NOTE: I’ve got some new blogging gigs – primarily for businesses that I’m operating and launching as part of Pure Incubation – and I want to make sure that I’m sharing the content that I’m producing on those blogs here (in case you care!) So when I blog elsewhere, I’m going to include pieces of those posts here and link to the full posts. FYI!

Here’s the article…

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Apparently the media industry is “stunned” that BusinessWeek is for sale. Really? Stunned?

Today’s article in B2B Media Business cites the following:

• - BusinessWeek lost $85 million in 2008
• - BusinessWeek has already lost $20 million in 2009
• - BW’s ad pages declined 17.2% in 2008
• - This year, BW’s ad pages have declined 36.8% compared to the same period last year- This year, BW’s ad pages have declined 36.8% compared to the same period last year
• - BusinessWeek’s online catalogs sellers of viagra and cialis in the usa ad pages have dropped 69% since their high point in 2000
• - Print ad revenue has fallen 59% in the same time period

Why are people stunned that McGraw-Hill would want to offload a business unit that is bleeding so severely? I understand that BusinessWeek’s brand is valuable and important, but most companies – including McGraw-Hill – can’t absorb $80 million in losses year after year.

I suppose that the shock and dismay people feel at the loss of well-established print entities shouldn’t surprise me. Just look at the outrage that people felt at the thought of the Boston Globe possibly closing its doors, even though that publication is on track to lose $85 million this year.

Read the full article on the Sauce Technology blog

I’m a start-up founder just like many of you, and there are days when I wonder if I’m the only one who feels, acts and thinks the way I do. But there are others that have gone before, and you might be surprised to see which tech founder you are most like. Take our quiz and find out your answer to the question: What tech entrepreneur are you most like?

Click here to take the quiz

(UPDATE: I’m going to ask you for an email address at the end of the process. I wanted to warn you up front so that I don’t catch you off guard!)

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One erectile dysfunction viagra of the things that we’re working on at Pure Incubation is launching a variety of software tools for publishers aimed at helping them solve their most crucial business issues. (If you want to know more about those publishing problem areas, read this post.) We’re doing this through our Sauce Technology business unit, and today I want to introduce you to a specific application – Quiz Sauce.

The quiz above was built using the application – give it a whirl and let me know what you think. Here’s the link to take the quiz in case you missed it above – What tech entrepreneur are you most like?

Today we launched a new application at Pure Incubation. It’s an assessment/quiz tool. The application allows us to create multi-page quizzes or assessments with a wide range of question types, point values and responses, and then build results based on the answers that were given by the person taking the test. It’s exciting to launch something new, and I can’t wait to start publishing quizzes, assessments and Websites in a whole range of markets to take advantage of the application’s capabilities.

Like I said, the app launched today and the first quiz is out – What Style Wedding Gown is Right for You? Although this quiz will clearly be the most useful for anyone planning a wedding (and I hope that you’ll forward the link to any bride-to-be that you know), I would love for anyone vigrx reviews reading this post to take the quiz and send me feedback. You can find my contact details here or post your comments to the bottom of this post. Seriously – I want to know what you think about the whole thing, specifically the application, but also about the content of the quiz. All comments, both positive and negative, are welcome.

Since I’m talking about the wedding Websites, here’s one more random bit. On the March 12 episode of The Office, Michael Scott (the show’s “hero”) is talking about a business idea that he has planned. Although his imaginary company is called “shoe-la-la,” I couldn’t help but find it humorous that I actually HAVE a site called Shoella. The names are eerily similar. Here’s the clip – enjoy.

And please send me your comments and feedback!

If you read this blog with any frequency, you already know that I’m in a bit of a “blog slump.” It’s gotten so bad, that the recent series that I wrote took me nearly a month to complete. A month! I didn’t even realize it was that bad until I just went back and looked at the dates. I should have realized that things were dire when people started alerting me to the fact that I completely missed my promise of a second post being “up tomorrow.”

So here’s the thing – I have a blogging problem. Actually, I have a few of them. First, I write long posts. Again, this is not news to anyone who reads this blog, past English teachers, or anyone who has ever received an email or a greeting card from me. I’m wordy. I don’t think that this is an inherent problem; the issue is that it takes me too long to write a blog post. When I was in the early days of blogging, I had time on my hands. Now, my business obligations are taking up a great deal of time and I need to cut back on the amount of time that I spend blogging without cutting back on blogging itself – this has been tricky. Actually, it’s been more than tricky. I’m totally bombing at it.

