Very New Zealand Christmas Scene - Onekaka Beach, Waiheke Island
I’m a hard customer to get – but if I’m happy with your product I’m pretty loyal. Indeed I’ve been an Aweber customer since 2007! But today I cancelled my account with them, and hit “buy” on my new GetResponse account.
There’s not a lot in it – unless you have between 500 and 1000 subscribers -than it’s very worthwhile moving! Still I probably wouldn’t have bothered because there is a bit of work involved, finding where all the forms are and converting them.
Actually I saved more because GetResponse currently has a 25% Christmas discount on annual plans – but that was just lucky!
It’s About Usability and Features
I’d got used to AWeber -when I started using them I knew nothing about email marketing. I learned using their interface. It’s pretty darn ugly. Over the years it’s improved, but it’s still not pretty. It’s quite confusing. I recently taught someone how to use it – and yes it’s still confusing.
Meanwhile a client asked me to set up an email auto-responder series to support their eBook. They were already using GetResponse – so I agreed to do it using their existing account.
I expected to lose some time learning a new system. But like – wow- seriously easy! Okay I already knew email marketing – but the system was just easy. And nice.
Not only was it easier to use – but it did stuff that AWeber didn’t do (or didn’t do as well)
all emails had a responsive design as well as a “normal” one. You could also preview in a number of email programs;
you could automatically send messages not just based on time or after a subscription but also after a user clicked a link, opened a certain message, reached another goal, change their data or had a birthday.
the control over timezones and when messages are delivered is also better in GetResponse
you can use Google Analytics with GetResponse
they have surveys built into the account
you can import existing contacts into a list without having to do another opt-in – that’s a biggie!
Very New Zealand Christmas Scene – Onekaka Beach, Waiheke Island
Why Not Use MailChimp – It’s Free?
Good question – indeed I do use Mailchimp for a non-profit that I’m secretary for. It’s not too bad – for sending out newsletters. Unfortunately – for the free version that’s all it does. It doesn’t offer a true autoresponder for free. I use auto-responders all the time – particularly for my lists associated with books. Once you sign up for the paid version it’s the same price as GetResponse – but has fewer features.
MUST I Use An Email Marketing System?
Short answer – yes.
Long answer – there are only two things you totally control on the Internet – your website (assuming you are actually paying for hosting) and your email list. In theory you can just keep a manual list of email addresses and email them from your own email account. But don’t come crying to me when your email provider bans you, or you find your emails go straight to the spam folder!
This week Facebook is full of bloggers crying because Facebook is now only delivering their FB Page’s updates to about 10% of their subscribers.
Of course you can pay (about $5/update) – but still not everyone will see your update. With email deliverabiltiy is pretty darn high well over 98% for both Aweber and Getresponse.
Maybe Twitter then? Well it’s been floated too – so don’t be surprised when they start charging too! The thing is that all these companies need to make money at some point. Social media is not a bad way to drive traffic – but they are a means to an end – not the end itself. The result is having people interacting on your blog and/or signing up for your email list.
Neither of us had the nerve to take the picture in mid-flight!
Big U-turn ahead! I started this blog in April 2008, actually it was probably a couple of months later and backdated the first few posts. I’d started working full-time online in the previous October. I didn’t have a clue. I was full-time because I didn’t have a job, not because I was making any money! I was going to be a success by Xmas. Maybe this Xmas?
At the time I called this blog “Passive Income” – because that’s what I wanted, and because I thought “passive income” would be a good term to rank for in the search rankings (it wasn’t – but I got to page 1 before a specific Google penalty knocked me off).
Niche Websites – Rise and Fall
My best ever Adsense month was January 2011 – I made $1383 dollars. I made the same again in a range of affiliates which ranged from Amazon to The Keyword Academy. In April 2012 the Penguin update by Google which penalized sites which had built links with insufficiently varied anchor text. The next month my Adsense was down to $700.
In August 2013 I made about NZ$46 (say US$38) from Adsense. The penalised sites haven’t recovered, and I haven’t bothered building any others. I could, and contrary to what Google would have you believe, you can still get them to rank. But they are vulnerable. And I don’t like having my business being controlled by Google – they employ more PhD’s than me – they will win.
The view from the top of Waiheke EcoZip towards Auckland, NZ
eBooks Rise and Rise
eBooks on the other hand are the same, but different. I repeated history and started with writing my passion – travel. I make a hundred or two from my books – but the market is small and the competition tough.
If Amazon changes their policies around indie authors, I’ll feel the pain. But not so much. You see the secret to eBooks – for me anyway – came with the success of my quick guide on how to format Kindle books. I wrote the book in frustration – not as a strategy.
