March 29, 2006
The Startup Process
This site has extensive information, in step by step format, about how to start a company.
Stage 1: Getting the Idea
Stage 2: Meeting Around the Kitchen Table
Stage 3: Getting the Founders' Commitments
Stage 4: Pullout from Employer
Stage 5: Creating the Business Plan
Stage 6: Filling the Management Team
Stage 7: Raising Seed Capital
Stage 8: Incorporating and Cash in the Bank
Stage 9: Finding a Home
Stage 10: Starting Up
Stage 11: Raising Secondary Rounds of Capital
Stage 12: Launching the First Product
Stage 13: Raising Working Capital
Stage 14: Initial Public Offering
March 27, 2006
GoogleCash
What’s GoogleCash?
It’s the world’s fastest instant business, really. It works like this:
1) You go to a website that pays commission when visitors
you send there buy, and you sign up for their affiliate program2) You go to Google and write AdWords ads and send
people to that site3) You get checks in the mail and your profit is the difference
between your AdWords spend and your affiliate checks. [quote from here]
Here’s a business that is simple and powerful. I’ve written previously about using affiliate programs to create an online store; well this business just eliminates your website from the picture. Essentially you have an online store without having a website.
Here’s how it normally works. You build a website, you sign up for affiliate programs and grab products that you want to “sell” [earn a commission on]. Then you go to Google AdWords and purchase ads that drive traffic to your site. These visitors click on your affiliate links and purchase the items from the parent site and you get a check.
Here’s how it works with GoogleCash: You skip the website, and sign up for affiliate programs [here are a couple affiliate networks to check out: ClickBank & Commission Junction] and choose the products to “sell”. Now you head over to AdWords and set up some ads. But when you enter the link for the ad, instead of entering your website address, you put your affiliate link back to your affiliate partner’s site.
You pay for clicks directly to their site and you get the affiliate revenue from the converted sales. Your profit is the total of your affiliate revenue minus your cost for the ads. Zero overhead to this business.
Skills required: Choosing your affiliate program, and the art of writing effective AdWords copy.
Chris Carpenter has a great eBook that will teach you the ins and outs of GoogleCashing. Also recommended is Perry Marshall’s definitive guide to AdWords. He has a 5 day free email course that will teach you the basics – I learned a lot from it.
The most impressive thing about the GoogleCash business is that there is very little work required and the processes are completely testable. You can monitor the success ratios of all your ads, expirement with various tweaks until they are performing to the max and you are generating substantial income.
A final note: Google AdWords can burn cash. I’d recommend picking up some kind of reference from someone experienced before getting started with the GoogleCash system.
March 25, 2006
Expired Domain Names : UltSearch and his 164 Million Dollar System
This story is about the closest thing to the perfect internet business that I have seen. It is the story of UltSearch and it was inspired by Jscott's posts on the Rich Dad forum.
It is the business of traffic. Traffic is king on the web and in 1998 Yun Ye realized just that. He figured out that by purchasing expired domain names [here's a book with some background on the domain name business
He would research the names that were expiring and within purchase them the minute they expired. Then he would through up one of his template sites [picture here with link to here: http://www.ultsearch.com/%5D with a ton of links on it. The hope being that the person would continue to click on his pay per click links.
The plan worked. Considering that domain names can be registered and hosted for under
$20 a year, he would only need to make 5 cents a day to break even. Now Mr. Ye scaled out the concept to include over 50,000 domains that require no back links, no promotion, no search engine optimization and most importantly no maintenance.
This business apparently pulls in 6 figures….A DAY! Last fall Yun Ye cashed in and sold his business for $164 Million.
This is my idea of a perfect business model. Many people have tried and continue to try to imitate his model but in my opinion with the level of competition out there right now it will be difficult to scale out the degree that UltSearch was able to do. But even a fraction of that would be okay with me.
Here is some more background on UltSearch and the expired domain name industry.
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