Web Empire

Over on Blue Hat SEO an interesting little drama has been playing out that caught my attention. Now let me say from the start that that site recommends both black-hat and white-hat solutions to Search Engine Optimization problems — hence the name I guess. Recently the host posted a guest commentary on ‘captcha breaking’.

Captcha refers to those little graphics with crooked letters in shades of gray or other OCR unfriendly styles, that are intended to ensure that only ‘real people’ enter data (such as registration details), rather than automated scripts. The guest post gave a long, complicated programming technique for converting these graphics into something an OCR program can read with fair reliability, thus allowing black-hat hackers to overcome this obstacle.

Now I have no use for breaking captcha’s, that just doesn’t fit with my style. But I was delighted by the subsequent post by the host of that site, where he gave his own technique for breaking captchas, just because the solution was so simple and elegant — the kind of concept that can be applied to other problems.

Instead of writing a complicated program in C and implementing various steps and procedures, his solution was to use a website that was already part of his web-empire. With a simple little PHP script, he simply displays the captcha he wants to ‘break’ on his own site, as a log-in requirement or in order to use some feature, just as if it were a typical captcha situation. Only he records the result from the user’s response, and feeds that back to the program that needs to know what the captcha says. So long as his site where he displays the captcha gets plenty of traffic, the response will be fast enough to use the results immediately. Such urgency is not inherent to the technique, but applies to this captcha example only.

This is a wonderful example of using a social engineering approach to solve a problem. I’m sure it can be applied (or modified) to many other situations where there is no programmatic substitute for human intelligence. There are sites that use similar techniques to identify the content in photographs, or distinguish galaxies from stars in high-resolution telescope images. How could you use this technique in building your web-empire?

NOTE: if the link to bluehatseo.com does not work, it is because the site is currently under various hack-attacks, supposedly because someone took exception to his revealing ’secrets’ about captcha-hacking. That is the drama part of this story I referred to at the beginning. Most hackers endorse the concept that information should be free, but apparently some harbor IBM style business concepts.

I came across a list of 32 things that make good subjects for Web Empires, because there are lots of people willing to pay to get these things. Seems an impressive list until you realize that there are really only FIVE things listed:

• 1 Make more money
• 2 Have more and better sex
• 2 Have a closer relationship with loved ones
• 2 Have more and better friends
• 3 Live longer
• 3 Feel healthier
• 3 Be better looking
• 3 Be thinner
• 3 Be more muscular
• 4 Travel more
• 2 Spend more time with family
• 1 Be debt free
• 4 See the world
• 4 Live in a tropical paradise
• 1 Be more secure
• 1 Have a nicer house
• 1 Have a nicer car
• 1 Have more cars and houses
• 1 Have a boat
• 1 Have a plane
• 1 Have more boats and planes
• 5 Be famous
• 5 Be more influential
• 5 Change the world
• 5 Have a super power (like telepathy or becoming invisible)
• 4 Have more time for recreation
• 4 Have more fun
• 1 Own a business
• 1 Work at home
• 1 Retire
• 1 Freedom
• 5 Rule the world (or some part of it)

I’ve added numbers to indicate the five things this list boils down to:

1. Money
2. Relationships/Sex
3. Health
4. Live Better
5. Power

The germ of truth in all this is that you can never make money selling people things that are good for them, without first convincing them that what you are selling will somehow make them happy. If they ever discover that happiness is really a choice to be made, and not the result of external ‘things’ you won’t be able to sell them anything, so be sure to never tell them that profound truth.

We all have goals, don’t we? Well no, not really. ‘Get rich’ is not a goal, and neither is ’success’. Goals are more tangible than that. In football, the goal isn’t ‘to win’ — it’s that big H shaped thing at each end of the field.

Likewise, you need to have tangible goals before you can think of achieving them. If money is your primary motivator, then set an amount you will earn this month, and this year. You have to believe in your goal, so don’t set it so high you can’t convince yourself you can reach it — but don’t settle for too little either.

Next, decide what steps you need to follow to reach your goal. Will you need a product of your own, a website — or Web Empire? Write out the components that will go into your goal. Then, for each component, break it down into daily tasks you need to perform to get those components built.