On the back of it I launched BookFormatter.com. I started making regular money freelancing – my doing for people what I explained how to do in the book! Never, ever think that giving away technical “secrets” is a bad thing, many people, having acquired the knowledge will happily outsource to a person they trust to do a good job – you know like the author of the book!
I’ve been in this game – mostly full-time – since 2007. In that time everything has changed. Hubpages and been and gone, Niche websites have been and gone (for me). I’ve been a writer and a book formatter, A website designer and an email marketing consultant. When I started social media didn’t really matter. The controversies and flame wars happened on blogs not facebook! Search traffic were the committed buyers – now more and more people buy through social media recommendations.
Working for Passive Online Income
Until this year most of my effort has been basically on building passive income. Ultimately I’ve failed at that. Google changed the rules, my attempts at manipulating the search results failed, and I didn’t have the heart to re-build. I couldn’t see it working for a many more years anyways. Google is becoming less and less important to informing how people make buying decisions.
Working Online – How Did I Do It?
I got paid on shared-revenue sites: Hubpages to BubbleWS
you get paid for your skills by others needing your skills i.e. freelancing
you get paid for recommending other people’s products (affiliate sales)
you don’t control your income because you don’t control the terms of service of the sites that pay you
Advantages
takes little skill to get started
the rewards can be quick
you can learn a lot and make a lot of connections
it’s perfect if all you want to do is work online and not deal with hard-core “selling” (raises hand)
when it works you really do make money in your sleep – I came back from a 2-month overseas trip with more money in my bank than when I left!
Disadvantages
it’s not long-term recurring income regardless of what the third-party promises
your income is controlled by terms of service you don’t control
as an affiliate you ride the wave up and down of the service or company you’re promoting
for mainstream products e.g. Amazon, eBay – affiliate marketing is basically dead because of the way Google now prefers it’s own brands in the search results
unless you’re very, very clever you are building someone else’s brand and not yours
Examples
writing for revenue share on sites like HubPages, Squidoo, BubbleWS etc
publishing books on Amazon and other sites
developing websites which are designed for ranking in Google and getting visitors from search traffic only
making money from Adsense and affiliate sales from websites which rank in the search results
freelancing via third-party sites such as odesk and eLance
Developing An Online Business
How Does It Work
you offer something that people want, that you can deliver and that people will pay for
you develop website, social media etc – with the purpose of getting people on an email list
you may use third-party sites like Amazon to get your message/name/brand out there – but the ultimate purpose is to push people to sign-up for your email list
you develop a website and an email list that you control. Traffic comes from a variety of sources which include social media and Google
Advantages
control – you control your product and you have access to your customers, if Amazon suddenly decides to offer only a 40% royalty you can decide to move your customers elsewhere
you can leverage customers and offer more expensive services and products to a smaller group – you can ultimately make more money with less effort, and it is sustainable
developing an online, or mainly online business, costs very little money
you have to develop some basic ability to explain why your offering may be useful to someone (“marketing”)
Neither of us had the nerve to take the picture in mid-flight!
Exciting Times
The last few months I’ve done a fair bit of freelancing – it pays the bills – but it’s also done something much more important than that – as a direct result
Freelancing made it obvious to me that there was a gap in the market, and realise that I could help fill that gap.
I’m currently buzzing with a new business venture a business partner and I will launch before the end of the year. We know there’s market demand. We believe we can fill the gap. We have the skills to make it happen and have identified a launch platform. Plus it will pretty much use all the skills I’ve learned in the last 6 years – plus a few new ones 🙂
You might want to sign up for the newsletter – in the box that will appear below in a second… There may be a special deal in the offing for subscribers… Can’t say much else – after all I’m trying to build excitement and buzz. Oh and we are still making it up!
I’ve gotta say – if I can find the skills to start a business – than anyone can! Seriously.
Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans – may your turkey and shopping go well. And the family thing if you approach it the traditional way!
Wow it’s been a while, about a month, but finally my newest website is live: BookFormatter.com (yes I was surprised that such a grammatical, 2-word dot com was still available to).
The thing is – it’s not just a website, it’s actually a business!
Hanging out on a writers’ forums I see an awful lot of authors who are not sure that they are, or if they want to be in business. I have a lot of sympathy for the ones who say “I’m not in business I just want to write books”. I used to say something similar – my version was:
I don’t want an online business. I just want to rank websites and make money from affiliate sales and advertising. I’m just an Internet Marketer, not a business-owner.
