Corporate Wiki

Networking with our peers and discovering new and interesting people is probably one of those needs that is built in to the human psyche. After, that is how humans developed language, and this is what makes all the progress possible. So it is not surprising that we have seen social networks such as Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, etc sprout up. There also seem to be niche social networks catering to specific sections of the society. LinkedIn is the best known of these, catering to the professional community, but than you also have networks such as A Small World for the well heeled.

So it is perhaps, not surprising, that Academics have their own social network. After all, sharing of research and following what issues and topics other academics around the world are working on, creates a natural demand for a service like this.

I consider myself quite familiar with Web 2.0 but I did not know.

I am generally quite fascinated with what some of the faculty of my alma mater are up to. I also like to know what the so called thought leaders today in Economics and Finance are thinking and saying. I mean, come on, look at the economy today. Wouldn’t you want to know what is coming out of the academia today? After all, these are the things that shape the policies and prosperity of the nation tomorrow.

So I search for academia on Google and guess what I find: academia.edu. The best kept secret, at least for people not affiliated with an university, social network. And the best thing is, you do not really have to be on the faculty or enrolled in an university to sign up. You can be an independent researcher and sign up just so you can follow the work of the academics that you are interested in. Or follow a journal that is important to you in your line of work.

Academia.edu is still a fledgling network but has built up quite a momentum. Over 200,000 people are already signed up and I have to imagine that there is still a ways to go. For example, I checked my alma mater (a large state university) and only a few on the faculty are signed up. Imagine the possibilities of collaboration and knowledge sharing on this platform.

Of course, I started my membership

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Last two weeks have been extremely busy for me. With the growth in Personal Dividends, and the start of Value Stock Guide and Corporate Wiki, the sites I hope will grow its readership and popularity over time a great deal, I realized that my existing shared hosting at Blue Host was just not enough and did not give me the flexibility that I needed. There were a few other changes I wanted to make. So finally I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my hosting and do a few other things that I have been planning to do for some time.

Personal Dividends, Value Stock Guide and Corporate Wiki are now on a VPS

I chose to go with ServInt as my VPS provider. I considered Media Temple Grid Service and their VPS offering but settled on ServInt as they offered bigger bang for the buck. Better VPS specs than Media Temple for less cost and customer support that is second to none. Moving to VPS from shared hosting does come with a learning curve, but since I have worked in IT in my past (specifically Unix systems), it was not something that was a big deal. Being able to tune the system and set it up exactly the way I needed it to be makes it worth every penny.

The actual move was not to bad either. All these 3 sites run on Wordpress. It was a simple case of backing up Wordpress databases, and restoring them on the new server, making sure that the mySQL db names and passwords remain consistent. You can even change them, if you know what you are doing, all you need to do is to make sure that you update your wp-config.php with the correct db_name and password. I also moved over all the Wordpress files (the entire wp directory). The wait for the nameserver change to propagate was the longest part of the move. I had purchased the domains at BlueHost and decided to leave them there, just updated the nameservers to point to the new location. By my estimates, it too between 24-36 hours for the nameserver change to be fully effective. During this time, a visitor could end up on either Blue Host or ServInt versions of my site but since I did not update the sites with new postings of comments during this time, it was not a big deal.

Personal Dividends has a new look

PD now uses Thesis theme. I bought the developer version as I do plan to eventually move other sites to use this theme. I have found Thesis to be an easy theme to work with and the customization options are extensive. It is written with SEO in mind and hopefully within a few weeks I will know if the theme actually makes a difference in SEO. Still, I love how much cleaner the site now appears and I am sure it has already improved the aesthetics and usability.

Ad serving gets an upgrade

I briefly tried out the OpenX community hosted ad server, found it to be too slow, tried DFP by Google, found it to lack in features. Essentially I wanted a tighter control on who sees what ads, based on the referring site. So for example, I decided not to serve adsense ads to visitors from Social Media sites. No point really, the CTRs for these visitors are close to zero. CPM ads make more sense for them. There were other targeting tune ups as well. Google’s DFP service does not allow me to target based on referrer. So I decided to download and host my own OpenX ad server on a sub-domain. Took me many hours to set it up but it seems to be much faster than the hosted service and I am happy with it. No doubt this will also come in handy with direct ad sales.

There will be more changes and fine tuning in the weeks ahead but I am already happy with the results so far. The sites appear to be much faster and more robust, and more importantly, Google Webmaster Tools show that the average download time for a page is now 1/5th of what it used to be.

