerations, maybe you cannot afford a 1000 hit a day loss to your website at any cost. There is a field of psychology called "rational decision theory" and there are some very interesting results one of which is that people make very poor risk/reward decisions as judged by the above criteria. In our field, I do not see much risk inherent in the economics of the business itself, not when compared to the legal risks we face, at any rate. In the United States, the guidelines for determining obscenity were set in the US Supreme Court's decisions in Miller v. California (1973), Smith v. United States (1977), and Pope v. Illinois (1987). "Whether the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would find that the work, take as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion);" AND "Whether the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would find that the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct (i.e.: ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated; masturbation; excretory functions; lewd exhibition of the genitals; or sado-masochistic sexual abuse); " AND "Whether a reasonable person would find that the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.;" It is number 3 that scares me .. not because of whether a website lacks "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" which is what most proponents of obscenity laws worry about,but because I don't know what a "reasonable person" is but I know I don't want to be judged by one. The Clinton administration has been blamed by anti-porn activists for being too soft on porn. During his administration, the number of federally tried violations of obscenity laws has decreased from 42 in 1992, to 32 in '93, 27 in '94, 21 in '95, 19 in '96, and 6 in '97. Politics is certainly one of the most difficult human endeavors to analyze and predict and I will not even try. But it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the next administration will return to more historical levels of prosecutions. What is still very unclear is what precedents will be set regarding prosecution of website administrators. In this industry we are certainly at a historical crossroads. It is my guess that obscenity prosecutions will continue at a scattered pace : a few here and a few there .. mostly political in nature. I do not in any way pretend to be an expert on this subject and I know that Lee Noga and Webfather are predicting a great increase in yearly prosecutions. But the differences in our predictions are immaterial. I stand firmly by Lee and Webfather in their analysis that the government is a very real threat to YOUR business and that you should not be naive in thinking it could not happen to you. For pretty close to no reason at all, you can be thrown in jail and prosecuted facing a further prison sentence, seizure of your assets, closing down of your operation, and a frozen bank account. I know many in the industry that have been around long enough that keep a considerable amount of cash handy in the event their assets are frozen. I highly recommend this. Maybe you'll win the court case (maybe not) but it is very difficult to survive with no money, your business frozen, server turned off, and so on. So, even though historically the odds of beiong prosecuted under obscenity laws have been low for any individual in particular I believe that when tied in with the risk/reward analysis given by expected return it must be taken very seriously. Because (1/2)*$200,000 - (1/10,000)*$JAIL is, in my opinion, not a winning equation no matter how small the factor. It is the same sort of thing as AIDS. The odds of contracting AIDS from having sex with one random partner are remotely small .. but you're still smart enough to use protection. You will notice that those that post here warning of the risks of prosecution, notably Lee and Webfather, are still in this business. They are not recommending that you leave it. Lee and Webfather are, to my knowledge, two of the most careful in this business at reducing their risk of prosecution but they both very well know that tomorrow they might be in jail. This risk is constantly brought up in my companies' meetings and we have made business decisions based on this risk, there are endeavors that we don't enter into even though from a purely business perspective they are more cost effective than the alternatives. 13. The Big Bang About a year ago, I disappeared from these boards until just recently. Basically what happened is that I burned out. Not completely, but I went most of the year hardly working and maintaining almost the same income level from February to November. In the previous two years, I had worked 7 days a week - almost all day and all night. Since Jesse and I formed Platinum Net in November I have approached things a little differently. We work 9-5 Monday - Friday with a few exceptions. I may do some work outside of the office but I keep it light. In that short period of time, we have made more progress than I did in the entire two and a half years previously. Success in this business seems to increase better than linearly with brainpower. What I mean by this is: one head is one head, but two heads are more like three heads. A partner isn't for everyone but it was the perfect move for ME. The rate at which one's ideas are transformed and developed is so much faster than when one has to develop them oneself. I would also like to point out something else I consider to be very important. Don't forget about your family and friends. If you have a boyfriend/girlfriend or wife/husband don't get caught up in the "I'm working hard for us, baby" syndrome. I have read many interviews with very successful people and when asked what they regret most about their lives if anything, they almost always reply: "I wish I had spent more time with my spouse." There are those that read this today that will consider this element about maintaining your personal life to be frivolous but I guarantee you there are many reading today