Author: Lis Sowerbutts

Categories
Affiliate Marketing Search Engines

Adding a BANS store To an Existing Site

Yes success! Having been frustrated with getting INFO domains indexed I decided to try adding a store onto one of my existing blogs. The blog has great content and basically gets about10 hits a day even though I havent updated it for months and done no promotion of it. I checked what people where using to find it and then built a BANS EBay store around those keywords.

Never Delete an Old Blog

Google basically considers that the older a site is the more likely it is to


Ruins of a Muslim haveli in an Oudh qasbah near Lucknow
Originally uploaded by Indscribe

be legitimate. If you think about it age is one think you really can’t fake! Or hurry up! My blog wasn’t being updated and it still has a has a PR of 3 which in itself can be useful for backlinks too.

Well 2 days later my store is indexed in Google: no traffic or sales yet but at least its got potential now! Think it might be time to re-vitalise this particular site too!

So if you think your old sites are a mistake you may be right but don’t delete them – they aren’t costing you anything and you might be able to reuse them for something more useful in the future.

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Rants

Statistics, more Statistics and Depression

Getting Indexed in Google
Are you are a compulsive statistics checker? Do you Google your domain url 15 times a day to see if you are indexed yet? Do you check Adsense on the hour every hour to see if you have made another 6c ? Do you worry if your visitor numbers to your hub or lens drops from 9 to 8? Yes you are obsessed with your statistics. You are not alone: I get out of bed and flick through my domains checking to see if they are in Google’s index yet (Hint: just enter mydomain.com in Google’s search bar will do it). Yes statistics can be very useful: if you can’t measure something you don’t know whether you are getting better or worse.

However until you have got first indexed in Google and second had a reasonable amount of time (that’s months not hours people!) to collect statistics you are seeing nothing but meaningless variations. Unfortunately those meaningless variations cause lots of people to give up before they get started. OK your site isn’t making anything after 3 months: you delete it. Unfortunately maybe the next day Google was finally going to index your site and throw it onto page 1 for your long tail keyword: what a shame!


So When Should you Check your Statistics?


Actual is not normal (a tribute to Edward Tufte)
Originally uploaded by kevindooley

  1. When you new website has been running for 6 months minimum
  2. When your new blog site has been running for 3 months minimum.
  3. When your hubpage has been up for 1 month minimum
  4. When you are testing a new form of promotion.
  5. When you are testing a new advertising campaign
  6. When you need to record what your income was for the month because you made so much money you are going to have to start paying tax on it!

You have Compulsive Statistics Checking Disorder When:

  1. You spend more time checking statistics than writing content, promoting sites or running your business.
  2. You know that you have a new click because you have memorised what the numbers were: for 10 sites!
  3. You are hugely exciting to have calculated that you will reach the Adsense $100 payment threshold in 4 months, 25 days and 13 hours.
  4. You know immediately if the statistics program is running slow and you havent seen a click update for 30 minutes.
Categories
Affiliate Marketing Making Money Online Marketing Online Business

Update on the first month of my BANS Empire

OK I started buying domains on 10 April and now I have over domains. Buying of course is the easy bit! To date I have only got 7 sites setup.


SALE, GRR!
Originally uploaded by Peter Kaminski

The GoDaddy sale is still on so you can buy a info domain for $1.99c (plus 20c registration fee). That’s cheap compared to a com at $9.99. Though you might want to hesitate before you jump in. Six of my BANS stores are on info domains and not one of them are currently indexed. What does that mean? If you put the exact url of the domain liswidget.info for example in Google it will return no results – but put the url exists – well not that one but you get the idea. No one searching on Google will find my stores 🙁

My first info was indexed for a couple of weeks: it even bought me in a small commission. Then Google did an update early May at it disappeared, the other info stores have either been briefly indexed and dropped or never indexed.

The low price of info domains obviously attracts bargain hunters but also spammers. It appears that Google has decided to “sandbox” info domains for a while to discourage the spammers – hopefully they will back soon :-). One of the things I have learned with internet marketing that there is not point worrying about things you can’t influence and I definitely cannot influence Google! On the other hand Google can’t ignore all info domains for ever – its a perfectly legal TLD with lots of perfectly legitimate sites established and being established.

As 6 of my info domains are effectively invisible to Google I am getting little traffic and no sales. The last site is a com but has only been up two dates so far!

Categories
Affiliate Marketing Making Money Online Online Business

Keyword Selection for Idiots Like Me.

Hubpages.com has a great scheme where you can write a “flagship hub” and be paid $25 for it plus another $10 as a traffic bonus. The amongst the requirements for the hub is that it must be 1500 words and have a number of links to authority sites. Hubpages also tells you the topic they want to you write about. I assume that those topics are significant in that they believe that we (HubPages and the author) will make money. So writing content rich websites will get me pad – nope – although HubPages paid me the agree $25 for writing the hub getting significant on-going income has been disappointing. I believe the hub’s themselves aren’t the problem – they have lots of good information: unfortunately if someone types into Google : “India Travel Tips” they find my wonderfully informative hub on Indian Travel:they don’t need to follow the advertisements or the EBay or Amazon offerings: I’ve solved the problem for them! So no in my experience content does not pay well!

