Entrepreneurship is one of those ephemeral qualities whose teach-ability people love to argue about. The plain and simple fact is that the skills necessary to any successful entrepreneur are just that, skills, and can therefore be taught. What can’t be taught are the personal qualities of passion, perseverance, and confidence, which are just as vital to the success of every entrepreneur. However, just because you are not born with these qualities does not mean you can’t develop them, you have to learn to find them within yourself.

Learning Entrepreneurial Skills

Educating an entrepreneur is such a complex topic that it was understandably avoided by universities for most of the last century. Entrepreneurs must learn to be generalists, proficient not only in their trade but also in diverse business skills such as selling, marketing, leadership, team building, law, and finance. Furthermore, an entrepreneur wants to learn these skills in their most practical sense. Reading about the sales process in a book is very different from sitting down with a customer and selling them a product.

However, a strong theoretical background in a topic always helps with its application, so it is a combination of book learning and on-the-job training that produces the best entrepreneurial skills. This can be seen in the fact that many successful entrepreneurs have a string of business failures (otherwise known as valuable on-the-job training) before their first major successes.

What does this mean to your if you are a budding entrepreneur? Learn and practice. Set time aside every day to read, listen, and learn about business. There is an almost endless supply of valuable business resources both on the web and in print, and you should take full advantage of them. Then, apply the most relevant ideas to your work and your business. Try things out and keep what works.

Developing the Entrepreneurial Bug

The entrepreneurial bug is what people are thinking about when they argue that entrepreneurship can’t be taught. It is the passion, the perseverance, and the confidence that drives a person as he overcomes obstacle after obstacle during the launch of a business. Truthfully, I agree that these qualities can’t be taught in a classroom. They are not skills or concepts.

But just because you can’t teach passion, perseverance and confidence does not mean you can’t learn them. Think about it, everyone at some point in their life has experienced passion for something. The problem is that these passions are often brushed aside as impractical pipe dreams and people learn to give up on them. You have to nurture your passions and help them to grow.

And what about perseverance? From childhood we are taught that mistakes are a bad thing and we learn to avoid them. This lets us operate in our comfort zone and teaches us to give up quickly when we fail. But perseverance and discipline are like muscles, and we need only exercise them slowly and regularly to improve them. Start by making and keeping small promises to yourself, and by trying things again, just one more time at first. It time, you can make a quantum leap in your ability to stick with a project or an idea despite adversity.

And finally there is confidence. Most people agree that confidence is a quality that can be developed. As a person learns, grows, and experiences success and failure he learns to trust himself and his judgement. The trick to keep your confidence growing is to keep learning and growing. Being complacent and coasting along at your job or your life creates a lack of self-confidence because your comfort zone narrows and obstacles begin to appear insurmountable.

A Free Entrepreneurial Curriculum

Entrepreneurship can be learned by an individual, if not necessarily taught to him in a classroom. As a budding entrepreneur you have to take your education into your own hands and tailor your curriculum to what you’re passionate about and interested in. Part of being an entrepreneur is not waiting for someone else to do it for you.

The resources available to an entrepreneur today are vast, inexpensive, and valuable. There are countless blogs from successful and experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Check out the blog of Guy Kawasaki or that of Joel Spolsky for example.

Also, online you can find free interviews, reading lists, online courses, associations and mentorship programs. One of my favorite resources is the Educators Corner at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. They have course syllabi, videos, case studies, and a fantastic podcast, all for free. One of my favorite entrepreneur interview programs is Venture Voice.

Again, get out there and find material that works for you. And if you only take away one thing from this article, let it be this - Don’t stop learning.

Tags: entrepreneurship, personal development, education, personal growth

This is my first article in the series about making money on the web. I chose to start with an article on domaining and domainers because once the initial investment is made, it is the business that requires the least attention. This makes it one of the best models of a residual income business on the web. However, this is not to say that domaining is easy. Working as a domainer simply means that you have to invest all your attention, effort and money up front, while researching what domains to buy.

