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Who is Kevin Ham and how does he have $300 million dollars?

I am an avid reader of money.cnn.com and they recently posted an amazing article on Kevin Ham, the most powerful dotcom mogul in the world. You can read the full article here. Basically Kevin is the perfect example of the American dream. He started out going to bed school and built a small domain business as a side project. A couple years later he left his residency to pursue his online dreams. And also because he was making more domaining than being a doctor. Crazy huh?

Here is an excerpt from the article. If only we could all do this…

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it’s all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It’s a cheap afternoon.

What I find interesting is that several of the sites he owns that I went too aren’t even that appealing. In terms of graphics and design appeal, they score like a 2 out of 10. So I guess we can say design doesn’t matter. It’s all about traffic. In fact, having an awful design might entice people to click an ad to get off your site!

That’s pretty much my take on the story. Be sure to read the whole article though. It’s very eye opening. Of course, he did all this pre-dotcom bust. Accomplishing something like this now would be virtually impossible.

I am always coming up with wacky and creative business ideas. Most of the time though, they are already taken. Is there really anything out there that hasn’t been thought of already? Sometimes I wonder.

Anyways, everytime I think of one of these ideas I always run it by my dad because he’s a very successfull business owner. You know what the first thing he always says to me? “Where’s the business plan?” I usually respond with something like “screw the business plan… this idea rocks.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in the real world. As much as I hate business plans, and I’m sure you do too, they are absolutely necessary when starting a business. You could have thought of the wheel, but if you don’t have a plan for putting that idea into action you will never succeed.

Without a business plan, no one will listen to you. Want a small business loan from the bank? Show me your business plan. Want to sell products in a new store? Show me your business plan. Want to lease some space in the mall? Show me your business plan.

In today’s post I want to provide all the to-be entrepreneurs out there a couple of sources for business plan structures and templates. These sites will help you organize and write your business plan.

• Business Plan for Start-ups by Microsoft
• Business Plan Examples by MyOwnBusiness.com
• Standard Business Plan Outline
• How to Write a Business Plan by the SBA

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Evolution is defined as ‘any process of formation or growth; development’. In order to be successful in the dot com industry, you must learn to adapt and evolve. Web sites have to stay current with the latest trends or they risk losing visitors, or even worse folding all together. Yahoo! is the perfect example of an ever evolving website. Their new innovations and designs helped them not only survive the dot com bust, but come out even stronger. Today they are one of the most visted websites in the world (#1 on Alexa).

In today’s post I want to take a quick glimpse at the history of Yahoo! and how they’ve been a pioneer for all of us. Using an awesome tool called ‘Wayback Machine’ we can take a look back at Yahoo! and any other website since their creation. It’s an awesome tool. You can spend a lot of time playing around and watching how so many successful websites have changed over the years.

October 1996
This is the first capture of Yahoo we have. It looks like a general directory from the outside. They have thousands of websites already listed. They have a sports section and a stock section. The Dow was at 8,427…If only I would have got in back then! They have an awful looking header image that looks like it was made in paintbrush.

January 1997
The first thing I noticed was they moved to two columns in the center, instead of having one column left aligned. They also worked on the header. It now looks cleaner and appears to have buttons. At the top they also have looking for a job, date, car? Adding new features is a great way to keep visitors coming back. If you scroll to the bottom you can also see they added chat rooms. Chat rooms were the craze back in the late 90s.

February 1998
1998 looks almost the exact same as 1997. I don’t see any major changes during this time. They still have the search bar at the top and all the directory listings in the center. I did notice more links at the top for personals, weather and shopping.

January 1999
Once again, the home page still looks similar to the year prior. However, there are a couple new important features added. New features include Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Games. Adding Yahoo mail was probably the best thing Yahoo ever did to improve themselves and maintain dominance in the industry. I don’t know one person without a yahoo mail account, even if it is used for spam. Yahoo Mail crushed the competition. Anyone remember Rocketmail?