BANS a Different Way to Make Money


B o o k s
Originally uploaded by katmere

Vic over at Bloggerunleashed basically talks about making money in almost the exact opposite way that I was. He wasn’t building beautiful content rich sites, don’t get me wrong he wasn’t spamming either, and he was definitely making more money than me!

Einstein defined insanity

as repeating the same behaviour over and over again expecting different results.

Time to change my approach I felt. Vic’s advice to newbies was to use BANS – Build a Niche Store which is a script which allows the non-programmer to quickly develop an EBay store: that is a site which pulls current auctions from EBay – your site passes on the buyer to EBay – you get paid if the buyer wins an auction.

The cost of getting into BANS seemed reasonable $97 for the software plus maybe another $100 for the domain names. My existing hosting would handle the extra sites: at least until I got into profit! Vic’s formula seemed to make sense: keyword selection is difficult so don’t focus on one site: instead build bulk sites, bulk sites, get targeted trickle traffic. so that 10 or 20 unique hits which will convert to $1/day profit – a 100 sites – that’s the start of a nice business as far as I am concerned. Chance suggests that you have to get lucky with 1 or 5 or 10 of the sites as you learn.
Vic’s 100 BANS post

Categories
Online Business

Great content will make you money NOT!


day in the life: lunch money
Originally uploaded by emdot

I guess I went through the normal phases of someone starting off online:

Start a Free Blog
This is still where I’d tell a lot of people to start: its great fun, its easy to get started especially on blogger and its – well free! My first blog is basically an online diary which changes topic as I change direction (about once every 6 months on average). To be fair I didn’t start the blog to make money – which is lucky – because I didn’t make any! The only people who read it were friends and they didn’t want to buy an E-Book on how to make money online!

Build my Dream Website
This one took me months – admittedly I was working full-time. I bought Dreamweaver, developed it all from scratch. It has fantastic content but again it didn’t make me any money. It taught me a bit of html and I had fun writing down a lot of information I’d had in my head for years but at the end it makes me : oh on a good month maybe $1! Well did until I took the ads off – more on that later!

Discovered HubPages
Found an revenue sharing site where the ads on my “hub” articles could make me money! I found HubPages from a post on a forum but in fact there are number of these sites. What I thought at the time was it was great being able to write on a topic without having to commit to an entire blog. What I soon discovered though was that, unlike on my own blog where I never got a comment on HubPages I started to get comments and feedback! I even made money writing on their “flagship program”. My writing improved: I’m proud of most of my content on HubPages but again although they’ve earned me more than my own sites, the hourly rate is still nowhere near $1!

In retrospect though HubPages has been valuable for me:

  • Its given my page rank (PR) on both my profile and most of my older hubs. Google loves HubPages: the site has a high standards and relatively little spam, this means that pages on HubPages not only rank high on Google searches but also acknowledges pages with good PR.
  • I met a group of people who not only improved my writing but also seemed to be using HubPages for other reasons that I was: which was basically to write on what I wanted. These people were using HubPages to gain authority for their “money making sites” – which didn’t sound anything like the sites I had!

Categories
Online Business

What I’m in Business?


Anonymous Flight Attendant
Originally uploaded by laszlo-photo

I guess I had to change some of my ways of thinking about what I was attempting online. I was having great fun writing at hubpages.com – but I was making little money with it. My writing had improved and got faster but I didn’t want to be a copywriter. Ironically just as I made this decision I had a couple of offers from people via hubpages.com which would have taken me down this route. Why didn’t I take this route?

In the end I want a business not a job. A job gets you paid when you do it, it might even give you some paid holidays and sick leave, but at the end of the day you get paid for your time. A business generates passive income. Income is stuff that happens when you are not working. While we travelled Australia we made $1000’s a month: every month our tenants paid us regardless of whether we were working! (We do employ property managers otherwise it wouldn’t have been passive income!). Content writing (for someone else) and endless other “work from home opportunities” will pay you for your time or output: but that’s not a business. In the same way as buying a lawn mowing franchise is not a business.

So how is a business different from a job?
A business takes time and knowledge to setup: a decent, legal business is not a get rich quick scheme: if someone offers you the opportunity to earn $X in Y days its a con – fullstop.

A business is not necessarily all fun and glamour: the people making $20,000 a MONTH on the internet – you never heard of them. They are quietly making their cash by providing a product consumer wants to buy. They don’t have famous blogs with 1000’s of subscribers showing on their feeds: blogs don’t make money : well making money online blogs certainly don’t.