Well the Google changes last year put pay to that. I figure that, although I could probably win in the short-term, medium-term the 1000’s of PhD’s that Google employs were probably going to win .
So I turned to books, which is exciting, but frankly I’m not building my backlist fast enough to make a decent wage. I’m not giving up on that, but I needed a more short-term cash boost. So BookFormatter was born.
Service Businesses Online
I’ve thought for a while that my Kindle formatting services page needed expanding. For a start I don’t just format for Kindle I also do ePubs for other eReaders and pdfs for print-on-demand.
Plus a separate site meant the I could focus on getting all the words in the right order, with commas, and all the other stuff the writerly people seem to worry about. (If I’ve missed some on BookFormatter.com feel free to email: lis(at)LisSowerbutts.com)
It took a while, partly because people kept on contacting me to help format their books! It’s taken me about a month to get the site live, along the way I’ve thought rather a lot about the process of launching a service business online.
I’m actually gone about this with some thought, and even, hold on to your keyboards, a bit of a plan. So business planning by Lis 101 – who’d have thought?
Why?
Well that’s easy – I need the cash flow. Books make money, but it takes a while, and is uncertain. Most books I can format within 24 hours and the clients pay 50% upfront and 50% on acceptance – the most I’ve had to wait for payment is about 24 hours after I sent the invoice. That’s a good cash flow business.
It also has the potential to bring in more NZ$ – the US$ exchange rate is continuing to hurt like hell – my expenses are in NZ$.
Then I discovered another reason – I rather liked doing it. I actually liked the interaction, the sheer novelty of starting with a book put together in a way I’d never have done myself, and making it work. I’ve always liked troubleshooting too and fixing problems as they come up. The interaction with clients was fun. It’s possible I’ve been in the back bedroom too long.
Defining An Offering For Sale
I must admit I’ve never been a huge fan of having a service business online. Indeed briefly I did offer small-business website SEO and basic websites. I struggled with it though, because it’s a very open-ended offering. It’s hard to know when you are done, you need to be very clear what you are quoting for and how you and the client will know when the job is finished. I got burnt rather badly by a client who could never quite decide which pixel went where (I’m not exaggerating) – I walked away when I realised I was living the famous Oatmeal Cartoon.
This time around I’ve learned a lot. Basically book formatting is something I like doing, and because of a very weird background I have in obscure programming languages (awk, grep, sed) and old-style software (vi, DisplayWrite) I’m pretty fast at it. I’ve also narrowed down my audience to several groups. I think knowing who your audience is helpful, because then you know how to find them.
If you are going to make a service business work need two things; demand, obviously, but also the ability to perform the service quicker, better, more-effectively and at a better quality than the average Joe.
Pricing
Pricing – that’s the hardest bit still I think. At least I’ve stopped apologising for asking for money LOL. I’m lucky with book formatting there are a bunch of competitors, listed right on Kindle Publishing’s help page. I checked them out. They were pretty expensive. Clearly the bigger boys were carrying expenses that I didn’t have (I suspect they are outsourcing to a third-world country and having to manage both the client and the worker). A lot of the pricing was just silly – quoting in hours when a client had no idea how many hours a job would take or in pages for an eBook. I also checked those advertising in places like kboards.com. Some of those were very low.
In the end I kept records of how long jobs took, worked out my required hourly rate, and came up with some indicative prices. I fell between the low and high-end of existing competitors – so that seemed like a good place to be. If I get overwhelmed with demand, I’ll put prices up.
Marketing
Having worked out WHAT you’re offering, I started in a small way and when people approached me, I tried to remember to ask them how they found out about me. After a while I saw some patterns.
First – I had an abject failure by trying to market to my friends over at da Pond – most of them were fairly tech savvy, were writing non-fiction, and didn’t have a lot, emotionally or financially, invested in their books. Cheap as possible was what they wanted to spend, and most had figured out how to do their own formatting which was “good enough”.
Instead the people who actually found me and hired me were:
authors who don’t have time and/or the inclination to format their books themselves;
generally weren’t online in a huge way;
normally had full-time, well-paying jobs.
But now it’s got more specific – I’m starting to see a pattern. I’m primarily attracting:
those who have bought my Kindle formatting book, understood the process, and decided they’d like to outsource (they make awesome clients because they understand what I’m offering them);
panic-stricken author’s who have just got a warning from Amazon that their Kindle book has problems. Because of my time zone I can often fix this faster than they’d believe;
authors who have a book published several years ago on paper, but have put off getting the eBook out as it was too hard.
Advertising
Having discovered the audience you then think about where they hang out, or how they might find me. The readers of my formatting book are easy – there’s sign-up at the back for the sample files in the book.
