At this time and in this economy I feel it’s best for me to work on 4 different $5 - $10k  projects rather than go for broke on one idea.  So unfortunately my social media website idea has been moved to the back burner until the time comes when I am willing to take the financial risk.  Until then, I just need to hope someone else doesn’t beat me to the idea.

For project #1, I decided to go with a far more conservative idea.  The plan is to put a new spin on the article site business which is spewing  more and more duplicate garbage content all over the web.  I want to provide more value to webmasters looking to spread their ideas without the seedy underbelly of the current article site/duplicate content business.

It’s amazing that some crap articles sites make $1 per day while others make $100s per day.  How much one of these sites earns is a direct correlation of how much Google love they get.  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why one site with garbage duplicate content is showered with Google love, while another is completely ignored.  I good friend in the business believes it is all about website authority, but how can a site that churns out duplicate content have any authority with Google?

Without giving away my idea, essentially this new business model will freshen up the Article Site business model while at the same time give Google exactly what they want and the web what it needs -unique, quality content.

I estimate that with me doing some coding myself, jobbing other coding out, and a minimal marketing plan, this new site will cost about $5,000 in the first year to build and the breakeven point should be about 1 year after launch.  The beauty of this new site is no matter how slow the site starts out, long term, it will constantly improve on monthly revenue making it a nice “blue chip” website in my portfolio.

I estimate time to launch will be about 3 months.  I invite you all to follow along as I create a new money making website on a shoestring budget.  I’ll post updates here as I go along, and reveal more about the exact nature of this new content site business model as it gets closer to going live.  You’ll gain insight, real-time as the site is created from the ground up

For now, I have put up a place holder (coming soon) site to get the ball rolling.  Feel free to drop a link to it to help give the site a kickstart.

Introducing my next bootstrap Internet venture:  Chatii.com

I have been using Twitter for about 10 months so I figure it’s time for me to step back and evaluate the service and it’s usefulness.  Overall, Twitter seems to be a time waster for me and most other users.

There are many Twitterholics that will say differently and tell you the Twitter is the greatest thing ever, but if you place a serious value on your time, the cost / benefit is not there for anyone but a small percentage of people that are probably already well known.

I have tried many of the plugins, applications, and apps that strive to make twitter more useful and user friendly but still have not found the magic bullet that transforms twitter from a toy to a tool.

The Bad

• If you follow more than a few hundred people, it’s impossible to keep up with your twitter “Friends”.
• Too much noise. Even the best Twitter users clutter up the stream with useless comments.
• One sided tweets are like hearing one end of a phone conversation.
• Conversations are spread apart in the time line so that they seem like random posts.
• Spam tweets are becoming a problem.
• Serial Followers.
• Serial Tweeters.
• Most posts add no value to the Twitter stream.
• Comment length limitation is too short.
• It can be addictive.
• Clueless founders waiting to cash out – even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

The Good

• If you already have a following on the web or in life, your masses can follow you and you can speak to all of them easily.  (if they happen to be listening)
• It’s fun and interesting to track thoughts on current events in real-time through some of the search tools.
• It’s useful at conferences to exchange feedback about speakers, seminars, and the best parties to attend.
• If you like chatting with strangers about random things and have time to burn it can be a source of mindless entertainment.

I will continue to toil away and stick with twitter for now and try to keep raising my number of followers to the point where if I ask a question, someone answers.  However, I am working to trim the people I follow to under 250. Moving forward I have set up some personal standards on who I will follow back.

If you follow me on twitter, I will follow back if:

- You follow no more than 300 people.
- You have more followers than you are following.
- We have some shared interests.
- You’re not a serial Tweeter.
- A quick glance at your time line reveals that your tweets aren’t mind numbingly dull.

Hopefully these measures will help me get more value out of Twitter while wasting less time digging through Tweets for that nugget of golden wisdom.

Over the past month I have been testing various alpha and beta versions of RSSdoodle on this site while debugging for public release.  In testing I had to go hog wild with way too many RSSdoodle posts and a few times two or three duplicate posts were auto created probably pinging a few poor sites to death.  For this, my apologies, but it was done in the name of plug-in progress.

Version 1.0 is finally released.  As designed, RSSdoodle works almost the same as Twitterdoodle.  In a nutshell, you set up your relevant keyword searches that will auto create posts of RSS feeds pointing to matching articles with a link and a short blurb. You then decide how often you want to create mashup posts based on each keyword search, if you want the posts on your front page or not, if you want to dofollow or nofollow links to the articles in the post, and if you want to turn pinging on or off.

The comments I received (from trackbacks to this site during testing) were overwhelmingly positive as most people appreciate a link back to their articles.  However, out of the thousands of RSS feeds given shoutouts I had one person ask that I not link back to their site in my RSSdoodle posts.  So I deleted the link to his site and built in a feature to block feeds from any website entered in the options area of RSSdoodle.  This had a side benefit of allowing me to block feeds from garbage websites and blog networks.  For example, a lot of crap RSS feeds were being pulled from the vox.com network.  So I blocked all vox.com RSS feeds from my posts.  As I block more and more crappy sites, my RSSdoodle posts are improving in relevance and quality.

Anyway, to properly manage RSSdoodle autoposts, I recommend you use the plug-in sparingly (it’s easy to get carried away), and pull in only highly relevant RSSdoodle mashup posts to your website.  If your website is about gadgets, then you would want to pull in daily posts of RSS feeds based on Gadgets.  It’s that simple.

On a side note, since I started testing RSSdoodle in December my traffic has steadily increased and I have been picking up more readers of my RSS feed.  Anyway, it’s a good way to bring likeminded bloggers to your site while you build out the core content of your blog.  Just in case you’re wondering, here is what an RSSdoodle post looks like: Startups.  Try RSSdoodle out and let me know what you think.

Here they are:

• Reach 500+ readers of this blog (I have edged close to 50)
  
• Increase daily page views of this blog to 1,000+ per day on average. (Currently averaging 400 page views)
  
• Build twitter followers to 1,000+ for @john_lessnau
• Create at least one new revenue stream
• Launch a Social Media web business
• Complete a ground up facelift and rewrite of LinkAdage.com
• Double Revenue at LinkXL.com
• Build up my Digg profile so that when I submit something I have a chance at a front page Digg
• Financially survive the continuing economic downturn

That’s all I have, it doesn’t seem like a long list, but if I hit most of these 2009 will be a very successful year.

Bottom line: “If you’ve never failed you’ve never lived”

This video is an inspirational message for anyone in search of their dream to live by.