Today we have some exiting news. As of a few days ago the Net Startup Blog has joined the Delirium Propaganda blog network. With this move you can expect many new and exciting changes that will make this blog an even better dwelling for all you bloggers.

As of today a few changes have been implemented, all of which promise to entertain, inform and continue to show you the path to successful blogging. The Net Startup Blog will from now on be dedicated uniquely and exclusively to blogging and any resource that might interest or help bloggers reach their goals.

Please visit soon and remember that blogging is a learning process, you need to invest before you can profit.

Technorati Tags: blogging, delirium, propaganda, network

Content is king, whoever came up with that is a pure genius and I commend him for that a thousands times over. Google has proved this theory to the highest extent. The best tool for marketing a website, is not just any old content, it has to be unique.

I know many people will complain about not being able to write about unique topics, but that’s not what I mean by unique content. Unique content is content that isn’t featured on any other website on the Internet, no one has it at all. This means that Google will list you in search terms related to that content. The more diverse your content, the more diverse your traffic and the more targeted your content, the more targeted your traffic. It’s as simple as that.

You don’t even need to spend a penny on advertising, just pull out unique content, and wait for Google to list your site and there you have it, unique traffic.

Technorati Tags: Google, traffic, content, marketing, advertising

It has come to my attention that blogging is a rapidly growing industry on the web. You’ve got various free blog services such as blogger and Wordpress.com just to name a few which enable you to easily create an account and start blogging in seconds. Blogging is popular and this is probably because of its ease and reality factor. It’s more genuine than seeing standard text on a bog-standard website, and offers that personal touch to information. Not only has blogging excelled into a hobby, but also full-time work. You come across thousands making money off blogging, so it’s definitely worth looking into. I hope that blogging will grow into a world standard if it hasn’t already.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Business, Wordpress

Fast Company published a fairly long article in the September edition of their magazine about the 17-year old Ashley Qualls.

This girl runs a MySpace layout and graphics site called Whateverlife…
Read more here

I can’t stress how important time management is to a business, and how it spells success or failure. If you haven’t heard this already, read very carefully, as this is one of the major factors in creating and maintaining a successful business that all are related to time management.

1. Be Proactive
Those who own businesses always talk about the stresses involved in doing so. Well, one major way of drastically cutting down that amount of stress is to always be proactive in your work. Being proactive means doing the work at any given earliest stage possible - so not doing the usual job of procrastination. It’s even more important is you’re in an industry such as web design, because clients normally have strict deadline that need to be met - one way of pleasing these deadline-stricken people are to give them the result earlier than usual. If you’ve predicted a project to take 5 days, deliver it in 3, and you’ll reap the benefits of a happy, and returning customer.

2. Schedule everything
No matter how big or small of a job, you have to schedule it. Get yourself a diary (typically ones this the hours of the day listed down the left hand side) and note down all the jobs you have to do. Write the urgent ones in red, and the not so urgent in another colour - it always helps to distinguish your tasks psychologically. When I say schedule everything, I mean everything, we tend to forget even the most simplest of things.

3. Prioritize correctly
Prioritize your list of work correctly. If you have something in for a closer deadline, put it above in priority. I always see prioritizing as obsolete to my time management, as if I’m prioritizing that means I’m not doing things on time in the first place. If you need help in managing your time, and getting things straight in your head, then prioritizing is for you.

As I’ve said before, time is something that should be cherished, and taken advantage of the most is can be. Don’t waste time, be proactive, get sorted.

Technorati Tags: Business

The word ‘potential’ is always flung around so freely on the Internet - especially in regards to a website’s growth potential. It’s true in most cases, that indeed, websites have extreme potentials to grow so fast in such a small amount of time. There are sites that have become market dominaters in a matter of months - which would usually take decades for a business to do the same. This is reflective of the Internet’s rapid growth and change rates, which just seem to grow exponentially every year. New websites are popping up everywhere, and with the introduction of social networking sites, such as MySpace, millions more pages are introduced by non-professionals too. It’s a medium for all - unlike the TV, which is restricted to those who have enough money in their pockets.

The Internet is truly ‘open source’. Open to all who can access it.

Google has become so large to quickly, that it now stands as an Internet giant. Over a few years, their popularity has just risen to new heights. Starting from a humble, well coded search engine, Google has now expanded into a massive portfolio of companies and websites, including it’s own popular e-mail provider - Gmail, and it’s ad network, Adsense. It’s very suprising how Google have managed to grow so quickly; about a decade ago, Google weren’t known well at all, had only their little search engine. These are the days where AskJeeves (now known as “Ask) and AltaVista were big search engine names. Google was young, healthy, and was on the rise after.