The panic-stricken seem to find me via Google from what I can work out. That’s the easy bit of advertising – the keywords shouldn’t be hard to rank for.
The third group, existing authors, I’m thinking about. It may be more about personal contacts and world-of-mouth among not so much writer groups, but those that have a story to share with fans (think those with causes or messages to share).
From the Great Minds Think Alike Camp
Completely by coincidence within days of my launch
Belinda launched RedSwallowDesign, for book covers and all things design; and
Loreecee launched eBookSalon.net for promoting your free days
Basically a new author who wanted to self-publish but wanted to outsource as much as possible – between the three of us I’d say your entry price is around $200 (budget cover $100, formatting $70, free book promotion $35) . Compared to the many, many thousands most self-publishing “companies” charge….
Yo – see I’m back – this could get become regular you know! – Watch the above video to see just how good the NZ weather is this week – seriously this is HEADLINE NEWS – the likely 7-day stretch of fine, calm weather for Wellington led the national “soft news” program a few days ago! Yup – it’s a small country – but if this is global warming bring it on I say!
I’ve thought long and hard about my business and I’ve come to some fairly startling decisions:
I need to get comfortable with “brand Lis”. I’ve always really, really disliked selling me , unfortunately that’s the game I’m in – people buy online, usually because they have a rapport with the seller. It’s really that simple. which doesn’t mean to say it’s going to be high-pressure buy, buy, buy – in fact nothing much will change around here – I think the change is more in my attitude. To the writers among you who don’t want to market. I say – do you want to sell books? In that case you need to market, end of story. It does not mean you have to ban obnoxious, in-you-face, grade A asshole and extrovert.
I need to get over the terror of public speaking – hence the crappy amateur videos, feel free to skip – I’m much better with words. In fact I probably need to get with the whole networking in person thing anyways.
SEO is not dead but it’s only a small part of the bigger picture. I’m watching with interest what Court Tuttle is doing over at his new site and applying his approach to my own sites, including this one.
I’m looking at more “quick wins” in terms of the cash flow stakes, recurring income (affiliates, royalties) are all amazing – but at the moment I need a quick cash injection.
Lake Wanaka, New Zealand
Is Lis an A-List Blogger Now?
No not at all. What did and still does annoy me with A-list bloggers is that they essentially make money by teaching others to make money with little or not experience of using those techniques to make money – ie 100% of their income from the teaching side of things and not the doing side of things. They also tend to obfuscate their earnings, or just plain lie. Quick which headline is more appealing: “Make $1.997,776.31 in the next year” or “Make just over the unemployment rate next year” – yes exactly!
Unfortunately, my instinctive dislike for them meant I threw the baby out with the proverbial. It’s not so much the “money being in the list” – but really the singularly most important thing to build as an author, entrepreneur, online marketer, whatever, is your list. Why? Because it gives you independence. Independence from Facebook not notifying your followers, Independence from Google algo updates , independence from future changes in Amazon rankings. If I have a list of people interested in me and/or my books and services I can communicate with them without involving a third-party who has a different agenda than I. (No I don’t host my own mail list and you shouldn’t either, I use and recommend Aweber, others like MailChimp – the point is they are in the business of providing email services – nothing else, they are on your side so long as you keep paying them). I suggest that those of you who focus exclusively on twitter or Facebook followers think about that.
his summary of traditional and self-publishing is spot on – if you still think being picked up by a publisher is a your goal – read this book, Kawasaki has had several books traditionally published so he knows what he’s talking about;
given that he’s been senior management at Apple not once but twice – his review of the rise of the eBook technology is worth paying attention to;
his writing advice outline/rough draft/then polish i.e. don’t edit as you go – is spot on.
I find his ideas about crowd-sourcing and company sponsorship intriguing – watch this space;
He has a very well written guide of all the options for self-publishers in terms of using author-service companies or not and the pros/cons of each;
there is good information on how to get genuine reader reviews for your book
The bad bits:
it’s regular price is $9.99 – on the high side for an eBook;
he recommends Word to write books in – but that doesn’t actually fit with the writing process he describes, plus he recommends a Macbook Air – which is even more irrelevant.
he advises using affiliate links within an eBook – to clarify you can’t use Amazon affiliate links within a Kindle eBook – this is against the Amazon affiliate TOS. You can use other affiliates though, or you can direct to a resource page at your website.
he recommends social media as a substitute for having your own website/blog – it’s not.