February 2000
Now we are finally seeing some changes on the Yahoo homepage. After three years of pretty much staying the same, they now moved to more of a portal feel. They added a green highlight box at the top of the directory, they added another column to the right side. They made the font larger for the directory categories. Another big feature I see added at the top center is Yahoo Messanger! Lots of big things happened in 2000 for Yahoo.

January 2001
This is the look and feel that I most recognize Yahoo with. Maybe because I first started playing Yahoo fantasy football in 2001, so I visited their site many, many times a day. They added a lot more links to the top center.

January 2002
The homepage still pretty much looks the same. No major changes that I can see.

January 2003
Finally seeing some color on the homepage. We are also seeing our first wave of advertisements. I see a Sierra Mist logo and a TD Waterhouse logo. Prior to this year, Yahoo didn’t have any ads on the homepage. I bet they saw a HUGE increase in annual revenues after adding advertisements. There are also a lot of organization changes. The site looks a lot cleaner and put together now. There are color differences for the divided sections. The header logo looks a lot cleaner and sharp.

January 2004
Looks very similar to 2003. I’m sure a lot of advancements were made on the backend and in the subpages, but the homepage looks very similar. They have the latest news displayed on the homepage and they are featuring Yahoo Autos! right in the center.

January 2005
For the first time we see less importance placed on the directory, and more importance placed on their other features. The directory listings on the homepage shrunk in size. It looks like here they are trying to be more of a news portal than a directory.

January 2006
More advertisements on the homepage. But everything else seems to be similar to 2005. Can you notice any major changes?

February 2007
Yahoo made the most changes to their homepage from 2006 to 2007. It looks completely different now. While all the information on the homepage is the same, they overhauled the look of it. You can now login to your mail account right there on the homepage. The made the search bar larger and more prominant. They added a left sidebar for the first time. Take a look at the header changes from 2006 to 2007. All those goofy logos are now gone and all they have is the Yahoo! logo. Rotating news is now featured right there in the front center. Another thing you might notice is ‘where’s the directory?’ in 2006 we saw the directory moved to the very bottom of the homepage, now it is completely gone.

Yahoo was founded as a directory, and today we don’t even see it on the homepage anymore. That’s what happens when websites evolve. Out with the old and in with the new I guess.

I know I didn’t provide as much details descriptions as I could have. I basically wanted you to see for your self how Yahoo has changed over the years. Take a look again at 1996 and then 2007. It’s hard to imagine how it could be so different.

If you know of any other websites that look a lot different from when they started, post a comment and I’d love to take a look.

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Everyone and their mom has heard of Myspace and if you’re in the web publishing business then you know what Myspace marketing is. It’s basically adding a million friends to one of you 40 Myspace profiles, then spamming messages, comments, and bulletins to all your friends, praying that they click on a link you put inside. It’s not noble, but it can be effective if you do it enough times.

Facebook, however, you may not have heard of (ending a sentence in a preposition? Yikes!). Until recently, Facebook only accepted college students into their network. They required you to have a .edu email address. In the last months to a year, Facebook decided to cash in on the social networking money and open their doors to everyone.

Facebook doesn’t have nearly as many members as Myspace, but in my opinion, their members are of better quality. Quality over quantity, right? Facebooks isn’t flooded with fake profiles built solely for the purpose of spamming.

I am not authorized to write a post on Facebook advertising the myspace way (spam), but I’m not familiar enough with how it works. I used to have a Facebook profile back in the day when it was brand new and I was a junior in college. I deleted it though before I graduated because of rumors that employers were checking interview candidate’s profiles.

Anyways, Facebook offers a different form of advertising than Myspace. On every Facebook profile, you will see what is called a Facebook Flyer. Flyers are small forms of advertising that are targeting to the members school.

If you have a website about the the Florida Gators (like me), you can order flyers to be sent to all the members who list the University of Florida as their school. This has to be 1000% more effective than spamming people on Myspace. Facebook gives you targeted advertising for a fair price.

