BSc, MBA and entrepreneur for the last 30 years.
Born in Melbourne, Australia Michael has been working in the BBS and Internet industry for the past 30 years. He has worked with the Australian Institute of Management and was in demand to present highly successful seminars in creativity, management and Internet marketing both in Australia and overseas.
Michael has a bachelor in Electronics and Computer Science and while completing his MBA in the 90's he founded a successful ISP. He later raised several million dollars in venture capital to develop an innovative marketing technology. Michael then accepted an invitation to speak on the new technology at the “World Marketing Conference” in Bangkok.
Michael served for 6 years as a director of the Australian Internet Industry Association (iia.net.au), the last two of which he was the vice-chairman. He contributed to forming policies on the Internet with both industry and government. A number of them related to; privacy, cyber-crime, copyright and he also chaired the committee for online advertising standards.
Over the last 13 years Michael has developed an extensive domain portfolio and after speaking at a number of domain conferences he made the decision to found ParkLogic. For the past 7 years ParkLogic has been working with monetisation companies and some of the largest domain owners in the world to extract every penny of value from domain traffic. ParkLogic is fanatical about providing properly structured tests, statistical analysis and superior results and customer service.
Michael has been writing his blog, whizzbangsblog.com, for the past 8 years in an effort to help share some of his experience with the domaining community. There are now over 600 articles and videos on the site that discuss a huge range of domaining topics.
A number of years ago Michael gained his private pilot's license and has over 50 articles published in a major Aviation magazine. He has been married to Roselyn for the past 27 years and has three wonderful children.
Advertising
BSc, MBA and entrepreneur for the last 30 years.
We manage the traffic to just over 1 million domains for clients and from experience I would head down the either of three routes: 1. Park the domain - you should get around 20RPM or about $800/month in revenue. This is an easy solution but destroys a lot of the value in the website. 2. Sell the spots to advertisers on a monthly basis. I do this with my own blog and make around $30K/year with little effort. 3. Insert video and other advertising into the website. You'll probably max out around 15RPM but you maintain the sites presence. I hope that this helped you out.
Corporate Law
BSc, MBA and entrepreneur for the last 30 years.
From my experience it's better to setup the IP company as a completely separate entity. There can then be a contractual relationship between the OP company and the IP company. This will assist in protecting the IP in the case of any legal action against the OP company. For instance, if the OP company is sued due to "bad advice" then the IP is not part of the law suit. The challenge then is to ensure that the directors of the both companies are different.....as any law suits of this nature often end up throwing the directors in as well! This structure gives you the greatest amount of flexibility in your business in the event of a sale. Quite often a purchaser wants the IP but not any of the potential liabilities (or skeletons) of the OP company. You can sell the IP company off as a clean entity and gracefully close down the OP company. I wish you all the best in the venture!
Start-ups
BSc, MBA and entrepreneur for the last 30 years.
The first thing that I'd do is a SWOT analysis. What are Strengths of your idea (eg. it's completely unique), what are the Weaknesses (eg. technical problems), Opportunities (eg. market size) and Threats (eg. competitors). This will help form the basis of your thinking in developing a business plan around which a key component is the cashflow. You can do all of this without actually spending large sums of cash. Lastly, in my own company we have a saying, "Build the rusty mini-bike before the Harley Davidson." In other words, do everything manually and don't automate a thing and see if your idea actually works as a business concept. I've seen too many businesses try and build the ultimate solution right out of the gate only to discover that they didn't actually have a market for the product. Whatever you do.....define the rusty mini-bike and work out the cycle from advertising, through to customer purchasing your product/service. Most importantly.....are they coming back.
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