Creating content for the web

Most of the time I find myself doing things which were not planned or thought of in advance and that do not create general value for me or others.

As one whose main occupation is the creation process – I must define and understand the word “value” and it’s meaning to me, what gets left by me to this world – what is my creation?

I have found that there are 3 main patterns or levels of creating value which represents the overall usefulness of my creations to either my clients or to me – but more importantly – my clients.

The first level -

Value extraction:

In this level you mainly focus on procedures being made within your projects to create better resource usage on your systems or procedures.

This might involve creating computer algorithms that use less of the resources or even fire unskilful employees to reduce the company’s spend.

The second level -

Value copying / duplicating:

You have visited a competitor and noticed he has introduces a new feature or a service you do not offer, you then recreate and copy it to your company – this is value duplication.

The third level -

Value creation:

You focus on your clients requests and demands and create new features or services based on your clients. The value originated in this process is usually original.

Each level of value creation mentioned above creates value for your company or service but it has been shown that the amount of value created by the third level is the most useful and because it has direct client orientation – it will help you to disconnect from the never ending competition and create new features your competitors haven’t even started thinking of.

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creativity & ideas

Creativity and Ideas

sometimes we have an idea, in most cases we either forget it or write it on some piece of paper and then forget where we put it.
It’s a good practice to have a system for writing down your ideas and not loosing these peaks of creativity, everyone has ideas sometimes no matter how old you are or how creative you find yourself. I know of people who are buried under the same work for over 20 years and still have great ideas.

Manifesting an idea

While many of  our ideas get lost,  some do become a reality – in a times of crises we might find our selves with more free time and even have time to act on ideas we never thought we’ll have time to do. Making room and time for trying to make an idea to a reality is not that hard when you are truly organized and can define a time frame in which you are free to act upon your thoughts.

Ideas on the Internet

Because these days we’re spending a lot of time on the web, many ideas might be related to a website currently unavailable and you just thought of, or an Internet service you think you can really use – but it doesn’t exist.
these cases are truly happening nowadays with many web surfers who build new Internet solutions and services everyday – Even though existing for over 10 years the Internet has been the main item in a new age, the information age. It’s most likely that because everything is still new, your idea has yet to be published on the Internet, or has yet to be published on the Internet your way.

Building projects on the Internet

As a web application developer myself, there are  four main paths to creating a solution (or a web application / site) on the Internet:

1. Downloading a CMS, or a pre written script available for download freely – these includes free blog  systems based on word press, drupal, php-nuke and more.
2. Paying for a complete commercial CMS or web site building system in which the source is not freely available and you might even pay enough to make the seller end it’s sales of the specified code / system.
3. Outsourcing and having a complete human written solution / web application to yourself – there are many forums and websites on this issue on the net, you can go there and find that many people are outsourcing huge projects at cost of well over 10 thousand dollars.
4. Build it yourself – start from scratch, learn the basics and start day by day until you get all things done your way.

Choosing your way

Well,  start by looking at the four item list above and think (while knowing yourself best) what is the path in which you find yourself more attracted to, I personally chose the forth way for my projects even though I chose the first one for this blog. having to build your own project by yourself might take a lot of time, and if your not in the mood for creation, commitment and development work – you might not find yourself choosing this path.

Thanks for reading, tune in for more information about these paths in future posts.

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Cracked Wall

Getting informed about risks :

  (The cracked wall)

You might have built a steady and growing business now, maybe you’ve reached the break even point or maybe you are generating a revenue of over 30,000 dollars per month – and you surely have some free time for your self.
After being in some positions in my life when a hard work pays off and you can enjoy your earned free time – I found my self eventually not aware to some of the risks that might arise if too much of that free time is not used to manage business risks.

Most of the times this happens because we want to award ourselves for succeeding and accomplishing the goals which were set and after we accomplish them, we usually forget to set the necessary conditions for our work to last.

