(I prefer getting as many of these on my Kindle to refer back as and when required)

Start here with Munger’s Worldly Wisdom:
http://www.paladinvest.com/pifiles/MungersWorldlyWisdom.htm

Books

The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham

Security Analysis – Ben Graham

Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements: The Search for the Company with a Durable Competitive Advantage – Mary Buffett

The Great Investors – Lessons on Investing from Master Traders – Glen Arnold

The New Buffettology – Mary Buffett

Learn to Earn: A Beginner’s Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business – Peter Lynch

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life – Alice Schroeder

The Tao of Warren Buffett: Warren Buffett’s Words of Wisdom- Mary Buffett

The Warren Buffett Way – Robert G. Hagstrom

The Economics of Banking – Kent Matthews

Insurance Theory and Practice – Rob Thoyts

Regular Reading

Warren Buffett’s Shareholders Letters offer amazing insight on all the business models he invests in (Insurance, banking, food and drink etc etc)

FT.com web/mobile/ipad app

Barrons – great ipad app

Investor Chronicle – Good for UK company reports and Simon Thompson’s articles are always worth reading

GuruFocus.com – excellent historic data and comparisons

Seeking Alpha

MorningStar – great for historical fundamental data

Videos

1. Pass the 5 Second Test

Make sure your site passes the ”5 second test”. Within five seconds your visitors should know exactly what you do and why you’re great at doing it. Say what you do through images and text.

2. Try A New Lead Form (Or Sales Page)

A big bold change to the lead form, try it for a day, if it works then keep it (look at the industry leaders and see what they put on their conversion pages)

3. Publish Your Phone Number Prominantly

Put your telephone number at the top of every page and make sure its answered swiftly.

4. Improve Your SEO

Making your site great long term works, but short term links will do the trick, ask your friends, family, clients and supplier to link to you, make sure some links use in the anchor text of the keyword you’re trying to rank for, but only where it makes sense and don’t over do it. You can always buy a few links, but you run the risk of a Google penalty if caught.

5. Try PPC on Google Adwords

Geographically locate your campaign to as close an area as possible. (if your clients are only in New York then only target this area) use exactly the correct phrase people will be using to find your site, make the advert as close to this keyword as possible using keywords in the Title and first line. Ensure your landing page is relevant to the keyword your are buying and if possible put the search phrase in big text at the top of the landing page. If you’ve not got a large budget start small, a few keywords and bid to the bottom of the first page to test it out.

6. Test Your Website Response Time

If your site is loading slowly upgrade your hosting. You load time using an online test, or just test yourself by comparing inituavely against sites that have lightening load times like Google and Amazon. Site speed is directly propotional to profit. If your site is slow find a better host (but make sure your host is located in your target country)

7. Make Your Links Blue OR Make Them Obvious

And perhaps give them an underline for good measure. If you’re not going to make them blue then make sure they are obviously get someone that hasnt seen the site to buy and watch where they find are getting stuck, fix this problem

8. Put Conversation Tracking On Your Complete Sales Funnel

ok if now its 4pm and you’ve got an hour left get conversion tracking on each page of your sales channel, and in a weeks time see which page drops your conversion, this is now where you need to look at fixing.

9. Put Your Prices Up 10% For A Week

Compare the results (do this in a month you know sales are traditionally stead) if you’re a price sensitive comondity retailer this might not work, but if could be worth a go anyway.

10. Write One Page of Great Content

About your products that’s an awesome bit of information (if you havent got a blog just a static page uploaded on to your site and linked to will do).

11. Put Trust Logos On Your Home Page

and conversion page (memberships, qaulifications,
ask a trusted client for a two line testimonial and stick it on your site prominently.

12. Send A Targeted Inmail On LinkedIn

If you are on linked in, find a person you know will want your services or products using the search and send them a targeted polite inmail “reaching out” to see if they would like to hear about what you offer. If your not on LinkedIn sign up start building your network and once you have a network post them the link the meaty article you have just written in point 10.

13. Email Your Client Database

Write a “this is what I have been up to email” to your client database, if its just a few entries that is fine, you can tailor each one a bit closer.

14. Send A Blogger A Product To Review

Contact one blogger that you know has a good audience in your business sector, reach out to them and send them a product freebie to review.

