Read more about Spuxy Studios here on The Orange County Register.

Remember…..    The secret to learning as an entrepreneur is to mix equal parts of inspiration and perspiration. Hard work without a vision is futile, while a great idea without execution is similarly worthless. In these TED talks, you’ll find the inspiration you need and the know-how to get it done.

1. Seth Godin on Standing Out: What makes you so special? Seth Godin’s talk is all about why people just ignore the ordinary. In order to stand out, Godin says, you must be either bad or bizarre. Boring will not bring you success.
2. Alex Tabarrok on How Ideas Trump Crises: Economist Alex Tabarrok’s talk celebrates the practice of idea sharing. He explains that through free trade and globalization, we are now sharing more than ever to create a community that’s more healthy and prosperous than before.
3. Dean Kamen on Inventing and Giving: Get inspired by this master of invention with more than 150 patents under his belt. In this talk, Dean Kamen discusses the Segway, and takes a look at even more big ideas, including portable energy and water purification to be used in developing countries.
4. Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success: How does success happen, and why do people succeed? Richard St. John knows, and he’ll tell you in this talk. Watch the video to learn the lessons of success.
5. Tony Robbins: As an entrepreneur, your choices make a difference. You can impact the future of your business, an industry, a community. In this talk, life coach Tony Robbins examines the invisible forces that motivate your actions.
6. Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement: Do you want to make an impact? Derek Shivers can show you how. Explore this talk, and you will see how movements really get started — with the power of two.
7. Itay Talgam: Lead Like the Great Conductors: Entrepreneurs must exhibit excellent leadership and management skills. You work much like a conductor — orchestrating different parts to ensure that they all come together like they should. In this talk, Itay Talgam examines how orchestra conductors can provide entrepreneurs with crucial lessons in leadership.
8. Gary Vaynerchuk: Do What You Love: Gary Vaynerchuk insists that there are no excuses for not doing what you love. If you’re a dreamer, but not quite yet a doer, Gary’s TED talk can give you the shot in the arm you need.
9. Alexis Ohanian: How to Make a Splash in Social Media: Make social media work for your venture with the guidance of Alexis Ohanian. Using the example of a humpback whale’s Web stardom, you’ll learn how to master memes and marketing in social media.
10. Richard Branson’s Life at 30,000 Feet: Find inspiration from Richard Branson, the entrepreneur who turned a record shop into the Virgin empire. This talk examines his career, near-death experiences, and some of his motivations.

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BuzzinGames is one of my first successful websites, which was made back in 2006. BuzzinGames brought in about 300 unique visitors each day and earned a few hundred dollars a month via Google Adsene. The site was sold in 2007, and since then has shut down. I couldn’t reach the buyer, but it’s a shame to see one of my first successful websites ever go down.

Good thing Archive.org has a copy of it here. Take a look!

1. Forum Software – Choosing the right forum software can be a great time and money saver in the long run. I can testify from personal experience. It’s really a pain in the ass for you AND the members to go through a forum software switch. It screws up a lot of the permissions and makes your members reset their password (depending on the forum softwares). Right from the beginning, choose a software to stick with. I highly recommend vBulletin.
2. Post Exchanges - In my opinion, this is the easiest way to make your forum seem more active. Everyday, hundreds of webmasters are exchanging posts on forums. What does that all mean? To put it in a simple way, if someone leaves 20 posts on your forum, you leave 20 posts on their forum. When I first began my forum, I did ton of this, and received hundreds of posts. Without post exchanges, I doubt my forum would exist right now.
3. Organization - I hate unorganized forums. Forums that are hard to navigate, messy, and confusing can deter users away. Try not to make too many forum categories and sections. All they do is make the forum homepage longer and make the forum seem emptier. Unpopular/inactive forums should be merged with other larger forums.
4. Number of staff - Remove all unnecessary staff. If there is no moderation and managing needed, why are they even on the staff list? Don’t take me wrong though, staff can’t be really helpful. It’s just embarrassing if a guest lands on your forum and sees more admins and mods than active members.
5. Professionalism – Present your forum in a professional manner, with a good looking design, easy to read, good grammar, and nothing obnoxious. cuz no1 wantz to c u talk lyk dis. itz anoying lol

Well, there you go. I hope you really got something out of it. It’s sad to see forums (some with great potential and a great niche) die out really fast. I may make a part 3, depending on your feedback, so please vote.

