We’ve been slaving over this for months - but we finally finished the category work on iBegin Source.

I’ll admit (for current and future clients) - we screwed up a bit. While the ‘business listing’ <---> ‘category’ relationship was accurate, the actual category names were slightly off. A common issue was sometimes we had a category end with ‘(Manufacturers)’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturers’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturing’. All three were the same, but the lack of normalization was an issue we made a mistake on.

It has taken a while, but it is finally ready for consumption. I’ll be sending out a mass-email tomorrow, but for current (and future) clients, the important links:

Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

This is of course the start. While the databases are primed to support both the old and new category format simultaneously, we will have to modify the system to properly accomodate and generate files for each. And then we have to start selling the Canadian data. And work on super-categories. And sell super-categories. And re-design iBegin Source homepage. And move the listings to www.ibegin.com [so that source.ibegin.com = info on business data, and www.ibegin.com = actual listings]. All while continually improving our data (normalizations, franchise-lists, franchise info, listings from professional organizations and associations, etc).

Fun

I thought I would mention it because I’ve mentioned it before (in regards to targeting). Plus it fits in with my latest post.

The one thing that burns super-bright in my head - liquidity. Having cash on hand is just plain useful. You could have a deal with massive company X and giant company Y, but without the liquidity to make it happen, what is the use?

The other thing that I think a lot about is opportunity cost. If I have a site that makes me $100 a month - and I sell it for $3000 - which is the better deal? Having a steady (yet extremely unspectacular) source of money, or having the cash today (which could, over those 30 months, make you a lot more).

The past month was the best month for this site. It did 1399 pageviews, it generated $205.41 dollars (yep a CPM of $146.82), and I sold it for a nice 31x monthly at $6500.

Both of us are happy. The buyer is building up a collection of content-websites (he has bought about two-dozen from us already). I’m pushing that money back into our other larger projects (which should generate a lot more money within those 31 months).

The site has been steady from day one - Google sends it a nice chunk of traffic. But there is no way to guarantee that traffic won’t go down (or in last month’s case - go up). So it still is a calculated risk on behalf of my buyer - and I decided I would rather have the liquidity today and ‘invest’ in it than waiting for its slow return.

So something to think about - you may have sites generating revenue, but you might be better off selling them and creating something else. The other lesson of course is don’t get hung up on traffic too much - $200 dollars from <1500 pageviews is nothing to sneeze at.

b Feed Me, Celebrific, Blogging Pro, Forever Geek, and Filmsy are no longer owned by Bloggy Network LLC - they are now part of Splashpress. Check out the press release.

I’ve talked about one of our strengths being our diversity - so why sell the blogs?

Quite a few reasons:

1. Blog Flux. It “holy shit this could be huge” excites me. 95,000 [approved] blogs. Alexa in the top 5k. Over 145,000 registered users. Yahoo says 4.4+ million backlinks, Google [sitemaps] says 4.8+ million backlinks. Blog Top Sites has tracked over 1.25 billion pageviews - in under a year!

   This site oozes potential. It has traffic. It has a base. It makes money. What it doesn’t have is a coherent plan to take it to the next level (10+ million backlinks, 500k+ registered users, sub-1000 Alexa). Part of the problem has been time. Our biggest blogs (being the biggest) required considerable effort and time on our end to maintain. Selling them frees us from that. At the same time, the sale provided us with …

2. Liquidity. Cash is the life blood of any business. We are self-funded. Yes Enthropia Inc itself is strongly in the black. Yes we have money that could continue to fund Bloggy Network’s growth. But I already helped fund the creation of BN. Two years in, it’s time for the company to start standing on its own. There is a reason it is its own LLC and not a subsidiary of Enthropia Inc. So the sale provides us with a good liquidity boost as we re-focus on Blog Flux.

3. Resources. Related to liquidity - Gawker and Weblogs Inc got in early, so they got all the press. Since then there have been only two blog networks really worth noting - b5 Media, and Splashpress (who bought the blogs). b5 is VC funded, and Splashpress has its own pool of money. Competing versus that is hard. You have to be realistic. We have our strengths - our fantastic web design department and Blog Flux. Few others can claim such a combo (I can’t think of a single site that competes directly with Blog Flux). So we put our full effort into our unique offerings. Best bang for the buck.