Now do it. Every day, do something. You might not even reach your goal — or you might exceed it. That doesn’t matter as much as the progress you make by completing the tasks that are prerequisite to achieving your goal. So long as you don’t get discouraged, so long as you continue to make progress toward your goal, you win. Give up, and you lose.

You would have to be psychic to know exactly when you will achieve your goal — don’t fret over it taking longer than expected. So long as you are making progress in the right direction, you have nothing to fear. You will achieve your goal. Don’t buy into the claim that if you can’t reach your goal within the allotted time you lose — that is defeatist. You only lose when you give up on it.

Make a plan, and follow it. If the plan doesn’t work as expected — change the plan, don’t abandon the goal! Look at your progress, and take heart that you are moving toward your goal. Keep going, and as time goes on, you will find it gets easier and easier. Build on your successes and learn from your mistakes — soon any goal you set will be achieved.

Lots of so-called gurus are encouraging their faithful followers to churn out webcast products — short audio or audio-video recordings. For the producer they are cheap and quick to make — so much so that every day hundreds of new free ones become available, not to mention the high-priced ‘products’ guaranteed to make you rich.

But look at it from the client-side perspective. Most of these, like most of what is written in eBooks and reports, is just junk. That is the nature of the business. But while we can skim through an eBook in two or three minutes and tell if it has anything of interest, you don’t really have that option with the webcast. You watch the beginning, which is full of promises, and 20 minutes later you are wondering when the speaker is going to begin delivering on those promises. Maybe half-way through you give up in disgust, or maybe you hang on, hoping there will be some crumb of useful information you can salvage from the thing.

In the end, each crappy video has wasted about half an hour or more of my time. If it was free that is infuriating, if it cost money, it is doubly so. Time is the most precious commodity we have, and to let some jerk steal it is worse than mere theft of money. It robs us of our very life — for life is made up of only so much time, and each wasted moment is gone forever.

Now of course I’m not saying all the webcasts are crap — just most of them. And it is certainly not worth my time to search out the good ones at the cost of listening to hours of mindless drivel. Before you waste your time on the next six-hour webcast, demand to see a written transcript first. It would be easy to tell from that how much value the presentation has for you — but preparing such a transcript is too much work for your ‘work one hour a month’ guru. If they don’t respect their clients enough to pay for producing such a transcript, I’d suggests their claims of huge profits are probably not worth the airwaves their written on.

How important is creativity to your success as Web-entrepreneur, or in any business venture? Look around, do creative people tend to be wealthier or more successful business people?

Lets look at two prominent pioneers in the computer business, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill, and his company, have reached the highest level of success, but they have never generated a single original idea. Bill started out by reverse-engineering a disk operating system, and then selling it (to IBM if I recall correctly, something called DOS). Next he took the advances being made at Palo Alto’s computer lab in GUI (Graphical User Interface) design, and watered it down and called it Windows.

Every time a creative company came up with some useful feature, Microsoft just copied the idea by writing software just different enough to avoid losing major lawsuits, and incorporating the feature into their software suite.

Steve, on the other hand, is a creative genius,  who surrounded himself with other creative geniuses, and produced one ground-breaking development after another in the world of computers. But those computers were not particularly well marketed, more expensive to make (and hence buy) than the generic boxes Windows runs on, and hence never reached as large a market share as they might have deserved.

Now Steve is no pauper, so don’t misconstrue what I’m saying into suggesting creative people can’t succeed in business. I’m just saying that creativity is rarely well-rewarded in business.

Part of the problem is that creative people tend to be perfectionists. They spend too much time getting every imaginable bug out of their software, for example, while Microsoft puts out untested junk and lets user feedback provide their testing results — then they charge those customers again when they want to upgrade to the  ‘new improved’ version that works like the original should have.

Of course you have to develop a lot of clout in your field before you can get away with those kind of shenanigans,  but even in everyday business striving for perfection can be a project-killer. No, I’m not saying you should have shoddy products, but once your product is good enough to meet your customers need, stop improving on it and start selling it!

Many people confuse quality with perfection. You should always strive to achieve the highest quality you practically can — but if further quality improvements mean you never get to market with your product, it has gone beyond high quality and into perfectionism.