I call this “the cracked wall” phenomenon, once building such a wall – without maintenance, it will eventually break. Some walls do last thousands of years, some of these solid walls are still standing. You want your solutions and business to be as strong as these walls, to do that you must be aware of the risks that might crack your wall – or end your business.

Easy steps to accomplish this mission :

1. List them – Try all ends of your business as a customer and think of all the possible ways one can stop your success, now put your thoughts on a list, ask other people for known risks they might think of regarding your business.

2. Prioritize – Grant a score from 1 to 3 to each risk, 3 being the biggest threat to your success.

3. Think of solutions – Go over the items you have listed from the most risky to the least and write possible solutions as if this risk has just happened, try thinking about it and imaging as if this is the current situation and you need to deal with it. after you’ll gather lists of solutions to each of the risks you’ll have a complete risk management solution you can use, if any risk does ever come true in the future.

Risk Preventing Tools :

I really like using a spreadsheet applications for such tasks as listing risks – preferably open office, but any app will do.

The importance of risk management :

In a case when a  high profile risk becomes real, you’ll most of the time become greatly stressed and won’t be able to think about the best solution to beat that risk in a short time, getting the chance to deal and catalog these risks before they happen can greatly help you prepare for any situation and you can also share these risks with other people from the same line of work and maybe find what’s their solutions to these cases.

Thats about  it, risk management can be the most important stone in your business wall.

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Empty blog pages?

Hi,

 

I know some people just want to boost the page count of their websites just to get listed more on google or other search engines.

This has become a more widespread action where in fact as a company which lists and promotes over 10000 websites on the web, on many cases we get a long human description and title for a really empty page.

My tip is, whenever creating a  new page – try to take the visitors point of view, if your page title and description  says you are going giving information on how to purchase an item – then give the information to the user, or the bounce rate of your sites will be more than 60% (bounce rate means that people are getting to your page – but leaving either fast or without entering any other pages or making new requests to the server – the definition depends on your analytics software)

Usually you’ll want to keep up your bounce rate bellow 40%, if your site needs revenue you might want to try out new layouts with extra banners, but keep an eye on the bounce rate in a daily basis (this can be done in a program such as google analytics – which is totally free to use and install).

Creating multiple and tons of empty pages for the sole purpose of spreading keywords and different URLs through the web – will get you into even more trouble. Lately I have seen after tracking a big site which probably out of a development bugs created about 500 pages for every 1 real page the administrator composed that this site was actually thrown out of the biggest search engine in the world in a metter of weeks, after the site has more than a million pages listed in search engines.

After checking out with the admin who tried to do modifications to the site, it seems like it was unfixable and basically made the site  loose most of it’s search traffic.

What can you do?

Writing  content isn’t that hard, try writing about the things you like doing or spending you time on. For me  web development, games and movies are the things I really like to write about.

Test your self and for 10 days write about a different topic each day – then choose the topic which felt the most natural to write about and continue and elaborate on that.

I hate writing, I tried everything

If you really tried writing for 10 days and it didn’t feel like something you could keep on doing, I’d suggest to hire someone. There are many content writers out there who’ll be glad to take some cents from you for a couple of HTML / TXT pages and topics you tell them to write about.

DONT CHOOSE THIS SOLUTION UNLESS YOU FIGURE OUT THE BUSINESS MODEL FIRST.

I have wrote this sentence in all caps, since this is the main reason why many businesses fail – money can be thrown away really fast in these areas. for example if you hire someone and you have a daily 3-5 articles to write task, you might be paying a large sum of money to that company at the end of the month, when thinking business oriented – you’ll probably won’t cash out the revenue at that time – the money will either be payed to you from other companies or credit companies at +30 / + 15 rates.

Always figure out the numbers and the math behind the business actions you take – before getting into such a service, I have personally seen many people sell or  expire their domain because they couldn’t even afford the domain renew due to lack of cash flow.

Have a great weekend,