Those people are wrong, and if you are one of those people then I’d like to point out that you’re not the only one who believes this and I’m glad you’re reading this post.

Cash-Flow is basically what the name says it is, it is the flow (movement) of cash (money) coming into (incomes) and going out of (expenses) of the business. Businesses are required to create a “Cash Flow Forecast” as part of their financial statement, and the forecast states the movement of cash through investing, financing (long-term financing and dividends) and operations (current assets and liabilities).

As a result this means that Cash-Flow is essential to the liquidity or solvency of the business. In other words, businesses need to keep a close eye on their Cash-Flow to ensure they can afford to make the payments to their creditors. If businesses correctly forecast they can anticipate periods where they won’t have enough cash in the business to pay their creditors which allows them to make decisions on purchases, as well as, provide the business with the ability to get an extended overdraft or loan to cover the period of negative cash flow.

Cash Flow Positive is where the businesses long-term cash inflows are exceeding its long-term cash outflows. Note: It is vitally important that you realise that just because a business is bringing in more cash it does not mean that is it profitable (and vice versa).

In order to help you understand this, I am going to use Twitter since this was part of the reason that led me to writing the post. This is because there have been reports all over the internet that Twitter is profitable. The likes of Bloomberg, Mashable, BusinessWeek, GigaOm etc all reported that Twitter was profitable, and yet all of them were wrong. Why are they wrong? Twitter isn’t actually profitable, they are cash-flow positive. Twitter have raised $155M in Venture Capital and yet because, Twitter is reportedly pulling in $25M/year from the content deals with Microsoft and Google respectively they’ve decided to claim Twitter is profitable.

Twitter will only become profitable when they have ‘repaid’ the $155M investment back to the venture capitalists and have excess money after the ‘repayment’ has been made.  This is because, Profit is essentially Total Revenue minus Total Costs and if the businesses Total Revenue exceeds the Total Costs they are profitable and for Twitter they are essentially in debt of around $155 Million and when that amount is ‘repaid’ they will become profitable. Until then they are cash-flow positive.

However, it is likely that Twitter’s investment is not debt financing. Therefore, another example of this would be a manufacturing company who purchase equipment to produce goods. However, the firm is experiencing financial difficulty and cannot take out any further loans from banks (or other financial institutions) so as a result, they decide to sell half of their manufacturing equipment. As a result of this sale, the firm will be cash-flow positive due to the fact they have sold manufacturing equipment however, they will not make a profit on this as the items have been used and they will have sold them for liquidation prices.

I hope this helps you understand the difference between Profitability and being Cash-Flow Positive, and from an investment perspective it is important to note, as highlighted by the example above, that a business can be cash-flow positive yet not be profitable, which is why when investing you should analyze income statements and cash-flow statements and not one or the other.

This leads me to my point that what is excluded from your site is what defines it – as this will make your site different to the competition and provide it with an identity at the same time.

When relaunching Profit Baron, I decided that it was going to have a sense of direction and that it was going to be a Personal Entrepreneurial Blog. In other words it will provide you with details of my life, my business ventures as well as, provide you with posts relating to the internet and entrepreneurship. This would be the opposite of pumping out posts on the latest widget or ad network or even pumping posts loaded with affiliate links as I do not believe that this provides you with value – and if there is a time where it does provide you with value then they will be obviously discussed on Profit Baron.

Now, I’m not saying you have to be unique as it is virtually impossible to do that – every blogger will repeat themselves (and contradict themselves) however, what I am saying is by controlling what you are deciding to publish on your website you are influencing the perception of your website and thus defining your website.

So if you are an online publisher ask yourself, what are you publishing and what does that say about your website? What are you covering/not covering? How does this relate to your competition? This will allow you to decide how you want to build your site as it will help you to stop posting content on particular topics whilst providing more content on other topics and this is will help you create an identity in your niche and define your website.

There are four methods which I have tried to find long tail keywords each having their advantages and disadvantages and I will explain each of these methods along with some advantages and disadvantages so you can decide which one is the best method for you.