Second, I have heard from a lot of people that the posts that they enjoy the most are the ones that bring in my personal experiences with starting a business. So I’ve been working on trying to figure out a format that I could use that would incorporate more of that type of content. But I’ve been struggling with trying to figuring out the balance of how to write about what I’m doing without a) sounding like a total prima donna and b) actually including information that will be interesting and/or useful to people. If I start writing about my day-to-day experiences, I am more than a little concerned that it will bore all of you to tears.

Finally, I do enjoy the long-form, analysis and informational writing that I have been doing all along, and I don’t want to give it up.

Those are the confessions.

So starting today, I’m going to try something new. I’m going to start adding a different kind of post to my blog repertoire. I stole this idea from one of my favorite blogs, Dooce. In her blog, Heather Armstrong includes a post called Daily Style, which is a short, daily post that includes a photo and a description of some kind of product that she likes and uses. The idea is that she takes something from her everyday life and writes a bit of commentary about it and includes a picture. The end.

Let me first say that Heather Armstrong does this incredibly well. So well, that this year she won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bloggies. She’s been copied many times before and will be many times again – and what I do will be a cheap rip-off imitation and probably slightly embarrassing, especially if it is compared to her site.

But here’s the thing. Starting a business is a risky thing. It involves a lot of borrowing nuggets of ideas from people who have gone before, mixing them up in a new way and throwing them out there for the world to see, comment on, reject or embrace. The start-up world isn’t pretty or neat. And nothing would ever get done if someone didn’t get an idea and just decide “What the hell. It’s worth a try.”

So here I go with my experiment in blogging more personally about my start-up journey. This is not a resolution – I am not promising a certain number of posts per day or per week, and I’m not sure that I’ll stick with this format forever. After all, an entrepreneur must be flexible and willing to make quick strategic changes. But based on my confessions, I need to try something new. And although I can’t be sure that this plan will work, I can at least remind myself that the experiment is part of the journey.

Photo by miss pupik

This month marks a milestone for Pure Incubation in the medical market – we just launched our first directory-based site: Orthopedic Product Guide. The site features more than 400 product categories with 1,200 companies, 6,000 products and hundreds of orthopedics resources, including white papers, surgical techniques, case studies, videos and product literature. Come on over the site and browse around if you’re interested; and if you’re really interested and have any feedback or suggestions, those are defintiely welcome, as well.

Up next – 16 more sites focused on various medical specialties.

The beginning of September was the one year birthday of my company Pure Incubation. And last week, my friends surprised me by throwing me (and my company) a surprise party to celebrate! I had no idea that they were planning this party (who would?!) but it was so fun to have a bunch of my friends, some of my family and a variety of egg-themed food to celebrate.

Everyone wore a Pure Incubation label on their shirt, and some of them (like Moe and Kim) wore blue and white.

The egg cake was as delicious as it was cute.

I am a firm believer that it’s important to celebrate milestones. Anniversaries, birthdays, project launches – in my opinion, they all need to be marked and noted, with proper gift giving, eating & drinking, and celebratory toasts.

Today is the first birthday of Pure Incubation. To celebrate, I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner. But perhaps the most fitting tribute was that today was also my first full-time employee’s first day of work. Today I spent four hours out of the office in meetings, but even so, we got more done today together than I get done in most days of working alone, even when I put in 12+ hours.

The timing was coincidental, but it turns out that a new employee was probably the best gift that I could have given Pure Incubation on its first birthday. Here’s to many more (birthdays AND employees)!

This week’s article for The Industry Standard is more personal than other articles that I’ve written for them in the past. It’s here: How to Make the Leap from Corporate Hack to Entrepreneur. I give some tips, but mostly the article is a first-person account of my transition from working at a big company to founding my start-up.

In the article I mention a vacation that I took to Arizona. That trip happened in May 2007 – Chris and I went to Phoenix, Sedona & The Grand Canyon to celebrate our first anniversary. At the time we went, I wasn’t thrilled with my job any longer. I was getting the itch to leave, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I loved the people I worked with, I had a good position, relatively good money…but I wasn’t really happy anymore and I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I went to Taliesin West.

I am not a huge architecture fan. I mean, I like architecture, but I don’t know much about it. Chris studied architecture for a year or two in school before switching to industrial design, but even so, going to visit an architecture-related exhibit isn’t what we would normally choose to do. But we were on a road trip and wanted to stop wherever the wind blew us, and however it worked out, we ended up at Taliesin West.