When choosing a forum page title for your index page, it is important to assign meaning to it. Don’t use a nickname or something you think is cool. It make work if you’re a celebrity like ShoeMoney, but odds are the general web surfer isn’t going to know who you are or what monikers you go by. If you have a computer help forum, then try to keep those keywords in your index page title.

Cleaning Your Page Title

When you install vBulletin, or other forum software, they often include a ‘powered by xxx’ in your page title. By including this in the default, they are lucky enough to get a few forum owners who either don’t care or don’t know how to remove it. Having a page title that says “Dog Forum – Powered by vBulletin” is not as friendly as a page title of just “Dog Forum”. First, the extra words in your page title will take away some of the authority of your main keywords. You want all your strength going to the keywords Dog and Forum, not Powered and vBulletin. And second, it’s not as attractive. Really, no one but webmasters knows what vBulletin is. If a 40 year-old single mom if browsing the internet, she might skip over your entry in Google simple because she’s unfamiliar with what vBulletin is and why it’s in your page title. She’ll just click the next site on the list with a better page title.

So how do you remove the “Powered by vBulletin”? It’s quite simple really. In your VB Admin panel, go to the template editor and select FORUMHOME. In there you will see:

<title><phrase 1=”$vboptions[bbtitle]”>$vbphrase[x_powered_by_vbulletin]</phrase></title>

Keep it simple and remove everything between <title> and </title>. Enter in the title of your choice, such as < title >Computer Help Forum< / title >. It’s that simple. By doing this, your forum will keep the remaining page title structure and edit the index page title only.

As for phpBB 3.0, if you want to edit your page title you need to open the overall_header.php file in your styles/template name folder. You will see a line that looks like this:

<title>{SITENAME} • {L_MCP} • {L_UCP} • {PAGE_TITLE}</title>

From here you can add/edit anything between the < title > tags to create your own custom page title.

In conclusion, having a clean, user friendly page title is very important to the success of your blog. Not only will it move up the SERPs quicker because you have targeted keywords in the title, but you’re forum will appear more approachable to the general browser.

If you are running vBulletin and have the money, I HIGHLY suggest purchasing vBSEO. It will take care of all things SEO related, and will make your life that much easier.

Hansup Yoon (pictured right), 15, has sold ZuneBoards, an Internet forum devoted to Microsoft’s Zune media player, for $62,000.

The teen, who recently moved from Irvine to Fullerton, created the site months before Microsoft introduced its answer to Apple’s iPod in 2oo6.

“It was the most perfect time to start a Web site about Zune and I was one of the first few to create a Zune-related site,” Yoon  told me in an exchange of e-mails.

Yoon  built the site himself using (free) MyBBoard software, later shifting to vBulletin and Joomla! (See a screen grab of ZuneBoards below.) In less than two years it grew to 60,000 members and more than 270,000 posts, all about Zune. It has been making about $1,000 a month from  Google Adsense and TribalFusion, both with tools that place ads that are relevant to a Web site’s visitors.

When he decided to sell, he posted it on SitePoint and other Web site sales sites for a minimum of $30,000 or “Buy It Now” for $60,000. Two bidders chose the latter option and crowdgather, a Woodland Hills company that has bought more than 70 message boards and forums as a foundation for Internet advertising, upped its bid to $62,000.

“Bidding was getting close to the Buy It Now price and I didn’t want to lose (ZuneBoards) over a few thousand dollars,” explained crowdgather founder Sanjay Sabnani.