Method 1. Keyword Analytic and Tracking Programs

I order to use a keyword analytic/tracking programme you will need to place a few lines of code into your site, so they can recommended long-tail keywords specifically related to your website.

Having tried a few keyword analytic/tracking programmes for myself, I found several problems with the ones I used. Firstly, if the website is new they are useless as they won’t be able to provide any long tail keyword suggestions due to you not getting any traffic from the search engines. Moreover, if you are getting some search engine traffic and the site is new then you will also receive the suggestions slowly which is annoying as you can’t plan to develop content in advance which match these keywords.  Secondly, on the other side of the spectrum if you have a website which receives a considerable amount of search traffic, they give you too many suggestions and on several occasions provided far too many to implement. Moreover,  if you decide you would like to filter and select specific keywords off the lists provided be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time with these programmes as the user interface is poor which makes it really hard to group, sort and tag keywords according to your priorities. Finally, they don’t provide a search volume measure for the long tail keywords they suggest which again means you will have to spend time using a search volume analyzer to find out which long tail keywords you should prioritize.

Method 2. Monitor Internal Searches

I haven’t tracked them on Profit Baron yet to create content maybe I should although, I have used this method on other websites I own/have owned and by monitoring what keyword phrases users are searching for on your website this allows you to create create content directly related to what they are searching for.

Method 3. Analyse Your Competition

This is an awesome method because, the competitor has already done the hard part for you – finding the long tail keywords and all you need to do is discover what those are. I believe that there are only two ways they’re the only ones I know to find what your competitors keywords are which is by visiting their website and analysing it by viewing their page source to find their title, meta tags and back links. However, this approach can take a significant amount of time but the benefit is that the research is detailed and you will understand your competition in much greater detail. The other method is a faster approach and this is by using a keyword parsing tool.

Note: This method depends on your websites rank in search engines, its link profile, on-site optimisation etc to ensure that you have a better chance of ranking better than your competition in the search engines.

Method 4.  Develop Natural Long Tail Keywords

This is the easiest and simplest way to develop long tail keywords as it requires little to no research at all. This is because, all you have to do is update your website with new content regularly or more frequently by adding new pages and core keyword-friendly content. The key is frequency because, being more frequent allows you to increase your visibility in the search engines and in turn will help to increase search engine traffic.

In order to discover how to bring more search engine traffic to your website you need to understand the Long Tail theory and how to apply this theory.  If you’re not interested too lazy to read the Wikipedia link then basically long tail keywords are multi-phrase search queries which are far more targeted than a main keyword topic as they specifically are targeted to information a user is looking for. In order words, by targeting low-volume search queries rather then dominating the major ones you will receive more traffic to your website!

For instance let’s say that the main keyword is “Business” then you would have the following long tail keywords:

• How to start a business
• How to write a business plan
• The benefits of getting a business mentor

The examples listed above are what real users are searching for and by optimising your website to target these long tail keywords by creating content for them then you are likely to get far more traffic then if you ranked for “Business”.

Firstly by adopting this method, you will receive higher conversions as visitors are already likely to purchase or convert on affiliate programs or recommendations as their search was more specific to the offer you are offering.

Secondly, the monetization potential is increased because, these visitors are highly targeted which means they are more likely to click an ads or subscribe to your site etc which means your audience size has increased and allows additional product sales in the long run.

Moreover, long tail keywords are easier to rank as you are likely to face ‘weaker’ competition as the larger sites are keener on targeting the main keywords.

Finally you are going to receive more website visitors as you will have more pages indexed by the search engines and this results in increased visibility which equals search engine traffic.

In the next post I will explain how to find long tail keywords.

Update: The second part can be read here – How To Find Long Tail Keywords

Since then it has received considerable attention and I have read numerous arguments for jumping on the unfollowing trend and against jumping on the unfollowing trend.

I’m not going into too much detail regarding as to why I decided to unfollow everyone as the advantages and disadvantages are well documented, although I will discuss the two main factors of my decision.

I recently blogged about how I was starting to like Twitter by actually realising what the service means to me and this helped to make the decision to unfollow the 4,145 users that I was following. A decision which has significantly improved my experience.