We took the tour. It was an hour-long, guided. In the tour, we went through various buildings on the school campus – Wright’s office, the studio and gardens, the private gathering room and even the family’s bedrooms. All along the way the guide kept telling us all these cool facts and interesting things, totally creative stuff that had my mind racing. Here are a few things that I saw and learned:

– There was an observation point on the grounds where Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his wives (he had three during his lifetime) used to bring chairs to every single night in the spring and summer, to look at the valley around them. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. Standing at that point today, the entire sprawl of Phoenix/Scottsdale was visible.

– The students who attended the school actually built the school before they could attend. They used only the materials that were available on the land. All of Wright’s designs were built to make sure that the buildings blended into the surroundings, and brought the outside inside, as well. This is called organic architecture, and he was way ahead of his time with it.

– Even after the grounds were built, new students didn’t get to live in the buildings. Their first year, they had to go out into the surrounding wilderness area and build their own dwelling on a slab that was there for that purpose. This was like a crash course in architecture – if your dwelling wasn’t good, you would be living with the insects and other animals. Married students often brought their families to experience this with them.

– Frank Lloyd Wright was a major movie buff, so there is a movie theater on the grounds. It’s pretty dark inside the theater, however, so he had the builders dig small cut-outs into the rock along the floor, and installed lights – the first track lighting ever.

– When Wright was a boy, there was a certain set of blocks that he always played with – Froebel blocks. He often credited these blocks as laying the foundation for the basic principles of architecture that he used throughout his career.

Ok, so those are some random things, and you might read them and think “so what?” Or you might think that some are cool and others are mundane. But I left Taliesin West with my mind racing about all the ideas that I had heard, and with the need to be creative burning up in my chest.

It took me a bit of time before I eventually left my job to start Pure Incubation. But this visit to Taliesin West started the avalanche. After this visit, I knew in my heart that I had to leave my corporate gig.

And this visit also reminded me just how important it is to find things that inspire us. To visit new places, see new things, meet new people, take a chance on something unexpected. You never know where inspiration might strike.

These pictures are all from various people on Flickr – all better than any of the pictures I took that day. They are all from Taliesin West.

Photo by andy54321

Photo by bluecanary_dreams

Photo by bluecanary_dreams

Photo by andy54321

My company has a lot of blogs for the various businesses that I’m starting – 52 to be exact. Most of them are run on WordPress, which I really like, one is run on an old install of TypePad (which is clunky, but might be because I need to update), and one is run on Tumblr.

I love Tumblr. I love the user interface, the way that you can post quick snippets of things. Quotes, pictures, text, links…it is fun to use. And the templates are awesome. The Cara Austin blog is on Tumblr, and it’s a delight to update every day.

But there is a fundamental problem with Tumblr that I wasn’t aware of before I started using it – the search engines don’t seem to like it. In the two months since I have been posting (every weekday starting March 13, 123 posts total), the blog has only received 17 visitors from Google. Every one of those visits, except one, had the term “Cara Austin blog” or “Cara Austin Tumblr” as the search term.

This is a major problem for a commercial blog. I have a personal Tumblr that I use for my own things, notes, things I want to remember – and I don’t care if no one ever comes to that site. But for Cara Austin, a musician who needs to get her name out there and needs to sell albums, this is a big issue.

I didn’t know this about Tumblr. I didn’t know that the pages wouldn’t be indexed well (or show up high) on Google. I knew that Tumblr doesn’t have comments. And I knew that Tumblr didn’t have a search engine built in. These things I decided to live with.

But I didn’t know that Tumblr had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem.

I could no longer ignore the fact after I launched another new blog on WordPress on April 23, put up a few posts, and that blog starting receiving more traffic, from a wider variety of search terms, in a much shorter time period.

Here’s a little chart to illustrate:

And so I’m leaving Tumblr. I’m leaving with a tear in my eye, but I’m leaving nonetheless.

Photo by Jaye_Elle

That was my alternate title for the story I just wrote for The Industry Standard – up now on the site: 10 reasons that start-ups absolutely should outsource (almost) everything.

From the titles I’ve chosen, it’s pretty clear that I am a huge fan of outsourcing. Since I am the only full-time employee of my company, I am a big outsourcer. Outsourcing has been a great way for me to scale quickly without breaking the bank. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t rehash everything here, but if you want to read about my experiences with outsourcing, here are some choice selections:

– Globalization, outsourcing and Pure Incubation
– How to hire a Web designer using eLance
– How to prepare for the globalization of your Internet business

And I found out today that all this outsourcing has had a positive impact on my business – for the first time (March 2008), I was in the black.

I am a fan of celebrating the small victories (and believe me, it was small), so I’ll be celebrating this weekend. Have a good one.

Photo by bfick