It’s official. As of today, I’m no longer the Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com. I’ve got a short version for those who just want the essentials and a longer version for my friends and colleagues who want to know a little more about what’s going on.

Just the Facts

I started as the Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com in November 2002, shortly after I left my last full-time employer and started back on my own. About.com has served me well over the past 6½ years, and I have served them well. Perhaps most importantly, I have helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs find, follow and fulfill their dreams of business ownership. I have also consistently grown the readership and produced some of the most popular articles on the web on a variety of small business topics, including:

• Choosing a Business to Start (#1 on Google for “choosing a business to start”)
• Create a Great Business Name (#1 for “creating a business name” and “picking a business name”)
• Pricing Strategy (#5 for “pricing strategy”)
• Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime) (#1 for both “make money online” and “making money online”)
• Passive Income: How to Earn More and Work Less (#2 for “passive income”)
• The Real Problem with Network Marketing and Multi-Level Marketing (#2 for “network marketing”)

Some of my other personal favorites include:

• Swinging for the Fences: Risk, Reward, and Entrepreneurship
• Building Your Reputation When You Don’t Have Clients Yet
• Cash (Flow) Really Is King
• Time Is Money
• Juggling Multiple Streams of Income
• The Innovator’s Dilemma
• Business mentoring series:
  • Why Every Entrepreneur Needs a Mentor
  • Choosing a Business Mentor
  • Working with a Business Mentor

So what am I going to be doing with all that “free” time? I’ll be spending it on my own entrepreneurial pursuits and other projects I’m passionate about, plus hopefully a little more sleep and time with family.

I’ll continue to write here, as well as at The Virtual Handshake, Linked Intelligence, Work.com, GTD Times and a variety of other outlets as the opportunity arises. If you are trying to reach me and only have my About.com email, you can contact me here. You can also find me on Twitter at @ScottAllen.

Personal Reflection

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It all started with a tweet by @AustinAaron of a great quote:

“Anyone who lives within their means, suffers from a serious lack of imagination.” – Oscar Wilde

I re-tweeted it, which prompted a reply from Ian Lee:

If managing your money well means you lack imagination, so be it. At least these people are not in debt.

Good point. But I wasn’t thinking about debt as the only way to live beyond your means. In fact, there are a lot of ways to enjoy the good life (or at least a little bit better life than you can ordinarily afford) without racking up debt to do so. Here are just a few ideas, all in 140 characters are less:

1. Have rich friends who enjoy your company and include you in their activities.
2. Find last-minute travel bargains by not planning vacations too far in advance (Priceline FTW).
3. Who says you have to OWN a jet to enjoy the benefits of private flights? FractionalJetOwnership.com. (Timeshares are a similar concept.)
4. Travel light. You can travel the world w/10 lbs or less (plus how to negotiate convertibles & luxury treehouses).
5. Barter. Liquidate unused inventory/time in exchange for goods/services you might not ordinarily spend $$$ on.
6. Closely related to #1 & #5..do favors for people – amazing how many will reciprocate w/ cool stuff.
7. Negotiate. Most things are negotiable – most people just don’t ever try. “Is that the best you can do?” works great.
8. Buy in bulk. Amazing how much money you can save w/ a 2nd fridge and/or freezer in the garage, for example.
9. One man’s trash and all that — http://Freecycle.org
10. Some people have some pretty nice couches (some aren’t even couches): http://CouchSurfing.org

What are some of your favorite ideas for enjoying a little luxury without spending a fortune?

UPDATE: I’m not sure which is worse, a bug or a security hole (for the record, I never thought twtAd did this intentionally), but according to twtAd they were hacked and that caused ads to be sent out on several people’s accounts without their approval. Also, just for clarification, twtAd is not the same as TwittAd, and the James who owns twtAd is James Simpson (see here), not James Eliason, the founder of TwittAd.

I received the following tweet this afternoon from Courtney Benson:

Since I haven’t tweeted much in the past couple of days, I had no idea what she was referring to, but fortunately it was a reply, to this:

What? WHAT???

I did remember briefly checking out TwtAd. I’m constantly researching various ways of “sponsoring the conversation”. I think there are some possibilities in that area, and as a social media strategist, it’s my responsibility to explore new services and business models.

But I never authorized them to start sending stuff out in my name. In fact, once I got in, I decided I needed to take a closer look before I activated my account.

Just to be sure, I tried to log in to TwtAd:

In case you can’t read the fine print, it says:

You have not activated your account yet so you cannot login. Please go click the activation link that was sent to your e-mail.

So I want to take a look at the activation email:

Note the highlighted text:

Before you can get started publishing our ads we need you to verify your e-mail address.

And yet, they’re publishing ads using my account, even though I haven’t activated my account and verified my email address!

FAIL!

Massive, nuclear whale fail!

I’d like to just cancel my account, but apparently I have to activate it first. In the interest of expediency, I’ll probably go ahead and do that rather than wait to get hold of their service department. I’ll post an update.

To the twtAd owners and anyone else running any service related to social media:

General design principle: Don’t do anything automatically on behalf of users without giving them a clear description of exactly what is going to happen (and when), and preferably giving them the chance to approve or cancel it.

As context, let’s begin with Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. While you listen I encourage you to follow the previous link (it will open in a new window) and read about the history of the song and the references in it over at Wikipedia.

I wonder if at the time, he could have envisioned today’s world, in which video production and distribution are so easily accessible to revolutionary voices. Sure, the corporate voices are there, too, but by and large, anyone who wants to create a video and broadcast it to the world can do so. And for all the cries of Google censorship of YouTube, for the most part it’s an amazingly open channel for diverse opinions and creative thought.

Video, in the hands of today’s youth, is a weapon of revolution. If the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth a thousand words…

I haven’t personally started harnessing the power of video, but it’s clear to me more and more every day that it’s time for me to.

My stepson Jesse is constantly coming up with great ideas and sharing them with anyone who will listen. Occasionally they’re both original and brilliant. Sometimes they’re just one or the other. Sometimes they’re…neither.

My son Jordan captured Jesse on video sharing some of his ideas and sort of mashed them all together. Enjoy! (BTW, this was my son’s first solo film for his Media Tech class).