This is because, you can’t realistically follow 4,145 people unless you want to use a significant amount of your time to read all those tweets of the users that you were following.

Furthermore, if you follow only a limited amount of users the level of spam decreases to zero unless you want to follow spammers especially in terms of DM’s which whilst I still have a DM bug, I am yet to receive a spam direct message  since adopting this new policy.

The disadvantage of adopting this policy is that you’re going to lose followers. My follower count has fallen by 506 already to 3884 followers. The drop of 506 may not seem significant but considering the amount of followers I had 4390 when I decided to do the mass unfollowing then I have already lost over 10% of my followers and I’m expecting to lose more. The fact that I have lost over 10% of my follwers doesn’t concern me because, if people are only following me because, I am following them – I don’t want them to follow me.  I only want people to follow me who want to see what I have to say and not because I am prepared to follow them back.

In case, you’re wondering how I got to so many tweets on a service that I didn’t see the value of then, blame FriendFeed as for a small period of time I imported my likes and my comments too.

You may highlight I’ve gone on record saying that Twitter has problems and you’re right I have but I’m not going to sit here and pretend they don’t because, those problems are still there – my DM bug is still there and they’ve increased the usage of URL shorteners but nothings perfect, right?!

However, I like the fact they are a highly ambitious and open company more then they’d like to be as, we’ve all seen their admin area and know that they want to become the pulse of the planet but, they aren’t the main reasons as to why I’ve started to like it.

This is because, after 9,364 tweets I’ve found a reason to use it by realising,  I was looking at Twitter wrong and I believe that this is probably the same reason that 60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month.

Let me explain.

I assumed Twitter should be like FriendFeed by having threaded conversations, likes (which could easily be implemented by fixing favourites) and a bunch of other cool features which are already existent on FriendFeed such as, expand shortened URLs  which it does on Twitter Search, a RT button, display images and play videos inside Twitter etc. Whilst some of these features are coming soon like the RT button I realised Twitter doesn’t need to be packed full of features well ok, maybe it does need some of them because, after all it is there to ask you one question what are you doing? and if you start to use Twitter for only that purpose you’ll find value in it.

Sure you can use it for other purposes such as  finding news, getting feedback,  notifying customers, find potential customers/people to network with, acquire votes on places like Digg etc but these are kind of involved in the whole process of what are you doing? anyway.

Why? Because Twitter isn’t a multifunctional tool like the ones that we’ve become accustomed to. For example, Facebook provides messaging, applications, games, videos etc rather Twitter is a tool which only does one job and it’s good at it too and I’m certain if you start to think of Twitter like that then you’ll start to like it too.

The problem with on Facebook it requires users to do the hard work. That is because, they encourage users to “deactivate” their account and the only way to be certain that your account along with all the data is removed from Facebook is to delete every single picture, comment and personal information from your profile and save the changes, and then email their customer service (who unlike Twitter actually get back to you) and ask for your account to be removed – then just in case they have disabled it, wait a couple of days and try to login, if a message pops up offering to reactive your account then you should email them again – if the message doesn’t pop up your Facebook account has been successfully removed.

However, I believe that the way Facebook are approaching user deletion is wrong, they should be able to delete effortlessly.

Let me explain from a generic perspective.

I believe that any company requires clear cut signals to tell them if they’re going in the right direction. Which is why I believe a company along with trying to generate revenue from its users (or even trying to get them to pay for services/features) needs to get the things which users don’t like about their product or service so they can learn faster.

Which means that the company is going to acquire more data and we all know what data means value. The value in this sense is to the company because, these failures (which is essentially what they are since users don’t like X or Y about their service) can teach them something about the market and can be corrected by the company either by terminating the particular feature, improving it etc.

This then creates a continuous loop as there is more data which facilitates the company to learn more about the market so they can make better decisions which of course leads to a better product or service. As a result the option to allow quitting on your service/product is important as it collects data and if you don’t allow quitting on your product or service then you are only going to be collecting positive data and ignoring negative data or to put a value on it 50% of the data.