15. search.twitter.com and @ Reply Someone Relevant

I tweeted today about the CRM Highrise, and got a great @reply back from the founder @jasonfried asking me a question.

Please find above the slides from my presentation “Content For Traffic: Q&A For Search Advantage” from the Content Is King conference yesterday hosted by PureContent.

Videos to follow….

2. Coffee? Get a good coffee machine, yes it’s a personal thing, but the smell of fresh coffee kick starts the morning for me.

3. Meet standing up. A meeting room is important but not essential. Stand up meetings around a PC are quick and to the point. Try change of scene and meet in the local coffee shop.

4. Look for flexibility. You never know what’s round the corner, keep the lease flexible to allow you to expand or contract as needed. In the current market great lease deals are for the taking, make sure to negotiate on rent and terms.

5. Big office toys are fun, but not essential. Staff most impressed by office toys probably aren’t the staff you need.

6. Use mobile phones, have as few landlines are necessary. In the UK you can get unlimited land line calls on a contract for £30 a month, then add a skype out monthly contract (6 Euros per month) to call worldwide landlines for free (thanks to JasonD for the tip)

7. Location. Think about location but remember its not everything, a dynamic company should be able to attract and retain excellent staff on the back of the business and culture rather than its office.

8. Wireless connectivity. Properly secured wireless is great and saves the need for cables everywhere.

9. Large screens and monitors. We’ve only recently done this, but now everyone has at least 24″ of screen to work with, it just seems to make life easier.

10. Simply entry & security. Keep office access features simple and practical (complex alarms, entry systems, etc tend to need admin time) if you’re small enough to work without these systems, then all the better.

11. Bin clutter ASAP. (I’m terrible at this!) if you haven’t used that stack of CD’s or out of date printer in 6 months find another home for it.

12. Use low tech networks. Low tech networks need low tech support which is cheap, sometimes less is more!

13. Secure your data & backup data off site. Double backup and secure heavily the mission critical stuff.

14. In town office space works. Chances are for a tech start up you’ve got a fairly young team, town centre means the team can arrive by public transport. Also lunch breaks can be used to best effect for people with busy lives.

15. Consider taking space in a shared environment. If you’re on your own, and just getting going, shared office space is a cost effective way to you out of the house (and out of your underpants) and allows you to meet new people in a similar situation for networking and business.

16. See if you local university has office space (Doug of CarRentals used this to great effect), space is normally cheap and flexible, networks are in place and talent is on the door step. The vibe of the university also seems to help.

Release your logo into the air as a bubble with Flogos. Thanks Tim for the link

Site: BackofTheNet.info
Communtiy: PES and FIFA (football games) on the Xbox & PS3 (players community)
Current montisation channel: Adsense
Size of community: >10k
Strengths: Active community; Links from xbox.com
Owners comment: “We get [>5k] unique visitors a day, most of them come for FIFA information, and the others are returning members. We have a custom built shoutbox (ajax + php) which gets most of our page hits as it’s where members go to chill out, chat, and arrange games & stuff.”

Ideas On Revenue Channel Growth

Ok, off the bat, this is a challenge. Gaming users want to play games not click ads, pay for upgrades, so we’re going to have to get pretty creative and try out lots of things. Key point here is try lots of new ideas, and trust the data you get from testing.

1. Increase The Community Size

Get more members, lots more. To give yourself the best chance you are going to need more users and traffic. Simplify the home page making a a sign up form with information why they should sign up and post sign up take them straight into the action. Also consider letting users get involved without signing up initially.

2. Build a Premium Feature

With enough loyal members a paid premium feature builds an instant revenue channel, and if that product is virtual you build it only once and sell it thousands of times, giving a huge gross profit (like software, drinks or wordpress themes)

Idea (i) – Paid Membership
By winning games all members earn virtual money, but to spend it on the site, (on cool stuff like virtual stadiums, fans bases, cups and medal cabinets etc), they need to become a paid member. This is same model as club penguin runs so effectively. There has to be real value to warrant the user wanting to spend their virtual money.

