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Interview with “SMB College Life Blog” publisher Shawn Borelli

March 27, 2008

My name is Shawn Borelli and I’m currently a college student studying engineering. I developed www.SMBCollegeLife.com because I had a hard time getting into, and paying for college myself.  I wanted to publish all the information that I found over the years that helped me with my college education.  I’ve also been able to collect a lot of information from my friends who were other college students’ going through similar struggles. Shortly after initial development I found myself researching as much information about the college planning process in order to publish the information to help a larger group of high school and college students.  My dedication quickly turned from making a few bucks and gaining credibility to helping people, which is when the real development of SMB College Life took place. The SMB College Life Blog was developed as an extension of the website, allowing me to quickly publish useful college news any time, anywhere. The SMB College Life site and blog are still in not-for-profit development phase, and only released to a small group of people.  The site will be launched to the general public in July 2008, when the first SMB College Life Student Pamphlet will be released in high schools around the country.

  WJ:  How would you describe your profession?

I am currently a full time student, studying Mechanical Engineering, and I also work for myself making small sales on EBay to get by and developing SMB College Life.  I’m hoping to spend the summer working within the digital media industry and continuing to prepare SMB College Life for its launch to the general public in July 2008.  I’m hoping that my profession will change from a full time student to full time developer of SMB College Life. The greatest success in life comes from helping other people and that is what I really want to do.

 WJ:  How did you get into New Media/Online publishing/Online communications? Did you see yourself getting into this field early on? What did you used to do “in an earlier life” (prior career, if any)?

I got into online publishing last summer when I took a computer science course and need to find something fun to do that would help me learn computer programming.  Enter the World Wide Web!   I was hooked instantly and began spending a good amount of time learning programming through website development.  The website development turned into a passion for helping other students just like me, and SMB College Life was born. I soon started compiling pages of information that I collected myself and from college friends into reports which I later used as content on SMB College Life. 

 WJ:  What do you think are the turning points that helped make webmastering/online publishing/online marketing a lucrative business field?

There are many things that make online publishing a lucrative business.  The development of search engines was one of the most important things that helped online publishers reach their target audience.  Online advertising opened the doors to generating continuous revenue streams for established publishers and enabled bootstrapping for new publishers. It’s really not that difficult to implement a working business model online.  The hard part today is reaching your target customer.

 WJ:  In your opinion, what is the most exciting recent development in online publishing?

In my opinion, one of the most exciting new developments to web publishing has been the availability and ease of integration of widgets.  With all of the current widgets available for free use it is easy for anyone to build a widget-based website without having to know much code.  Current technologies and consumer products are being built as widget-based systems and are a big hit on the mass market.  These systems will allow users to personalize their browsing experience, portable devices, media systems, and so much more.  The doors are opening to develop all new business models using widget- based systems. 

 WJ: What do you think are the essential skills to become a successful webmaster?

There are a combination of skills that makes one a successful webmaster.  Building a good reputation amongst your audience is one thing.  Content is another key to becoming a successful webmaster.  This is what people will be interested in, your content.  You can publish anything online but if it is not valid, useful, or interesting information than it will be hard to build an audience.  Marketing is the key to building an audience of readers.  If you can’t reach your target audience then they will never know about you and you’ll be writing to yourself.  You can build a credible reputation, publish hundreds of pages of content, successfully market directly to your target audience but if you don’t have some sort of business model in place then you will not profit from your efforts.  It takes time and money to publish online so you want to make enough to pay for your time and investment at the least.  Proper business models will generate streams of income that will help you to expand your skills and work on new things.  All these skills combined make a successful webmaster.  Programming is really secondary these days with all the resources available online.

 WJ:  Being a webmaster has gone from being a one-person job to a field that allows specialization. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for your business?

Specialization is a good thing for my business.  I’m not the best coder in the world, nor am I the most artistic when it comes to creating images and graphics.  It’s taken me some time to get to the level I’m at today with coding and design, and I plan to enhance my skills as I continue to publish.  The things that I specialize in are helping people, producing quality work, and creating something out of nothing.  I’ve focused my efforts on these skills and received additional help along the way to develop SMB College Life.  This will one day create more career opportunities within my business and help me to focus on my individual skills.

 WJ:  Do you think the industry is regulated enough? Have the authorities or the Net’s relevant governing bodies become too restrictive? Which areas of online activity do you think NEED further regulation?

I think that the regulations on the industry have gotten better over the years but there is always room for improvement.  I think that spam regulations have gotten significantly better over the last few years as we no longer have to worry about five pop-up screens coming up every time we use our web browsers.  I know I only see one, maybe two per month which is a great step forward.   Tighter regulations need to be developed when it comes to spamming, especially email spam.  I receive a lot of spam in my inbox daily and this really troubles me because people are abusing email lists.  This makes it hard for legitimate businesses to send informative emails to potential customers without being instantly labeled as spam and deleted.  Ideally, I could have the answer to everyone’s student loan debt but I wouldn’t be able to reach anyone with the message because people would see an unfamiliar email address in their inbox and automatically delete my email.  This is because everyone is so used to unfamiliar emails being spam today.  Very frustrating!

 WJ:  What are the challenges the industry is facing today?

I think the challenges that the industry is facing today is seperating the legitimate websites from the one’s created by people who know how to cheat the system, fill a page with nothing but advertisements and take the search engine rankings away from the people who have good content and want to help others by reaching a target audience.  Search engines have gotten more refined over the years but more development needs to be done to improve the current system.  There are so many websites today, with the same exact content, that it is really hard to find the exact content you are searching for.  This only leaves room for niche search engines to take over and specialize in certain areas of the market.

 WJ:  What would your advice be to someone who is just getting his or her feet wet in online business?

If you are just starting out in the online business world be prepared to spend a lot of time learning new things.  There are some many little things that go into properly creating a website and publishing your content that it’s very hard to know them all when just starting out.  Be persistent yet flexible with your design and development as it will happen in stages.  Identify your target market early on and be prepared to work hard to try and reach this market.  If you are bootstrapping then be prepared to wait a lot longer.  The most important thing I’ve heard throughout my development of SMB College Life came from my grandfather.  He checked out the SMB College Life site one day and complimented me on the great job I had done on it.  The next thing that came out of his mouth was simple and effective.  He said, “How are people going to use your site if they don’t know about it?”.……………………..Thanks for reading my profile!

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