Remember by collecting only half of the data then you’ll only be able to paint half the picture. Personally I’d rather be able to paint the full picture so I can assess the situation and ensure my company is heading in the right direction which is why allowing effortless quitting of your service is vital as you can collect data which facilitates you to meet the needs of the market and allows you to develop products which the market require which generates more revenue in the long-run.

It’s not because the enterprise version of you has launched a bunch of new features which would be really great on your service nor is it that you’ve increased the usage of url shorteners…its not even that you’ve gone mainstream meaning internet marketers are filling spamming my @replies

click on the image for larger viewing

… Although credit where credit is due, those accounts are no longer showing in my @replies.

I’m mainly not impressed with Twitter because, they don’t seem to care about the most important people…their users. For instance when Twitter allowed support tickets into their customer service area…yes, that same customer service area which co-founder Biz Stone said “does an amazing job” on the Twitter blog I was hoping for a quick resolution. I never got a reply.

Furthermore I have a DM bug on my account which has gone worse over a period of time. When I initially contacted @ev @jack and @biz via Twitter itself to inform them of the DM bug…the problem never got resolved in fact it has worsened from a 1 DM bug when I contacted them to a 5 DM bug.

Proof of my inbox/sentbox being empty (I read/reply/delete as I go):

click on the image for larger viewing

Moreover, I am not the only one who isn’t impressed with Twitter’s customer service or lack of as problems have been reported by many bloggers and your users including Allen Stern and Orli Yakeul. It’s not even like Twitter lack a customer service department as you haven’t only mentioned that you have employees dedicated to it, companies such as Zappos and Dell have praised you for your customer support… which leads to the conclusion that Twitter only cares about their “celebrity” users (the ones who they’re going to make money off in the short-term rather then in the long-term).

Whilst Twitter isn’t the only company who aren’t providing a great customer service experience to all users it is vital everyone realises that people are likely to tell as many people as possible about a bad customer service experience than a good customer service experience, and eventually if you fail to provide a good customer service experience for lots of users it will impact negatively upon your business.

2 Short.Url (2su.de), 2Zeus, 3.ly, 9mp, a.gd, abbr, arm.in, a.nf, bit.ly, bloat.me, Buk.me, BurnURL, Chilp.it, cli.gs, clk.my, Clop.in, DiggBar, ff.im, Fly2.ws, fon.gs, Foxy URL, FWD4.me, g4.ms, gl.am, Good.ly, Gurl.es, hex.io, Hurl.no, idek.net, irt.me, is.gd, J2j.de, kissa.be!, Kisa.Ch, kl.am, krz.ch, Kore.us, Kots.Nu, ktzros, Lincr, LinksPreadeR (l.pr), LinxFix, LNK.by, lt.tl, lurl.no, Metamark (xrl.us), migre.me, micURL, min2me, MinURL, Moourl, MyURL.in, nd url, Pendek.in, Pic.gd, PiURL, Plurl, pnt.me, POPrl, pt2.me, Puke.It, qr.cx, Qurl, qux.in, r.im, RDE.me, redir.ec, RIMS, rnk.me, RubyURL, Safe.mn, Sai.ly, SFU.ca, shorl, Short.ie, short.to, shortn.me, Shrtn, Shw.me, Smallr.net, SMFU, Snipie, SnipURL (sn.im), snkr.me, song.ly, srnk.net, StumbleUpon (su.pr), TightURL, TimesURL, tini.us, Tiny.cc, TinyURL, to.ly, to.vg, tr.im, tra.kz, tsort.us, tweet.me, Tweetburner (twurl.nl), Twip.us, Twirl.at, twtr.us (tw6.us), u.nu, UiopMe, ur.ly, URL.AG, URL.ie, URL (un)faker, urlBorg, urlShort (ooqx.com), urlShort (u.mavrev.com), urlzen, Virl, vl.am, VTC, XORTR (xrt.me), XR.com, xrl.in, X.vu, xxsurl.deZ.PE, Zi.pe, ZipMyURL, ZZ.GD

…and those are only the one’s which I have recently interacted with.

I hate the fact that I am forced to use them – with the main ones that I am forced to use being ff.im and bit.ly although ff.im links are only generated when sending FriendFeed data to Twitter so that doesn’t really bother me.