You never saw your children grow up, but you continue to guide us every day. We have done many things you would not approve of, and quite a few that you would be very proud of. I remember all the times we had together, how you were always so eager to show us off; our accomplishments, even if so small in the grand scheme of things, would swell your chest with pride.

There never goes a day that I do not think of you, what you meant to us, what you taught us, your love, your encouragement, and your drive. Many times I have wondered how things could have been different if you were still here with us, but I know that even if you are not here in flesh and blood, you are still here with me in spirit, every moment of the day.

You taught me the value of hard work, rational thinking, commitment, integrity and fearlessness, all qualities that you lived every day and that I still struggle at times to live up to your standards.

On this Father’s day, I say Thank You! Thank You for being you, and for setting examples that I can follow in my life.

Corporate Wiki was represented this week at the Blogging for Profit Carnival – May 31 Edition hosted at BlogConduit.com. The Carnival featured my article on keyword research techniques. Check it out, there are many other nice articles on blogging in the carnival.

When I first started publishing on the web with my first site over 2 years ago, I was pretty clueless about how to get traffic coming my way. I subscribed to the theory that if you have great content, visitors will show up. Some did, but not as many that I hoped for or wanted. I spent the last 2 years learning about what drives traffic and how to get search engines to send traffic to my sites.

Do These 3 Basic Things Right and Search Will Send You Traffic

1. Keyword Research – Produce content that people are actively seeking for,
2. Page Optimization – Structure content in a way that shows the search engines that it is relevant to what the users are searching for, and
3. External Links – Show the search engines that your site is to be trusted

This is true for organic search traffic but if you are looking to buy traffic through pay-per-click advertising, these principles are still true and will help in reducing your costs and improving your conversions.

In this post, I will talk about Keyword Research and will pick up the other two topics in later posts.

Most Free (and Some Paid) Online Keyword Research Services are not Effective

There are many excellent keyword research tools that one can use to find what people are actively searching for. For the longest time I have used Google’s free Adwords keyword research tool. It works great and provides tons of useful data. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that Google’s tools are designed to manipulate advertisers and publishers in a way that optimizes revenues for Google and may not provide the real search data. Besides, it misses quite a bit of long tail search information. And lastly, it obviously cannot provide information on what people are searching for on Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine.

There are other commercial keyword research service, some of which have free (and maybe limited) options. Wordtracker has good reputation. Wordstream has many free tools that can be used for keyword analysis. Both of these are worth a try.

Just remember that most sites that are serious about SEO are using one of these 3 free tools. Which means that they end up going after similar keywords, mostly focusing on the ‘head’ keywords (those one or two word phrases that have the most traffic potential, although their conversion potential may not be great).

Now why would you want to target keywords that

1. are already ultra competitive
2. have more competition coming in every day, and
3. provide traffic that is not ready to buy and does not convert well?

What I really needed was a tool that creates a unique keyword database for me, provides for a way for me to group the keywords thematically, and captures the actual long tail traffic that have reached my site (meaning my sites already are considered credible for these terms), so I can use this research to develop post ideas that are relevant and help me eventually rank for some of the more competitive head keywords. This is great since the visitors who ended up at my sites with very specific search are more likely to find the content relevant and so are likely to come back, or convert better.

Until now, to do this was complex and time consuming. Sure, the information existed. Google Analytics provides a history of the actual searches that resulted in the visitors to my sites and also the conversion data. Google keyword research tool gives me the initial keyword research, and one could use spreadsheets to segment and group keywords (or develop one’s own database). This works in the beginning when a site is new but after a while becomes quite a chore when the keyword database grows to tens or even hundreds or thousands of keywords.

All this is now changed with the recent release of Wordstream for SEO product.

How WordStream Keyword Management for SEO Helps?

WordStream for SEO is the first product I have found that has been developed to help the site owner through all of the tasks of researching and managing keywords for the site. Sure, you can do keyword research similar to what other tools provide. Even in this case, the WordStream keyword research appears to provide better and more accurate information than Adwords or Wordtracker. But where WordStream really shines is in its ability to help you (with auto suggestions and rule definition) group and segment keywords on an ongoing basis. I said ongoing, as Wordstream continuously pulls in new keywords from your Google Analytics account or if you prefer, by installing a tracking code on the site. This means that over time, your keyword database becomes your own proprietary keyword database, which is highly relevant to your site. To top it all, Wordstream offers a free Firefox Plugin that you can activate when you are writing new content and it will automatically pull keyword research, make long tail keyword suggestions and keep a track of the keywords that you have used in the content.

