Every webmaster has his fair share of fans and haters, most people appeal to the fans but if you appeal to the haters you might get something like this..
After Jeremy’s article a tiny dispute erupted on his blog soon it spread across several blogs and lately i’ve been doing alot of sphinning and saw this story on how shoemoney is a “damn” hypocriteand the whole article revolved around his argument of how make money online bloggers are seos themselves and the worst of them all. Badmouthing someone like shoemoney with hardly valid points got him great traffic and a front page spot at sphinn but what most people don’t see is that the person blogging about this is a “make money online blogger” himself and is doing more bad mouthing to others then actually getting anything done and besides from that it was a good link bait technique with a fairly big price to pay.
Badmouthing people could get you some really heavy traffic if you appeal to at least 30% of the traffic but it comes at a price of making several enemies at once, It could be considered as a last resort in my opinion.
While reading all the latest from the Crunchies 2007 over at TechCrunch, I found this picture of Shoemoney living it up over at TechCrunch’s Crunchies 2007 party.
Well I guess he was living it up, they reported to have drank beer from metal bottles so I’m assuming Shoemoney had a few.
After the awards ceremonies, which was a joint venture between TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Venture Beat and GigaOm, people gathered in the Herbst Theatre including those who couldn’t get tickets to see the awards being presented. It appears that everyone was having a good time mingling amongst each other and getting to learn more about the new start-up sites.
Before the party, they gave out 20 awards with StumbleUpon getting the one for the most viral marketing site. Others to mention were facebook coming out best overall, but we all expected that one didn’t we?
See the full list of awards that were given here at TechCrunch
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and is a cognitive tool used in business to evaluate both the internal and external aspects of a business entity. SWOT analysis is used in conjunction with the Mission Statement (see here for the article on Mission Statements) The general rule is that strengths and weaknesses are internal, that is they are aspects of the existing business. Conversely opportunities and threats are external to the entity, and include the business world at large and competition. Using again my own business as an example I have developed the following strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths
Weaknesses
High level of technical writing ability
There is an upper limit to the amount of work that can be taken on
Strong reputation with existing customers
Existing Customer base is small
Good turnaround of projects
Not enough time is spent generating new contacts in the industry
As a general rule of thumb, there should be as many weaknesses as there are strengths. This is because it is natural for many of us to focus on the positive things about our businesses. Whilst it is important to focus on the positive it is equally important to focus on our weaknesses so as to develop strategies to combat them. Focusing now on the opportunities and threats
Opportunities
Threats
Constant Demand for new content
High Levels of Competition
Ease of accessing the customer base on web forums
Quality of content often sacrificed to price by consumers
Specialist Business Market increasing daily
Sourcing new work is time consuming
Again it is important to assess the threats in as much detail as one assesses the opportunities, as really knowing the limitations of the external environment will help to develop the strategies needed to maintain the competitive edge. From the use of SWOT, as well as having a good Mission statement, the business owner will be able to develop a good Balanced Scorecard, which is the focus of the next article. For more information on SWOT analysis see www.quickmba.com/strategy/swot/, a good site with much detailed information on SWOT analysis, it is also probably a good idea to look briefly at PEST analysis, which takes SWOT a step further and details on this can be found on www.marketingteacher.com/Lessons/lesson_PEST.htm , but the level of detail here is sufficient to develop our business plan.