4. Personnel. No doubt about it, the people you have determine how well you do. We had a project recently fall into our lap that was just too good to pass on (it is related to local - and no detail is public yet). So one of our programmers is moving to that. Another blogger (who was the primary writer on b Feed Me, Celebrific, and Filmsy) was promoted. Michael (who wrote primarily on Apple Gazette and Forever Geek was promoted to run our city-blog network: is My Home. And since his passion was Apple, Forever Geek was the odd man out. And they wanted David [to deal with the technical issues - their weak point]. A good fit for David too - he was close to their Performancing team, and the blog he ran was Blogging Pro. All this movement created a huge headache for us - finding good capable bloggers. The simple solution was to move on.

It’s a win-win for both. Splashpress gets some high quality blogs with real loyal followings. We get to stay small and focus on what we think will yield the biggest bang for the buck.

It’s Halloween today, which means I’m busy gorging on the chocolate we are suppoused to be giving out [those Twix are so delicious].

With user accounts as hundreds of sites (I’m sure we can all attest to that) - ‘forgot password’ is a process I go through again. So - pick on Compete again - email addresses are easy to get to. If I put in my email address - you shouldn’t reset the password immediately. You should make sure it is the right user by sending a ‘click this link’ request to that email.

Simple usability stuff like this boggles my mind. I know Aaron likes Compete - time to reset his password ceaselessly

[I’m kidding, don’t actually screw with other people’s passwords. Just a dumb move by Compete]

I had also promised some stats on releasing freebie themes - that is delayed until next week (we have a decent-sized announcement tomorrow).

For those that read TechCrunch, you are obviously aware of the ugly infestation that is Crunch Base.

The idea is simple - while TechCrunch covers the news, Crunch Base is where they keep persistent profiles on each company. This profile includes investors, revenue, press releases, etc. A decent idea. But what TechCrunch decided to do was every time a company name was mentioned, it linked to the Crunch Base site (instead of directly to the company).

Now there would be a simple solution to this - every time a company was mentioned, link to it directly, and then have a ‘(profile)’ link after it. But the dirty little secret was that it was a no-go due to search engines. Most of Crunch Base’s traffic is from people searching for company names. Linking using ‘(profile)’ wouldn’t give it the linkjuice it needed. I just bought a search analysis for Crunch Base on Compete.com - and other than their own brand being #1, all of the other traffic-generating keywords were company names. Point proven.

But there was a lot of angry feedback. People were not happy. So they created a widget. While you read the blog post, you would also see information on each company. You can also minimize it so that you never have to see it again. Good idea.

The problem of course is that the underlying HTML still contains links (for search engine purposes) to Crunch Base. Not that I find anything wrong with. Except that it absolutely uglifies the RSS feed.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Add tags around the widget HTML. Then create a WP hack that makes sure none of the HTML in between appears in the RSS feed.

Voila! This way TechCrunch gives its (well-deserved) SEO juice to Crunch Base, all while sparing their RSS readers the HTML eye sore.

I had an interesting call earlier this week. When we originally launched iBegin Source, we almost blew the floor off the competition. Our entire approach was efficiency and efficacy - do it right (the first time), do it fast, and do it simple - remove barriers to save costs (especially in terms of man-power).

Imagine my surprise - one of the ‘Big Three’ was willing to offer Full US for 36 months at $2000 a month.

For another post, but the noise volume over at iBegin is definitely on the up-and-up. By making sure we are around, keeping in contact, our “presence” is starting to get felt, and it seems like the competition is responding. We have quite a few customers now who were going to go with the Big Three - but ended up with us. Price? Support? Our vision? This blog (I myself am flattered by how many compliments I’ve gotten here).

Even better is that our presence is now strong enough that we are cash-flow positive. Isn’t that a peachy thought. Which at the same time isn’t to scare our current customers - the rest of Enthropia Inc does well enough to cover any issues (plus savings). But iBegin is almost ready to stand on its own two feet.

I’m terribly excited for 2008. Not that we are interested in selling (consider me as someone who builds lifestyle companies), but we had a buyout offer in the low seven digits. By end of 2008 we should be at least in the eight digits. We have a lot of stuff to do and implement - so much in the pipeline - our small team means fast results with low overhead. First on the agenda is taking direct control over is My Home and giving it a shake (the current manager for that is … leaving … more on that very soon).

My last post was on the randomness of how a search let me to find out about other people discussing one of our companies.

I love random stories. It is truly odd how on the internet, everything is interlinked.

So - another story.