Definition of Domaining

Domaining is basically the business of buying domain names as an investment. When thinking about this business, a good approach is to think of domain names as real estate. Think of them as pieces of virtual internet-land that have some intrinsic value, where the majority of that value stems from their location and from their degree of development. Their "location" is akin to their visibility on the web. Short recognizable names have the best location, and so they are also the most expensive. The buildings on a piece of land are akin to a website developed at a domain name. The website is likely to attract visitors either through it’s content or functionality, and therefore increase the value of the domain name.

Like any mature property business, most of the valuable names have already been snatched up and are only available at a premium. Speculative names are still available, as are names with unproven extensions (.info, .biz, .us, etc.) A big difference in the domain world though is that new names with potential are available all the time, as new phrases and trends become popular, as old domain names expire, and as new technologies emerge.

Monetizing a Domain Name

There are a million way to monetize a domain name if you are willing to develop a website on it, but since this article is about the purest form of domaining, I will only address ways to monetize domain names without developing them.

Reselling Domains - As with any piece of property, your domain may be worth more to someone else than you paid for it. This may be the case if you develop a knack for coming up with brandable names ahead of time (ie. google, digg, myspace, zappos), or if you manage to snap up names related to a developing trend or idea (ie. bird flu, wimax, AJAX). This is a speculative way of making money from domains, but your initial investment of $6-9 per domain won’t break the bank and might create a hefty return. Once you buy a few domain names, list them for sale on websites such as Sedo.com and DomainState.com to see if any of them get picked up. Remember, patience is a virtue.

Parking Domains - On the web, targeted traffic is worth money. Targeted traffic are simply visitors interested in a specific topic. If your domain names get traffic (more on this later) you can monetize that traffic by parking your domains with a domain parking service such as sedo.com, domainsponsor.com or fabulous.com. You simply register with the service for free, point your domains to their DNS servers, and voila, you’re done. The service puts up a simple one page website on your domain that has advertiser links and information based on the keywords and category associated with your domain name. When visitors follow those links, you share the revenue generated with the domain parking service.

Finding Domain Names

There are many different strategies for coming up with and researching domain names to buy. There is plenty of (well researched) speculation out there, but there are also many domainers buying names with the intention of creating passive income. For this, the domainers buy domains that receive traffic that can be monetized.

The simplest way that a domain receives traffic without having a website on it is through type-ins. We’ve all been responsible for type-ins before when we went straight to the address bar and typed yahoo.com or money.com or bored.com. Sites such as cellphones.com and business.com get hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors a day through type-ins. Often, people will type their search terms directly into the address bar with .com, hoping to find information of interest. This behavior is characteristic of an internet newbie, but keep in mind that there are more newbies on the internet every day, and as broadband becomes more widely available, this is a trend that is going to continue.

Research time is the biggest investment a domainer makes before buying a name. A great free tool that I use for domain research is Domain All-in-One from DomainState. It allows you to quickly check the availability of domains, as well as look up keywords on Overture and domain popularity via Alexa. Below are a few strategies for picking and finding domain names.

Speculation - If you have a good head for names and can come up with catchy ones that might one day be a company’s next product or brand name, give it a try. Also try to spot upcoming trends and catch phrases, and register names related to them. Names in other languages, and names in other Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .info, .us, .biz, etc. are also quite open to speculation. Remember though that speculation is just that, and there is no guarantee of a future payoff.

Type-in Traffic - Most obvious keywords and phrases have already been registered, but new ones are coming into the public consciousness all the time. New music trends such as reggaeton, new global scares such as bird flu, and new technologies such as wimax present the early bird with an opportunity to register keywords and phrases that are likely to get more and more type-in traffic. Keep your eyes and ears open and do a little research every day to see what is available.

Typos - Misspellings of popular domains get traffic through type-ins. This includes domains such as gogle.com or yahooo.com, but also less obvious ones such as celphones.com and homelaons.com. These domains can be lucrative because you can park these domains using the right keyword and create instant revenue. For coming up with likely typos and determining their likelihood, I’ve found SearchSpell to be a very useful tool.

