I have recently heard some great things about the brain child site of Seth Godin called Squidoo. If you have not seen it, I do suggest you spend a bit of time there reading some of the lenses.

Squidoo is a social network (yes another one) that is built around the idea of people sharing and exchanging their ideas on business and various other topics. It is a good tool if you are just starting out your business as a visitor.

After going through though, I ask myself why would anyone want to create an account and produce lenses. There is no way to monetize it for your time and there is no link love for you to post. So you are posting content for them so they can make money from your content.

So with that in mind I ask myself why would anyone want to contribute to Squidoo? If you are really helpful and like to provide advice why not start a blog? If you have used Squidoo let me know if I am missing something here.

 

I was using StumbledUpon yesterday and then found this site called PickyDomains. PickyDomains was listed as a company quickly approaching $1 million in sales for 2007. PickyDomains describes their service as…

“If you need a great, memorable, easy to pronounce domain name that exactly describes what your website is all about – you are in the right place. This is what we do. We find available domain names that are descriptive, concise and are easily remembered. And if we can’t find one, or you don’t like any available domain names we suggest – you don’t pay anything.”

So they charge you $50 for this service plus the cost of the domain from what I can tell on their site.

If they are approaching a million dollars in sales that means they have 20,000 customers? If so, that is great, although that means you would have to crank out aproximately 83 domain ideas or so a day. I know myself I would probably  be able to do 1-3 a day.

This also got me thinking, is this a service that we should provide? Do you have trouble finding a good domain? Looking at the domains our customers choose to purchase, I believe that some could use this service.

If this was a service we provided, how should it be structured?

If you live in Surrey you may have heard of the Self Employment and Entrepreneur Development Society (SEEDS). This is a Canadian Federally funded program that helps people on social assistance start there own business.

This program will show you how to write a business plan, do marketing and basic book keeping so your business gets started on the right leg.

They have 3 programs that you can apply for if you are on social assistance:

• Government Program 1
• Government Program 2
• Government & ACCESS Funded Pilot Program 3

The nice thing about the program is you continue to get paid through your social assistance while you work on growing your business.

I was speaking with the Director yesterday and found out that the program is available to anyone in Canada. The only problem is it is only running in Surrey. So if you can make it to Surrey and you are on social assistance then this program is something you should look into.

We are working with SEEDS to see if there any area where we can help with the continued growth of there program in the future.