Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a blog called blogmaverick. He tends to post business related content with an “eye to the future” kind of feel. I like reading them and you can tell he is a sharp guy as you read. My favorite posts, by far, were a recent set focused on his own past. They discuss where he was (his stature in life economically) when he got started, what his motivations were and how he ultimately won. As someone who runs a small (very small – I still have my day job ) business and who continues to try to get over the hump these were a great read.

I contacted Mr. Cuban to get permission to repost my favorite eight items. He agreed. So prepare to be motivated (or if nothing else to get a peek into the mind of a self-made billionaire). This will be an eight part series. I hope you enjoy.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but anyone interested in business and making money (not in the “fast money” sense, but in the “reaching your target audience” sense) should check out Mark Cuban’s blog.

If you are a basketball fan you know Mark Cuban as the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks. His behavior is sometimes contraversial (or so one is led to believe by the press). He’s a bazillionaire, but really seems like a pretty down to earth guy. I’ve never met him so I suppose I don’t really know the real deal here, but everytime I’ve seen him or read his writing I have come away thinking either “that dude is the best sports franchise owner their is” or “man, this isn’t just some wanna be jock that got lucky and made some money… this guy has some brains.”

Cuban rarely blogs directly about his team. His typical post are more business / economic related and contain great insights about how businesses should go about making money. For example, in one of his recent posts he discusses how newpapers could turn it around via their online portals. The same logic can be applied to other content providers. I know it sounds simple to say “get the customer’s credit card number”, but that really is a great first step. Then it is easier to convince them to spend money on services on a whim or even a subscription basis. Yes, easier than paypal or simply allowing them to reenter the credit card information. Make it easy and let them know often about the extra services you offer.

I only decided to write this post because I am often struck by Cuban’s knowledge about how to make money. I look at it this way… if I have a billiionaire telling me that I don’t make it easy enough for them to spend their money at my establishment (online or brick / morter), but that they can think of ten offerings I could provide (easily) and I could grow my business / customer base in the process you better believe I’m going to listen and I would encourage others to do the same.

It seems to me that everyone out there who intends to monetize their website wants to know how to get their page rank to a certain level. I can tell you now I have no idea what the answer is to these questions. My best advice is to create useful content and market yourself. Hopefully people will find you interesting enough to link to and that will push up your rank.

Now, because I know that even for me that answer is not “good enough” and I still want to know “how many links do I need to be a PR X” I have collected the following posts from other boards on the subject. Each post will be preceded by the board in which it was found.

Source of the following two: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/35069.htm

Hi all,

Regarding the “how many links” questions, I’ve found a page at seogeeks.com with the following claims:

To get the PR you want, you need about 18 links from pages with the same PR, assuming 50 links per page.

So if you want a PR7, you’ll need links from 18 PR7 pages, assuming each of these pages has about 50 outbound links. Alternatively, you could have 3 links from PR8 pages.

Well, that’s just what they say. I don’t know how current that information is. And can’t remember the exact url 🙂

and…

As a rough guide (assumuing there is an exponential factor of 10 between PR levels) you can say that PR levels need a certain amount of PR ‘points’ passed to them from other pages:

PR1 needs 1 ‘points’
PR2 needs 10 ‘points’
PR3 needs 100 ‘points’
PR4 needs 1000 ‘points’
PR5 needs 10000 ‘points’

9The exponential nature of PR explains why getting to PR 9 and 10 is so tricky)

PR ‘points’given out by a page, again this is a simple example, can be roughly calculated by dividing the above values by the number of outbound links.

e.g. a PR3 with 20 links gives 5 ‘points’ to each page, this would move a page with no other inbound links to a PR1

Assuming that the pages that you get links from have an average of 20 links you would need 20,000 links from PR2 sites to get to a PR5. Likewise 2,000 links from PR3 sites would be required.

The good news is that you would only need 2 such links from PR6 sites to make it to PR5.

There are many more factors to consider such as dampening, the actual PR of a page can be PR?.0 to?.99 and make links worth different amounts from what appears to be thesame PR value etc.