For example, if I go to Twitter and post a link it is automatically converted to a bit.ly link don’t get me wrong bit.ly is a really cool service especially the  “+” feature and the same happens when I click on a link from Twitter it is generally a bit.ly link (unless someone created it manually or used a service such as awe.sm like Techcrunch do) which means that we are basically adding an extra layer to the system.

However this isn’t the major problem with URL Shorteners.

Let me explain.

The Internet was designed in a way which meant that there wasn’t a single point of failure which could easily break large parts of the web. URL shorteners can cause this single point of failure because, a regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver and the publisher’s DNS server and website whilst a URL shortener adds an additional layer which acts like a third DNS resolver and if a problem occurs with the URL shortener then you can’t access the ‘real’ hyperlink which causes a single point of failure.

Additionally this extra layer means that it’s going to take time to get you to the link due to additional DNS lookups and server hits.

Expanding on this single point of failure theme, URL shorteners become middlemen sitting between the link and its original destination. This is one of my biggest concerns which I have previously expressed and which has been highlighted recently by the media with the fact that Tr.im decided it was going to close down although it has since decided to go “open-source” and remain open as the third-party could decide that a link which you shorten violates its Terms Of Service and delete it. Moreover, the URL shortener which is now the key to getting to the original link could experience downtime,  accidentally erase the database, forget to renew its domain, get hacked, disappear or change the way its url shortener works which means instead of sending you directly to the original link it sends you to a page on their site which contains the original link on.

Consequently, there is the usability aspect of using a URL Shortener which is highlighted on Twitter.com itself as you can’t tell where the link will take you (although you can tell on Twitter Search). However, FriendFeed does expand the url which helps to prevent phishing but many sites are like Twitter and do not expand the shortened URL.

I’m not going to dive into the exact details of the post as I think that you should read it but I think that the argument is wrong for several reasons and while I think and have said on several occasions that Windows 7 will do well and that their corporate software and xbox divisions will keep making the company decent revenues for a while yet I am not convinced by several other aspects of  Microsoft.

However, my main concern is the internet division of Mircosoft as I’m not sure if they are able to build an impressive Internet business even with the launch of Bing and the the Yahoo deal.

The latter which could be argued that it is Microsoft’s Big Mistake. This is because, now the deal has finally been done it has led to many blogs that I read clearly stating that they believe Microsoft’s new search business will be similar to Google’s just roughly half the size – since Google has around 65% and Microsoft now 30%.

Those guys are wrong because, the deal won’t give Microsoft 30% of the market and whilst in terms of queries processed Microsoft will be roughly half the size of Google’s assuming Yahoo and Microsoft don’t loose any market share in the two years it will take to implement the deal and that we are ignoring every other country outside the US as Google are far bigger on the international scene.

Anyways lets get to Microsoft’s Big Mistake – money in terms of the internet division. That’s right the same money that at one point made Bill Gates the richest man in the world, the same money that we use everyday on groceries etc and even the same money that you paid your internet service provider to be able to read this post

Let me explain.

When anyone values a business they may look at other factors such as ethics, company history etc but there is only one factor which means the most – the money aspect of the business aka. profit and revenue – and because of the Yahoo deal Microsoft’s relative share will still be tiny.

This is because, almost two thirds of Microsoft’s search share share in the US will come from Yahoo and of that two thirds they will keep exactly 12% of the revenue from this share. This means that on top of a fee Microsoft gave to Yahoo for its search business they will give them 88% of the revenue and bear all the costs.

In other words if we are imagining that Microsoft are a mini-Google then Microsoft are incurring all the costs which Google do for every search – in fact I believe that Microsoft actually have a higher average cost then Google so their costs are actually higher – and unlike Google who keep all of the revenue, Microsoft only keep a fraction of it.

Furthermore, as Microsoft already have a $2.2billion loss making division in its Internet business and that because of the deal it means that they won’t be the owners of the market share it has acquired via the Yahoo deal after the deal expires – the deal doesn’t seem to make any sense and this only means one thing:

Microsoft will still be loosing money….a lot of money.

P.S. Steve you should have acquired Yahoo rather then done this deal.