April :: 2009 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

When it comes to publishing magazines, whether in offline, “dead tree” format or online, my friend Larry Genkin knows his oats. Which stands to reason, given that he has worked with over 125 publications, including USAToday, BusinessWeek, Forbes, FastCompany, and Inc.

Now Larry is sharing his knowledge with those of us to whom the idea of having our very own magazine is appealing. And thinking today about his program and what I wanted to write about it, I realized this could be a terrific opportunity for many professionals working from home – some of whom, let’s face it, might not have been thinking a year ago that they would be working from home any time soon.

Tonight, Thursday April 16th at 8 pm EDT, Larry is presenting a free workshop, How to Launch Your Own (Profitable) Industry Magazine in 3 Months. You can get the details at this link – when you get there just click on the Free Workshop link at the very top of the screen.

The Transparency Bit

Having sat through his presentation of the subject a few weeks ago, I was so impressed that I teamed up with Larry to help him promote his program. So yes, I have a vested interest here, but I’m ok about that, because I think what Larry has to offer is quite fascinating and in fact offers many people a practical, achievable and personally fulfilling way to establish a “nice little earner” – or nice big one – without having to leave home to do it.

Questions, questions

But who of us can afford to produce a magazine? Doesn’t it cost a lot of money to set up? Wouldn’t you need a big office and a lot of staff? And doesn’t it take years to learn the ropes about publishing before you can produce a magazine of your own? At least one that anyone would take any serious notice of.

Larry answers these and other questions in his free online seminar and I believe many people will be surprised at what is now possible in the world of publishing and how some traditional obstacles to entry and success need no longer play a role.

What are you going to do with your industry knowledge, anyway?

In this current economic climate, with so many people losing their jobs, or people who are still employed but looking at retirement or just a change of pace, there’s one thing I am sure of, namely that there are a whole lot of people with a whole lot of knowledge about the industries they’ve been working in, perhaps for decades, and who don’t know what to do with that knowledge.

Would producing a magazine that everyone in their industry came to see as a “must-read” be an interesting idea?

Larry’s ideas on this – based soundly on his own extensive knowledge and hard-won experience, are quite eye-opening.

But actually, you don’t even have to be an industry expert

Another aspect of what Larry offers is to show how any of us, without being experts in particular industries but with a modicum of intelligence and a healthy dose of get up and go, can develop and produce an industry-leading, profitable magazine in a manageable timeframe.

The link again, and remember to click on the Free Workshop link at the very top of the screen.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is something I keep reminding myself I need to learn more about. I’ve got some of it worked out and have found invaluable the free, downloadable guide Google released some time ago – Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. But to improve my knowledge and hopefully the findability of my blogs, I’m embarking on some self-education. So my plan is to focus on something about SEO once a week, at the beginning of the weekend, and report here in a series which I am grandly titling SEO Saturday.

Today I’m looking at the question of whether hyphens or dashes in URLs are better than underscores. As the title of this post declares, it seems that the verdict is no contest in favor of hyphens.

Why would this question concern me?

Well, having spent about half an hour today trying to find a good domain name for a new project and discovering the top level, dot com version of each name I picked was not available, I got to thinking about using a hyphenated (i.e. with a dash or dashes) domain name, just as an SEO expert colleague of mine does regularly. In the particular instance this would make quite good sense, because each of the dot com names I looked at was parked, that is it was not being used for a “real live” website or blog. So I would not, on the face of it, be competing with someone active in the same market space with a live site and the same site name.

And indeed the dot com domain version of the ideal name I wanted for the new site proved to be available in the hyphenated version.

Maybe it was time to get over my prejudice in favor of “continuous” domain names and get into the hyphenated variety?

Then, no doubt because I was thinking about all this, I noticed in my FriendFeed stream a video by Google searchmeister Matt Cutts about hyphenated versus underscored URLs. Not that I’d been thinking about using underscores, but the video was brief and I found it very interesting for the implicit insight it gave into how the people behind the scenes at Google think and work.

Verdict on the particular question? Google’s machines read hyphens in URLs as separators, i.e. indicating separate words and thus, Matt indicates, hyphens are better than underscores. At least, better for now. He acknowledges that they might change the algorithm one day.

The next question is: given the choice between a hyphenated dot com name and a non-hyphenated, “wholeword” dot net, or dot org or other alternative to dot com, which is better?

I’ve done a bit of searching online but don’t know what the “right” answer is to that, although there does appear to be a consensus of “one hyphen good, two or more hyphens bad”.

Advice and comments welcome.