You must place a minimum order of $50 for Facebook Flyers. But you can split it up between any school you want. $10 for UF, $10 for GA, $10 for LSU, $10 for USC, and $10 for Notre Dame. They make it very easy for you to pick your target and advertise them. For $50 to one school, you get 25,000 Flyers. You can also spread it out of many days. You can do 5,000 Flyers a day for 5 days.

Depending on the size of the school you want to advertise to, 5,000 flyers may last you a day, or it may last you a week. It all depends on how many members are in that school.

I have yet to test this form of advertising for Gator Envy, but I am definitely planning on it once the Fall Semester starts up. If you have used Facebook Flyers before, I would love to hear about your experience and the results. It’s not free like Myspace spamming, but I think $50 to advertise on one of the web’s top 50 websites is a pretty good deal.

For more information on Facebook Flyers, click here.

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Entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for new opportunities to make money. Whether its putting advertisements on a website or selling affiliate products, we want to increase our earnings. Well, have you ever thought about making money online through a different avenue?

I’ve known about Prosper for awhile now. I read about it in magazines and news articles, but never took the time to sign up and participate in it. For those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, Prosper is “the online marketplace for people to people lending”. What that means is any individual can borrow or lend money to other people. Lenders bid on how much they will lend and at what rates they are willing to offer. For a quick look at what it means to be a Prosper lender, click here.

People on prosper are looking for money for all sorts of things. Some people need money to purchase an automobile, finance a business, start a rock band, pay back a family member, purchase a wheelchair.. you name it. Thousands of people are looking for money. If someone is looking for $2,000 to pay for college, and you only have $500 to lend, you can put in that portion of the money. You don’t have to give someone the whole amount. While browsing the loans out there, people put in $50 all over the place.

As a ‘lender’ they use actually means ‘loan purchaser’, so you don’t have to be licensed to give money. Prosper.com takes all the money from the lenders and combines it into a loan that they distribute to the person.

Lending money to someone at 20% isn’t free money. There are risks involved, such as, the borrower not paying the loan. That would suck if someone didn’t pay you back right? That’s why Prosper suggests you diversify. Instead of putting all your money into one person, spread it out over 10 people or more.

I took the first step today and signed up with Prosper. I am interested to see if you can make decent money by lending it out to people. I know a lot of research has to go into who you are investing. I think that Prosper provides you their credit information and other variables. If I actually lend someone money, I will start out with a low amount like $50-100 just to see what it’s all about.

If anyone reading this actively lends people money on Prosper, leave me a comment with your experiences. I’d love to know it you can make some extra money doing this.

The power of Digg is no secret. Get an article on the front page and it will bring in thousands of visitors to your site. But what you may not have realized is that Digg is not only a source for hot news and free traffic, but for ideas as well.

Digg is constantly being updated with the latest and hottest new gadgets, toys, games and tech news articles. Odds are they will get the knowledge faster than any other news site out there. Members of Digg compete with each other to see who can submit the news first. If you click the ‘upcoming stories’ you will find stories submitted every minute. Just click refresh every so often and the latest news will pop right up.

Whenever I get stuck for an idea for a site, I like to browse my way over the the Digg upcoming stories. Check them out for ideas or new domains. The first time I tried this was back in May or June. I was just refreshing the page over and over and saw an article titled “Sega announces new Sonic title.” I click the link and found out the name of the new video game was called Sonic Wild Fire. Quickly I tabbed over to GoDaddy and typed in sonicwildfire.com. Sure enough it was still available! I registered the domain that instant. And the rest is history. (for those of you who are new readers, I sold the site back in September or so).

There’s no telling what kind of hot news could spawn up and give you a great idea for a site or domain opportunity. It could be a new game, new hardware, new movies…it could be anything. Digg is no longer just tech related. They have sports, entertainment, business, and science now.