Many of the components of this product are offered for free, and you might want to check them out to get a flavor for what to expect. However, the full power and benefit of the product only become clear when you start using the Keyword Management for SEO product, which is a paid monthly subscription (comparable in cost to what you might expect to pay for other competing products). I have signed up for the paid subscription for all my sites and have been using it for the last week or so and let me tell you, it has been working beautifully. And the support is top notch, with tons of online training videos and articles.

I have not yet tried the PPC version of Wordstream. It is much more expensive but when it appears to me that the benefits will outweigh the cost I might decide to upgrade one of my accounts for ppc keyword research.

I do not want to term this as a launch. A launch smacks of frenzied activity and clenched buttocks. This is neither.

In more than one way, it is a recast of my own classic, Arohan’s investing life, which I am going to retire soon.

Story of Arohan’s investing life

As my first blog, I have to say it taught me a lot. It also became the place to experiment for everything new I wanted to try out. Which meant that my subsequent sites were much more refined and met with greater successes.

Unfortunately, experimentation also meant many mistakes were committed. For example, after gaining Google PR 4 in just a few months of existence, the site subsequently dropped to 0, I suspect permanently. I figured my over-zealousness in monetizing the site was the reason.

I was also not happy with the disparity in the domain name and the site name. An unhappy accident of my inexperience (at that time) in migrating the blog from blogger to self hosted wordpress environment.

All this meant that over time my search traffic ground to a halt.

And I polluted the niche subject matter of the site with my political ramblings. Can’t say it drove any of my readers away, and may have even won me some new readers, but it did cause the focus to slip.

Enter Value Stock Guide

My goal was to turn Arohan’s investing life into a hub for value investing where investors come to get new ideas and socialize. Over time though, I determined that this is better done with a new site. That will give me the opportunity to rectify the mistakes of the past and give the new site the best chance of growth.

So I am now starting Value Stock Guide.

The site will probably spend a few weeks to a month maturing and saying hello to various search engines, and collecting searchable articles while I add all the features that I am planning to add. This will also give me time for introductions to the new readers or reacquaint the old ones.

And than I will slowly ramp up the marketing.

Of course, you never are really done succeeding. There is still so much more to do.

In the same way, you do not really fail. You learn. Sometimes this learning costs a lot. But invariably in such cases, it also teaches a lot.

Failure is an Option

Take for example my earlier foray into franchising. Start a franchise, I thought, and you are following a template for success. As it turns out, it is not true. You end up doing the things, at times, not knowing why.

You can of course make a comfortable living if you do well with a franchise. But as I realized, I do not want all the responsibility with no say in the important decisions in how to run my business. Was the cost of failure worth this realization? At that time, it did not seem so, but now I can say absolutely.

More so when I think I did well to cut my losses early, rather than limp along for a few years before dropping out. Cheaper that way, and I got more time to do the next thing.

Which brings me to my key learning.

If You Fail, Fail Fast

Slow failure costs time. Extricate yourself from the sinking boat. If you do it quick, maybe you can escape with your wits around you (and some rations). Do not hope you can fix things unless you have a definite plan to do that and you are certain that everything will work the way you planned. Not hopeful, but certain.

If you are not, get out and move on. There are a lot of other things you can do, and now maybe do them better. Within a few years, this will be history. Failure is forgotten, but successes are not.

You Never Truly Succeed Unless You Fail

If you have never failed, you are just not trying hard enough or aiming high enough. Push the boundaries, see what works and what doesn’t. Explore new ideas. If you falter, pick yourself up and keep moving.

That is how it all works. Entrepreneurship is no different. Great successes are preceded by great failures. Or in other words, failures inspire new successes.

Welcome! I was wondering when you will show up.

This blog is an attempt to chronicle my personal adventures through entrepreneurship as I try to build a business empire from scratch. You can follow along my journey. I plan to write more than just about entrepreneurship. Whatever is on my mind, really, although it is likely, more often than not, what is on my mind will be business.

Why am I calling this blog Corporate Wiki?

Great question. Wiki, as is now used to mean, is a sort of collaborative information store with version control. Wiki, as I am using here to mean is an abbreviation of What I Know Is. And since this is about my business, the name Corporate Wiki works for me.

If you are a purist, or for some reason disagree with my usage of the name, all I can say is the hell with it! This is my blog.

That settles this question then.

Moving on …