I was going through iBegin Geocoder’s stats when I noticed a forum post that kept sending us traffic. Turns out they were using us for ZIP Code latitude/longitude. Since we had recently released US Zip Code centroids for free, I registered on the forum, quoted that specific part, and said hey - since you are using iBegin already, why not just use this downloadable file. I posted in an as non-spammish way as possible.

Checked back the next day, the post was gone, and I was warned. I PMed the moderator, explaining that I was confused. He was pretty prompt, saying that a lot of first-time posters are spam, he will take a look at it.

The next day the post was restored and the moderator PMed me. As I viewed the skin design the site was using (remember, we do skins via vBSkins.com), I clicked on who had done their skin - Relivo. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only were they using our Illacrimo WP theme (interesting considering they are a ‘design’ firm), the bastards had removed the accredition link on the bottom (something we do not allow).

So I tried to contact them, but of course, their bloody contact form was/is broken. But lo and behold, they are hosted by HostGator (the owner is a friend of mine), and their domain is registered via NameCheap (whose owner I also know).

Anyway - that is where the story stands for now. I still have to get them. And I will. But it is interesting how randomness can be so tied together.

I’ll have a post soon on how we use free themes to push our brand - in the meantime, you can preview our next freebie: GossipCity.

UPDATE: Seems like word travels fast, and Relivo has quickly updated the site. If a staff member did add it, why did no one question where it came from? Anyway - things got resolved purty quickly.

So I was perusing over some stats for iBegin Source, and saw that the last person who had downloaded our data had come via ‘local business data‘

Looking in the results, I noticed a post on Webmaster World titled “Good Source For Local Business Data?

Lo and behold, it redirected to this page, which had been posted roughly 24 hours ago. And lo and behold, someone had mentioned iBegin.

This was both amazing and frightening. Amazing that not only had Google indexed it so fast, but there were now other people mentioning iBegin. But frightening too - there was no easy way for me to know iBegin had been mentioned. This was especially crucial as tennis_fan28 was slightly incorrect - it wasn’t 50k for the full US, but 40k (not that big of a deal, but accidental mis-information). It wasn’t picked up on blogs. There was no link for me to find it on referrals. BoardTracker (imo the best bulletin board search engine) missed it by a mile. The only thing that would have caught it would have been Google’s advanced search option (where you can specify the date-range of when something was first found). Unfortunately this has two problems: 1) it finds a lot of junk/redundant stuff (eg anything on the ibegin.com domain new to Google) and 2) it only works for *new* pages - a forum thread started a while ago but with a new mention of iBegin would pass through.

Anyway - what eventually happened was I posted in two separate threads where iBegin was mentioned, and the next day the threads were gone. Turned out they had been flagged for review - and I don’t blame them, it did seem very convenient. The posts were restored the next day - anyone try to crawl Superpages.com? and Good Source For Local Business Data?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I am in love with our iBegin Weather weather widget. It is a great way for us to build up deep links, build brand, all while doing something super simple and super light (the stress on the server is there - but we have enough experience with caching and what not that it loads fast and intelligently).

So I laughed really hard when I saw this: The Enterprise. That’s right - the weather is ’sponsored’ by Seafood Sam’s - way to go guys

We have over 2,500 unique sites actively using our weather widget. Google reports 20,000 backlinks (not bad for a site launched in mid-May).

The widget strategy is a great way to build up traffic. But it shouldn’t be your primary feature.

I had recently posted about how we had changed from ForumTemplates.com to vBSkins.com. One of the issues I hoped to be fixed was the domain name - banned from Google/etc, the new domain was to let us back in.

And results are already in.

Currently ranking in at #25 for ‘vbulletin skins’ and #11 for ‘vb skins’, the SE traffic is already trickling in. And Yahoo is even better - vBSkins.com sits at #9 for ‘vbulletin skins’ (with ForumTemplates.com at #8), and #3 for ‘vb skins’

The domain change has helped tremendously - no more are we generic ‘forum templates’ - you know what you are getting before you click on the domain.

And another interesting tidbit - #12 for vbulletin skins was a site called vbskinstudio.com. I saw it was parked, saw it was for sale for $75, and while I wrote this post, I purchased it. According to Yahoo, it has 38,000 backlinks. The domain will now be promptly redirected to vbskins.com, generating even more traffic to the domain, with a very minimal investment.

Not to mention vb-skins.com is also likely sending me (inadvertent) traffic.

Moral of the story? A good domain helps, and be on the look out to buy defunct sites that can send you traffic you want.