Expired Domain Names - Domain names expire every day without their owners bothering to re-register them. Expired domains may have hosted websites, portals, blogs, or businesses beforehand, and as a result they may have incoming links from other sites and they may come up in the search engines. This means that they are likely to get some traffic, which you can monetize through Sedo or other means. Since this is a such a profitable strategy, you most likely will have to go through a drop-catcher such as Pool, SnapNames, or NameWinner and pay a premium for the expired domain at an auction. Also, keep in mind that the traffic numbers at these sites are likely to drop over time as they fall in the search engine results and users realize the old page is no longer there.

Buying Proven Domains - If you have some capital laying around and are willing to pay a premium for an income stream, then you can buy domains that already have establish traffic and income. These domains can cost anywhere from the 1999 bubble price of $7.5 million for business.com, to more reasonable 5- and 6-figure prices of proven domains today, to a few hundred dollars for a domain with a minor income stream. Good places to start looking are SnapNames, Sedo, and the For Sale forum at DomainState. In this case, your investment might take a few months to a few years before you generate a positive return, but the security of an income has always been an expensive commodity.

Next Steps

If you are new to domaining, take time to learn the business and hold on to your wallet for now. There is a lot of great information out there at resources such as DomainState and DNJournal. Their articles and discussions are a great way to avoid many costly mistakes yourself and to learn where to invest your time and eventually your dollars.

Once you have a grasp of the business and enough confidence to get going, go ahead and start experimenting! Don’t spend large sums of money up front or buy hundreds of domain names at once. But do get started buying a few; one of the beauties of starting in this business is that you can register a domain for the price of a burger. Check out 1and1.com and NameCheap.com. Put them up on Sedo, advertise them for sale, see what you get. And if you want to take the development route, go ahead and put a website up on them.

Be consistent and have fun. Learn about the business daily and try out new strategies until you find one that you’re comfortable with. Play your cards right and you too could soon be making money while you sleep.

The range of opportunity out there for profiting from a domain is astounding. Strategies go from the simple to the insanely complex, to the inspired. Some appear more profitable than others, and some apply more to certain kinds of domain names. Some require little or no work, while others require full-blown teams for development. As I venture into the world of Automatic Income Sites (AIS), I’ve found some strategies that appeal to me and others that definitely don’t. I plan to start spelling them out here in a new series of posts titled “How to Make Money on the Web.” Keep in mind that I am a newbie at this, and the series is written as a learning exercise from my point of view.

Erik over at Good at Everything is rocking it. We both decided to jump on the web 2.0 boat of possibilities around the same time in November of last year, and since then he has not only kept up a well updated and interesting blog, but also launched two other sites. The first was Aloha Update, and the most recent is Sprint Rants. Did I mention that Erik holds a full time job, a full time girlfriend, and he surfs, runs, golfs, and plays tennis on a regular basis? Frankly, I don’t know where he finds the time, and for that he gets my Kudos!

In his latest entry, Erik talks a little about what motivated to start Sprint Rants, and I have to say that being a Sprint customer myself, I know exactly what he means. Sprint is alright with me when it comes to reception, but their customer service - let’s just say it leaves something to be desired. I have no doubt that there are many unhappy customers out there looking for a sounding board and a place to vent, and they might very well find it in Sprint Rants. What’s more, congregating unhappy Sprint customers in the same place could give a voice with the corporate giant, and allow them to share tips on how to work the system. For example, because I called Sprint and complained so much about a year ago, I am now on a "special" plan that gives me a ton of minutes for a reduced rate.

Way to go Big E!

I finally got around to it.  I’ve been wanting to do a little renovation and house cleaning around here, and I finally got the process under way.  There was quite a bit to be done - sprucing up the layout, changing the color scheme, coming up with a logo, changing how the categories and archives display, implementing a favicon, etc. etc.  Needless to say, it was a long process, but I’m happy with the result.  Not ecstatic, but happy. There is still much room for improvement, and the site still looks amateurish, but all the steps were in the right direction.