Idea (ii) – Gameplay Recording and Publishing App
Perhaps a stronger idea is to build a paid app to make recording and publishing goals (and other gameplay) super easy & and have these goals published on your site. This software would be expensive to build but may have application not only in football games but all types of console gaming and once you have built in once you can sell it again and again.

3. Simplify The Site

Streamline the site, take out anything unnecessary, make the design as professional as possible and benchmark it against the competition. Make the site clear and direct into the core proposition you are focusing on.

4. Chat Monitisation

Try monitising the chat system, Meebo is offering a simple way of doing this but I’ve haven’t tried it.

5. Content Library – Build The Adsense Revenue

Build a huge gaming library full of useful football gaming content and get your users to help you. Backofthenet has links from xbox.com so must have some level of search authority. Capitalise on this by building out an excellent resource which will gain traffic from search. This search traffic can then be monitised through adsense or what network or affiliate scheme works best. Blend the adsense ads, make the links the same colour as your normal links and put them in the navigation places for high CTR.

Trial, Error and Time…

To turn this site into a revenue machine is going to take lots of hard work, a splash of investment into new models, time to roll things out and building on ideas that work. In my view it can be done, but you’ve got to be in for the long haul. Good luck!

Su.pr home screen


I’ve used the service and it works really well. The benefits are:

- Post links direct to Twitter and Facebook status updates from Su.pr
- Get analytics data about these posts including optimum posting times for future posts
- The URL shortening service frames the page and put other popular content from your site alongside
- Get stumble opportunities from Tweets or Facebook updates
- SEO friendly and personal site URL shortening options (eg. http://yourdomain.com/a8kjk)

Unlike the Digg URL shortening where the benefit is only achieved if you get enough Diggs to reach the front page, Stumbleupon shorteners encourage stumbles, and a smaller number of stumbles equates to traffic from Stumbleupon.

The URL redirected page:

I’ve always been a fan of Stumbleupon although they are commonly forgotten as a social network. Su.pr should bring it back to the limelight. Using it for simple status updates on your blog via Twitter and Facebook will definately help the best content get more traffic, without any extra work.

Fact #1 Steve Jobs has Syrian roots.
After his birth in San Francisco to an American woman and a Syrian man he was given up for Adoption.

Fact #2 Atari and HP Turned Jobs Down.
Atari and Hewlett-Packard both turned down start-up funding requests from Jobs in the day:

So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’

Fact #3 Jobs likes Gates photo credit: Seattlepi When interviewed live with Bill Gates Steve Jobs made friendly comments on their relationship referencing their long term “marriage”.	Fact #4 Jobs was a fruitarian photo credit: Dreamstime The name Apple was chosen because Apples were Steves favourite food at the time.	Fact #5 He’s not dead Bloomberg photo credit: Tombstonebuilder Bloomberg mistakenly published his 17 page obituary (29-08-2008 ) briefly before the mistake was rectified.
Fact #6 He’s an ex Hippie Please teach me Photoshop In his informative years Jobs travelled to India. Barefoot and threadbare he spent some months on the hippie trail in India, ’60s style.	Fact #7 Jobs paid $10m for Pixar photo credit: Pixar Mr Jobs purchased the computer division of Lucasfilm (of Starwars fame) in 1986 for $10 million and incorporated it independently as Pixar. Later Disney bought Pixar for $7.5 billion.	Fact #8 His catchphrases are… photo credit: Photobucket He favorite catch phrases are: “Un-be-lievable”; “Mere mortals”; “It’s huge” & “Wouldn’t it be great”. He tells the story and sells the dream, this character trait is common amongst successful entrepreneurs.
Fact #9 He’s got huge feet photo credit: Pixel Addict Steve has big feet, size 14 big. Perhaps he went barefoot in India because he couldn’t find any oversize shoes!	Fact #10 $1: Steves annual salary photo credit: bionicteaching As the Chairman and CEO of Apple Computers, he pays himself an annual salary of $1 per year.	Fact #11 Lazy parking habits photo credit: Cultofmac Some people are obsessional about catching Steve parking in Handicap spaces. Steve, you may have changed the world with your computers but you still can’t illegally park!

If today was the last day of my life would I want to do what I’m going to do today?

Thanks to Chriswrites for pointing me in the direction of this video of Steve Jobs talking at Stanford.