Webmasters all over the World are now looking to take advantage of Google’s massive search numbers everyday, but their quality content written on their sites. Every time someone makes a search on Google, a site with certain factors has the top result. Although we don’t know exactly how Google’s alogrithm works, we do know some factors that affect your websites placing.

1) Keyword Density
Keyword density is the % of the searched keyword you have in your content. Google has a certain healthy range to which they find out which sites are most relavant. Although Google counts keyword density as part of their search results, this doesn’t mean you can spam the keyword in your content - Google penalizes you for that as well.

2) Keyword Relevance
Keyword relevance is probably one of the biggest factors in the way Google represents their search results. For example, if someone searches “Dog Training”, if you have a site that is called “Dog Training” and has the URL of “DogTraining.com”, and in addition to that you have good, well written articles with the keyword “Dog Training” involved, then you’re likely to list pretty high on the search engine results. This is keyword relevance, having the exactly keyword searched in your content and URL.

3) URL-Keyword Relevance
If the URL of your site contains the searched keyword (look at the example above), then you also have a very good chance of listing higher in the search engine results.

4) PageRank
Google has its own system of “PageRank” which allows people to see which sites are most important in their eyes on the Internet. Page Rank is decided by a number of factors, such as strong sites linking in to that site, and the number of links. Page Rank is scaled from 1-10, and only very rarely do you find sites in the 9-10 scale (normally massive companies).

These are just a few of the factors that help your site list higher in search results, and thus, help you bring in more traffic. Optimising your site or webpage for search engines is called SEO - Search Engine Optimisation, and is a growing field on commerce and in general.

Try a few of the points, and you should see your site listing higher in the search engines very soon.

Technorati Tags: SEO, search, engine, optimisation, webpage, search results, traffic

Blogging has become something that has taken the Internet by storm. A new, quick and easy way for people to publish and share information - something that Content Management Systems like WordPress have done brilliantly - a true milestone and congratulations to all those at WordPress!

The Internet is now full of more active and diverse information, rather than the conventional page which had the same information on it for all eternity, and blogging has made that difference. There are weblogs that update every month, every week, every day, and help the Internet to become that “dynamic network” we all want it to become. The future of information sharing at a click of a button is very near; and may already be here. I can imagine technology expanding at a very, very rapid rate. In a few years, everyone will be using touch-screen technology with everything, which is totally synchronized with every piece of technology in their household (including toaster and fridge). It’s not very far at all.

Blogging is just one example of a technology or function that has progressed so far in a virtual environment; but now that we have this rapid growth of technology and diverse machinery, who knows what’ll come next.

What do you think we’ll see in the next few years?

Recently, I’ve come across some pretty wacky and crazy blog comments on NetStartupBlog, and one of my other blogs that I own. They’re all in some strange English and seem to be reasonable comments at first until you actually look down and see all their links to weird websites (mainly porn related). It really ticks me off to see these comments trying to be pushed into innocent blogs all over the Internet.I guess these guys never give up, it is really sad.

I’ve got the feeling that blog spammers are trying new tricks in order to get their silly comments published on popular blogs all over but for the moment, it isn’t working. I haven’t visited a reputable blog and seen that it has been defiled with such a comment but I have the feeling it will happen soon.

Technorati Tags: Blogging

You always hear crazy things on the Internet. Some guy in Texas who can eat his own weight in food, or a french women who can bend her body like there’s no tomorrow. Well, none of that is nearly as crazy as when I hear people making valuations of there site, and use a silly 10x monthly revenue model in order to do so. It’s absolute stupidity. Webmasters and the like nowadays don’t even think that a site has potential to grow, or that it’s actual code and design cost a pretty penny to develop! It’s just 10x monthly revenue!

Say if I had a site that cost me $800 to develop. That’s including design, and PHP/SQL coding. Now this site had a very eye-catching and well thought out design, and a small, unique script running. The owner had put adsense up on it the other day, and at the point of sale is making around $1 a day off adsense. The site was receiving about 100 unique visitors a day.

Now, I bet you, using that case study, that a load of people would estimate the sale price at around $300. Why is that? Why, 10x monthly revenue of course! I’ve never heard a more idiotic thing in my life…seriously. It’s like saying, a house sells for 10x monthly rent!

The script and site itself cost $800 to develop, and so you have to include how good the design and script is. What is does, how it can grow etc. I would valuate it using the following:

$800 (develop costs) + $200 (profit on development) + $365 (year of revenue) + $365 (potential growth) = $1730.

That leaves the valuation at $1730. Much more than the $300 that most people would try and offer.

This silly 10x monthly revenue rampage has got to stop, or sites would be devaluing everywhere.