One of the neat things about business online is that you can keep a close eye on your competition. You get to inspect their sites and sample their service in a totally anonymous environment. There are also an abundance of tools for analysing and tracking competitors, allowing you to quantify their traffic, see how their site has changed, find out details about their domain, be alerted when they are in the press and lots of other things. (more…)

When Todd Garland launched his company BuySellAds just over a year ago I can remember thinking “Oh happy day” because finally there was a site to help automate what was a rather painful task – managing sales of ad inventory on our various blogs. In the intervening months BSA has come out of beta, signed up publishers by the armful and is today serving well over 1 billion ad impressions a month. I caught up with Todd to ask him how life is going at the helm of a startup in a notoriously tough industry. (more…)