Sabnani wasn’t surprised to learn that his acquisition was created and owned by a teen-ager.

“I’m getting more and more used to that,” he said. “My first acquisition was a graphic site from someone in Italy. I was blown away when I found out he was 16.”

Because Yoon is a minor, crowdgather negotiated with his parents, and the deal closed in a day. They used escrow.com, an Irvine site that acts as a shield against fraud between buyers and sellers of businesses, Web sites etc., Sabrani said.

Yoon’s ability to build a profitable Web site would be the envy of older and wiser entrepreneurs.

“At first I tried to teach myself with books I would buy from bookstores…However, ultimately, I was mostly self-taught from other Web development communities like Forums.DigitalPoint.com, SitePoint.com and NamePros.com,” Yoon said. “The Internet is an amazing place. You can practically learn anything you want if you’re willing to make a time commitment.

“It is so easy to make money on the Internet. Web development. Made-for-Adsense sites. Affiliate marketing. Paid to post. And the list goes on,” Yoon said. “I guess that’s one reason why I am so thankful to God. Not everyone has the mentality and understanding of how things work online as I do.”

After he designed ZuneBoards, he marketed it by exchanging posts with other small forums. In a few months he had several volunteer administrators and moderators who made sure the forums were organized and all posts obeyed the site’s rules. ZuneBoards now has more than 70 people working on it.

“The great thing was I had so much freedom,” Yoon said. “I only spent 30 minutes online a day on ZuneBoards. I could go on vacation any time I wanted.”

Yoon decided to sell ZuneBoards to spend more time on his school studies. He will be a sophomore at Troy High School this fall and plans to try out for the football team. Also, with the slow economy, he wanted to give some financial support to his family.

“Thirdly, I felt that I wasn’t doing my best to really make ZuneBoards grow to its full capabilities,” he added. “I felt a new ownership would really bring in fresh leaders that were really motivated and focused on the growth of ZuneBoards.”

He said he will continue as a site administrator but not have ownership responsibility.

Sabnani said young entrepreneurs who are going to school or working full time and running forums on the side have a tough time. “They don’t get the respect of advertisers. The bigger you are, the higher the advertisers will pay for the same advertising inventory.”

Yoon, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, describes himself as a normal American teen-ager.

“I love sports. I love to hang out. I love to game. I’ve played lacrosse and baseball in the past. This will be my fourth year playing football as a running back,” he said. “To be honest, only a few of my close friends even know I do this.”

He has not yet planned out a future of entrepreneurial ventures.

“It’s kinda hard to see into my future right now, but I can definitely imagine myself working for my church, starting a nonprofit organization or even being a youth pastor,” he said. “I can’t imagine myself grown up sitting behind a computer all day making money while there are hundreds of millions of people who are starving and never felt God’ s love.”

“He’s a great kid and a valuable member of our church,” said Matthew Lee of Sarang Community Church in Anaheim. Han is doing some Web site work for our high school ministry.”

FBLA – As some of you may have known, I entered two competitions this year for FBLA: Internet Application Programming and Web Site Development. I’m happy to announce that I placed 5th place in the state of California for Internet Application Programming, and 2nd place for Web Site Development (which was enough for me to go to nationals). Unfortunately, I lost in the preliminaries in nationals. I definitely plan to go for round 2 next year.

rsvp2.0 is a fully functional mock-up startup website, created to be entered into a FBLA event–Internet Application Programming. rsvp 2.0 takes internet event management to a whole higher level. Why limit the program to a single, specific event, if you could open it up to a whole variety of people? That is why rsvp 2.0 is designed to be ready for a full-scale web startup. Any user can sign up and create as many events as they would like, and have the power to manage all of them with one simple account management system at rsvp 2.0.

rsvp2.0 was designed (photoshop) and coded (php/mysql) by me, and was selected as one of the Top 3 going into State Conference. I will keep you updated on the results, but hopefully I may be able to advance to Nationals Competition.