Entrepreneur | Internet Marketing Blog

How much are your users worth?

As anyone who runs a website knows, your userbase constitutes one of your most important assets.

Putting a "value" on "users" and keeping track of this value makes a lot of sense, even if you're not looking to sell your website. Yet putting a value on users can often be difficult.

by Patrick Oak 24 November 2008 12:05pm 5 comments

Site review: Fitnessfootwear.com

Fitness Footwear was launched by Luke Barlow in June 2005 as a way of selling Chung Shi sports shoes, which couldn't be found anywhere else in the UK.

Fitness Footwear homepage

Four years on, the site is doing well, and Luke now has a team of ten, and the business is currently outgrowing its warehouse in Hertfordshire, and has even launched a sister site, onshoes.com.

Having started as a family business, the website has been created on a limited budget: Luke has spent around £100k on the site since launch. So how does it shape up?

by Graham Charlton 21 November 2008 12:00pm 0 comments

The information overload threat and opportunity

According to a study recently released by Yahoo, UK internet users are suffering from information overload.

As reported by the Association of Online Publishers UK, the study, which is entitled "Return on Attention," found that 70% of users "admitted to spending hours sifting through unwanted or irrelevant information."

by Drama 2.0 21 November 2008 08:30am 4 comments

VCs taking in more than they're producing

The notion that the business of venture capital is broken is one that I've discussed multiple times before.

In short, I (and many others) have observed a major problem with venture capital in recent times - too many VCs with too much money chasing too few "good" opportunities.

by Drama 2.0 19 November 2008 10:00am 0 comments

Where's the best place to launch your product?

According to a study published recently by Marketing Science, the country where you launch your product has a measurable impact on its uptake.

As AdAge reports, the study, entitled "Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth or Vanishing Differences," analyzed data from 31 countries, including developing countries and ranked the countries based on how long it usually took for 16 consumer products to "take off" over the past 50 years.

by Drama 2.0 04 November 2008 08:45am 0 comments

Index Ventures' Ben Holmes on the Playfish deal

Playfish this week announced a whopping $17m funding round, led by internet-focused VCs Accel Partners and Index Ventures.

In doing so, the London-based developer of games for social networks will have provided encouragement for other startups seeking funding. While this deal has been in the pipeline for a few months it proves that the VCs aren’t entirely hunkering down.

by Chris Lake 30 October 2008 09:30am 0 comments

Charging for services back in vogue

As the woes of the global economy have forced entrepreneurs and investors who had previously been fans of the "everything should be free" ad-based business model to reconsider their beliefs, there seems to be a growing infatuation with paid services again.

by Drama 2.0 29 October 2008 09:15am 3 comments

Gary Vaynerchuk on video, social media and Twitter

Gary Vaynerchuk is director of operations at Wine Library, a wine retailer, and is perhaps more widely known in internet marketing circles for his videos, where he primarily delivers insights into topics related to social media.

He is also the face behind Wine Library TV, the video-based wine tasting blog that has done much to help transform the Wine Library business into a $50m-a-year retailer, from $4m six years ago.

Gary is a blast...

by Chris Lake 28 October 2008 13:14pm 1 comment

PR tries to sell 'afterthebailout.com' on eBay for $1m

Kudos to Annie Jennings for trying, but something tells me that she’s not going to sell the domain name ‘AfterTheBailout.com’ for more than a million bucks.

Annie, who runs a New Jersey-based PR firm, has fired over two jaw-dropping press releases informing me that the "hottest domain name AfterTheBailout.com is on sale at eBay", with the minimum bid set to a staggering $1m.

Number of bids to date? Zero.

by Chris Lake 20 October 2008 12:40pm 2 comments

Can Twitter make money?

Even as a hardened skeptic of the microblogging service Twitter, I cannot deny that it has built up a passionate if not mainstream userbase.

Putting aside the reasons why I personally think Twitter is a waste of time, the real problem for the site is that it doesn't yet have a business model.

by Drama 2.0 20 October 2008 09:15am 8 comments