I’m not surprised that I wasn’t able to get the graphics work exactly how I envisioned it. Graphic design is something I’ve only done on a handful of occasions, and on top of that I’m not in touch with my artsy side.  What’s more, it took me AGES.  I did learn how to use a few new tools and techniques along the way though; it’s always fun to learn something new.

But while we’re on the subject, what do you think of my logo?

Like I said, after going through the process of design and implementing over the last few days, I have a new respect for graphic designers.  It’s hard work, and there are some people out there doing amazing stuff, and doing it quickly.  And there is a lot of knowledge involved.  Color theory, layout management, fonts, CSS, and the many tools out there used to create and manipulate graphics.  Props.  Next time, I’m finding myself a professional.  Next time, I’ll hopefully be able to afford a professional

[Danger - disconnected musings ahead] Lost in thought, that’s where I’ve been.  Well actually, I’ve been lots of places, but for the last week or so, thinking has been my excuse.  I’ve had a lot of time to myself, and since I’m starting a new stage in my life I find myself with a renewed vigor for thinking, learning, and reading.  Before that, however, I was completing my move out of Honolulu.  I had two crazy-fun weeks before leaving, during which I had to intermingle a healthy amount of packing, shipping, and wrapping things up, with beaches, friends, dancing, and good-byes.  And since February 1st, I’ve been settling into Los Angeles.  I’m currently staying with my girlfriend Lisa, and it’s a funny contrast to the two weeks prior.  It’s quiet and peaceful during the day and fun and chill in the evenings.  With all the time I spent planning my departure, I didn’t spend even a minute planning my arrival and so I find myself with gobs of time.  It’s good because I need the time to think, work on my mindset, and adjust to the change, but it also means that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reading blogs and being lost in thought.  I only hope I’m learning something from it.

But back to my two weeks in Honolulu.  My sister Rocio came to visit from Buenos Aires for those last two weeks and brought a friend.  It was great, because in playing tour guide for them, I got to see all my favorite parts of the island again and said my quiet good-byes.  Also, it meant that I kept incredibly busy, going sightseeing to different beaches and parts of the island, going rock climbing, surfing, hiking, dancing, camping, drinking, kayaking, and partying.  Quite a list.  I also got to take the time to see my friends and say my good-byes, though I like to think of them more as “see you laters” because you never know when you will be seeing each other again.  (And I will most definitely return to Oahu, repeatedly) There’s a lot of good karma in goodbyes.  You realize how much you’re going to miss people and how big a part of your life they’ve really been.  Everyone gives themselves permission to be mushy and express their love.  Those days left me feeling nostalgic, but happy about my experience.  I also took time to do moving away stuff like packing and shipping, cleaning, settling bills and address changes.  One thing I obviously did not do, was blogging.

I arrived in LA just over a week ago, and I’m happy to be here.  I really do look at this like a new stage in my life, which is at once exciting and daunting.  I’m excited to be close to Lisa again so we can see where this relationship will take us.  I’m excited about striking out on my own, and for the first time in a long while, I’m excited about working.  At the same time it’s scary not knowing what the future holds even two weeks from now, not having a secure income, or a routine, or even much of a plan.

But I am settling well into life here.  I take the time to be with Lisa and enjoy her company.  I’m taking the time to reconnect with old friends and my sister Marisol, who goes to college here.  And I’m shaping my time into a viable routine.  I wake up early, splash some water on my face, eat something quick, and then get to work.  Before lunch I take a break to exercise and listen to an audiobook or a podcast, shower, then I eat and rest a bit.  Then I get back to work until evening, when I either spend time with Lisa, or friends, or both.  This is the ideal routine that I’m working towards right now, and I have the order right, if not the timing.  Also, work right now really consists of apartment hunting, more moving tasks, reading, learning, and consuming blogs and forums for ideas, techniques, and inspiration.  I plan to steadily shift my work focus to more “producing” tasks.

Overall, my outlook is positive and excited.  Stay tuned in as I hopefully start to “produce” more blog posts