that know exactly what I am talking about through personal experience. Burnout and stress are real problems that can affect you in surprising ways. I have seen people hospitalized because of stress induced problems. Try and clear your head of business for a while and have a great time every night and weekend. On the flip side, while you are working, I think it is imperative that this is fun for you. Jesse and I have had this discussion for years and we both agree - most anything in our life we do - we don't consider to be "work." This to us is NOT WORK. It is a game. It is entertainment. It is fun. I NEVER wake up and say "I don't want to go to work today." If I start to not like something I do something else. I have seen people come into this business and then leave it for "religious reasons." Don't get completely caught up in the money. If you are always at odds with your religious/philosophical/moral beliefs, chances are you are going to have a very unpleasant life. I strive for complete consistency between my beliefs and my actions and I am an exceptionally happy person because of it. Know thyself. Understand your own motivations, desires, what makes you happy. What stresses you, what kind of people do you like to hang out with, are you who you want to be? Each of these things are important in both your personal and business life and even if you don't act on them today, remember them later in the event you start going through any of the things I discussed here today. I want to leave today's post with two things that are quite a bit more practical. 1. One of the best books that I have ever read: Influence. The Psycohlogy of Persuasion. by Cialdini. Basically ... "elements of persuasion .. case studies, and so forth in a very readable format. You might read the whole book in a night. I owe many things in my life to this book .. including part of my college GPA. I have read it in its entirety 5 times in the past 10 years. 2. Automate redundant tasks. To quote GP, "learn perl .. automate." Anything you are doing over and over again on a daily basis, either program yourself or hire someone else to do it. We have spent 100's of hours in automating tasks but it will save us 10's of thousands of man-hours this year freeing us up to explore new ideas. Our whole strategy so far has been this. Think .. idea .. expand idea .. automate it .. think .. idea .. expand idea .. automate it. We feel this is much better than: Think .. idea .. expand idea .. work .. work .. work .. work .. work .. work .. work .. work. Expand, expand, expand. ;) Outsourcing Probably anything that you think of can and has been contracted out including wartime soldiers (mercenaries). One alternative to hiring an employee to perform a certain task is to contract the job out. It might be something as small as paying a cleaning service that would save you or one of your employees a considerable amount of time. You can outsource graphics design, programming, system administrator, payroll, bookkeeping, and almost anything else you can think of. You can hire girls to go to shows wearing your company shirts and saying that they work for you. The core idea is that you need to focus on what makes you money and grows your company rather than on peripheral issues. The decision to outsource something can include many factors. We would never outsource programming, for example, as it would involve a security risk - allowing someone access to our servers, proprietary programs, and ideas. If one is on a tight budget, having everyone chip in every once in a while to clean the office might be a better idea than having a cleaning service come in. Currently, we have about 1000 square feet of office space and clean the office ourselves. In two weeks we move to a 3000 square foot office and will undoubtebly pay a cleaning service at that point. I know one webmaster that outsources all is graphics work and always to the same guy. Someone who is both reliable and does excellent work. He prefers this to the alternative of having a full time graphics artist which would include not only aying him or her a constant year-long salary but having to create enough projects to keep a graphics artist busy 2000 hours a year - a problem in and of itself. If you do have a programming job there are probably temporary services in your area where you can hire someone on a day to day basis and might even find someone you'd like to hire on a full time basis. Like I said, we ourselves would never do it but maybe security isn't such an issue with you. You might also hire a consultant to see how you can streamline your business' operation or a phase of your business operation. If you run a webmaster program and are cutting the checks yourself I know it can be quite a hassle. There was one program that ran into a lot of problems doing this - they had so many webmasters in their program so quickly that they were not able to keep up and the checks kept getting sent out late. You can call ADP payroll services and they will send all your webmaster checks out for you for (I think it's) about $1.50 a check. Call them and they will send a very friendly rep out to you and set it all up. You can fax them the info once a week or 2 weeks or whatever your pay period is. Two more important things to consider outsourcing: doing your taxes and getting legal advice. Definitely pay an accountant to do your taxes .. and definitely speak with a lawyer about laws in your local area. I know one webmaster that after speaking to a local attorney, found out the attorney had a few friends in the DA office that would probably pull a few strings if it came down to it. My advice on taxes yesterday was not meant for one to file them onesself but rather to point out the things you should be aware of if filing taxes for the first time. I noticed other webmasters responding with advice but also with a very cautious tone. The bottom line is see an accountant and call one now if you haven't already.
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