I hope that helps

I like both of those answers. And no I didn’t do the math to see if they are in agreement. But at a glance it is easy to see that the higher rank a page is that links to you the more valuable it will be. Mathematically this is not exacly true (or perhaps more precisely it is not ALWAYS true, but it is USUALLY). Try to get links from others with high ranks. Or get gazillions of links from lower ranked sites.

Here’s a final comment from the same site:

Questions about “how many links” are almost impossible to answer because of the way Page Rank calculation works — the math behind is far from linear.

Here’s a thread that took the Page Rank equation apart to a degree – perhaps it will help you understand why there is no easy answer for your question.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34079.htm

Oh yeah, and supposedly pagerank only updates once a quarter or so. Bah.

This article at the WSJ discusses how businesses (specifially tech / internet businesses) can make money when they “give away” so much product for free.

Here’s the parts I am interested in. I encourage anyone to read the entire article at the link above.

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero — nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods — from music and video to Wikipedia — can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can’t make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that’s two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn’t new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this “two-sided market” model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

In other cases, the same digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as “Freemium,” a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers. It’s an inversion of the old free sample promotion: Rather than giving away one brownie to sell 99 others, you give away 99 virtual penguins to sell one virtual igloo. (Confused? Ask a child: This is the business model for the phenomenally successful Club Penguin.)

With physical stuff, samples must be doled out sparingly — there are real costs to be paid. With bits, the free versions are too cheap to meter and can be spread far and wide.

What about those companies trying to build a business on the Web? In the old days (that would be until September of last year) the model was pretty simple. 1. Have a great idea. 2. Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest possible market. 3. If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4. Repeat until you’re bought by a bigger company.

Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they’re still young.

This is, of course, nothing new in the world of business. But it is a bit of a shock in the Web world, where “attention” and “reputation” are the currencies most in demand, with the expectation that a sufficient amount of either would turn into money someday, somehow.

The standard business model for Web companies that don’t actually have a business model is advertising. A popular service will have lots of users, and a few ads on the side will pay the bills. Two problems have emerged with that model: the price of online ads and click-through rates. Facebook is an amazingly popular service, but it also an amazingly ineffective advertising platform. Even if you could figure out what the right ad to serve next to a high-school girl’s party pictures might be, she and her friends probably won’t click on it. No wonder Facebook applications get less than $1 per 1,000 views (compared to around $20 on big media Web sites).

What about the oldest trick in the book: actually charging people for your goods and services? This is where the real innovation will flourish in a down economy. It’s now time for entrepreneurs to innovate, not just with new products, but new business models.

Take Tapulous, the creator of Tap Tap Revenge, a popular music game program for the iPhone. As in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, notes stream down the screen and you have to hit them on the beat. Millions of people have tried the free version, and a sizable fraction of them were ready and willing to pay when Tapulous offered paid versions built around specific bands, such as Weezer and Nine Inch Nails, along with add-on songs. (The Wall Street Journal is pursuing a strategy of blending free and paid content on its Web site.)

Meanwhile YouTube is still struggling to match its popularity with revenues and Facebook is selling commodity ads for pennies after its effort to charge for intrusive advertising led to a user backlash. And news-sharing site Digg, for all its millions of users, still doesn’t make a dime. A year ago, that hardly mattered: The business model was “build to a lucrative exit, preferably in cash.” But now the exit doors are closed and cash flow is king.

Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever — the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and “Free” has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette’s free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today’s Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them — free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter — but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.

I enjoyed this article very much as someone who gives away a lot and had several arguments with my better half about whether it was okay to give things away. This backs up my position that giving away some things to attract more users maybe some of which will pay for other things is okay.

I saw this post about Virtual Goods and the 7 Deadly Sins on the Bizspark website and it got me curious. What kind of virtual goods can be out there for various websites. I have posted most of the article here because I want it quickly accessible to me as I do some strategic planning, but please go check it out at its source for the parts that I did not include here. The original author “Yi-Jian Ngo” and the original document.