Categories
Making Money Online Marketing Online Business Rants

So Why this Blog?

One of the common methods of assessment at university is to get students to keep a “learning journal” – I hated the dammed things – used to write the thing at the end of semester after the fact. It was good idea used inappropriately. I find as I try to learn this bizarre world of Internet marketing that I need to keep a learning journal. Unlike the well structured university environment who tells you at the start of term what you are going to learn and then proceeds to teach you item by item until you have been fed all the learning outcomes, I am not sure where my learning on Internet Marketing is going. I know where I want it to go: I want an online income that will approximate my professional off-line income: say US$4500 /month. How am I going to do it? I don’t know to be honest. I have some ideas, more ideas than I ever had about how to build this business but I don’t have a step by step plan.

No one has given me the leaning plan on this one! I do know that I need a plan though otherwise I risk running around in circles and not being able to measure and adapt my experience to achieve my income goal.

So this is my on-line learning journal: trying to write on what I’ve learnt and trying to record enough that to work out what works for me and what doesn’t.

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Rants

Why Another Make Money Online Blog?

Is working online from home going to be a dream come true for me? I don’t know yet but at least I am going to give my dream a go!

Fantastic just what the blogosphere needs: another make money online blog! Yeah but this one is different – really honestly different – trust me! There are lots and lots of blogs purporting to tell you how to make money online but telling you how they make their money online. Unfortunately quite a number of the big name blogs are sophisticated scams. Its not that they don’t make money online for their owners, its just unlikely that they

There are lots of blogs out there describing people’s travels – in fact my first blog started off just as that – a record of our trip around Australia and our move from New Zealand to Australia. Well this blogs is a description of my travels in the business world: trying to make money online.

So the back story how did I get to here:

  1. I’m in my 40’s a New Zealander currently living in Australia with my partner. I have a degree in science and worked as a geologist before I moved into general IT about 10 years ago.
  2. For years I worked to live, to varying degrees my work life varied from moderately interesting and pleasant enough to downright toxic and boring. Its saving grace was that it was very well paid. When I left my last IT job I would have been in the top 10% of income earners in the country.
  3. Even when work was good I was bored, and resentful of the time it took from my real life, when it was bad I was exhausted and woke up on Sunday’s dreading that I would have to go back to work on Monday.
  4. I worked to live: we travelled and we are serious competitive dancers. Neither of these hobbies are cheap. I felt trapped the typical: have to feed the lifestyle treadmill.
  5. A few years ago we started investing in real estate. We have done well out of the local property boom and in desperation, and boredom with nothing to do in my last year of IT work I ran the figures. I made an interesting discovery: we had saved enough for retirement: not to retire now but to retire at a reasonable age in say 5 years time. In the meanwhile we just needed to cover our living expenses we didn’t have to contribute to our retirement fund.
  6. Finally we both felt that we had a chance to make some changes: we rented out the house: put our belongings into storage, bought an old 4WD and drove around most of Australia over 7 months.
  7. We ended up in Perth, Western Australia,we liked the town and decided to stay for a while. After 7 months off I still didn’t want to go back to IT: not even in a new town. I couldn’t even get the enthusiasm to update my resume and start looking for jobs.
  8. I decided in Sept 2007 to try for 6 months full-time to make a living online.
  9. By Christmas 2007 I had a monthly income of around $12 plus I had made another $160 writing articles on hubpages.com. Yes I was a resounding failure at this making money online scheme.
  10. January 2008 I was getting desperate: I felt my ego was on the line: I had to make money online otherwise I was a failure. In reality I wasn’t really desperate, my partner had a well-paying job, we were saving money and enjoying living in Australia: but I felt I wasn’t contributing anything and that I was rubbish at the internet marketing stuff. I also wondered if it was possible to make a living ethically online. Every second blog or site I found on the subject was suggesting that I build my list with every email address I could lay my hands on – that didn’t sound like either good ethics or good business to me. How could I flog products to people I didn’t know, especially products I had never used!
  11. January/February 2008 looked at writing articles at 1c/word, I considered earning less doing on-line jobs as a software tester or business support. Fortunately reality intervened and I realized that I could get over A$18/hour cleaning so I got a cleaning job. Then I picked up a part-time geology role which I actually quite enjoyed. I focused on my writing online rather than the make money part and had a ball, slowly m income was increasing but it was going to be even a reasonable part-time income any time soon: not this decade either!
  12. March 2008. Its sometimes annoying on the Internet there is just so many connections that sometimes something just goes click – I finally found an online Mentor. I wasn’t looking for one, in fact I didn’t think I needed one – but I found Vic Franqui at Bloggerunleashed and the guy seemed to make sense. He had just started video blogging at the time and I decided if he wasn’t the real deal he was one of the best actors I had ever come across! He wasn’t asking for my money: didn’t want me to pay and was providing all this great info for free – had I found my get quick rich scheme finally?