In his book though he suggests a couple of things I think are wrong InDesign is not the right tool for eBook formatting (and not just because it costs about US $600, or a lot more than that if you don’t live in the US) and I think every author should have their own blog – relying on g+ is not a good policy , because Google can change the rules any day (and probably will) .
Also check out Cathy Presland’s Becoming a Writer course over at Udemy – it’s free. If you’re not familiar with Udemy – it’s a way for independent writers to present their own courses using a mixture of media (videos and pdf seem the most popular). Cathy’s course is about improving your writing – particularly for non-fiction authors – worth checking out.
I started this blog in April 2008 on blogspot- it moved to WordPress and this url in November 2008. I’d had the odd month-long break over the years but the 3 months since I last posted here is a personal record, and not in a good way!
Well to be honest I never intended to blog in November as I was away in Burma for the entire month, and I was a bit busy before I went away – but the whole of December and half of January is a bit unacceptable.
So, to all of you, and particularly those who got in contact to say variations of “are you dead/got a job/decided to start a pyramid scheme” – sorry.
I’m still working out the future for this site – but it does have a future – don’t worry! I feel like I’m straddling two worlds at the moment:
SEO
writing
Which is not to say I’m an expert in either: but I think I probably better in both than most i.e. I write better than the average SEO and I know more SEO than the average author.
There may be a niche between the two – I’m going to find out.
Cultural Highlights of Myanmar
What Have I Been Doing
Writing
I still struggle with writing, there is still far too much time-wasting. But I did get the third book out for my Non-Boring Travel Guides series live before I went to Myanmar. It’s not selling well yet, but to be fair I’ve done little promotion, except for a few free days recently, which has given me a few sales.
I also put together a picture book of some of my best Myanmar photos – to encourage people to signup for my mailing list on LisTravelTips.com – pictures don’t look so good in black and white – so I went with pdf for this one.
I have a number of 1/2 finished projects including how-to guides for travel in Myanmar (parts of which will be posted on LisTravelTips.com ) and a travel memoir from an earlier trip around Australia. I’m starting to get quite angry at how the success of Eat, Pray, Love now means that no trad published travel book has much travel content on the places visited, rather just a little window-dressing before we get to the internal angst, and insecurities of the author/friend/partner/dog plus their love-life (or lack thereof). I’d like to put the travel back in Travel Memoir …
Formatting
I’m getting a consistent stream of formatting jobs, from a mix of people I know and people who found me either from my formatting book or via random searches they’ve found this site.
The biggest change in the last year or so is – that, finally, as of 31 December, Smashwords is accepted ePubs direct, so you no longer have to go via the awful Word formatting step. I’m still playing with this – so I will be writing more about it shortly.
I’m also beginning to wonder about the continuum of eBooks to web apps. I don’t actually see much difference, apart from the technology, and I see a way to get more mileage from my content. As Windows 8 rolls out I see apps stopping being just a toy for iPad users, and are on the way to becoming mainstream. EBook formats aren’t great for a lot of travel content, better than paper, but not great, it could be that the app space is where I should be. Anyone doing this already?
Business
Yup I’m still making less money than this time last year, and lot’s less than the previous year, but onwards and upwards. I’m not about to get a JOB or anything defeatist like that, and frankly, I’m enjoying doing more client work. It’s good to hear about other people’s ways of working and ideas, and I have a several of my own.
Frankly when I started on-line I really didn’t see why anyone would ever buy anything that I created. I’ve changed my ideas on that, the more I look at what’s available in the travel niche, the more I think I can add value! Plus, and this is a surprise, my Kindle Formatting guide sells steadily, predominantly by world-of-mouth, so I will be considering writing some more books that help out the technically terrified author.
And This Blog?
I made my “reputation” here for calling it as I saw it and bad language and grammar. I’m working on the grammar and the proof-reading – the rest of it probably won’t change much. I know the “A-listers” still say you shouldn’t rock the boat – and I still disagree. There are plenty of scams in publishing, just as in Internet Marketing. Buyer beware – but I’m happy to help 🙂
I see a niche of where writers meet marketers , I’ve seen absolutely awful books do well because they are well promoted, and I’ve seen great books die because no one can find them. I’d like to get the two sides talking to each other.
I’ve seen plenty of people start blogs talking about their often multi-year journey to publish (self or trad) a fiction book. This is my journey to publish and make money from a range of non-fiction books.
Plus I’m not American – so there are some quirks about doing the ebook thing – starting with getting an ITIN (coming soon).
So yes I will be posting more often, stick around 2013 is going to be an awesome year, both for me and for anyone else who is willing to put the work in to being a successful entrepreneur online (that’s shorthand for a writer who markets, or a marketer who who writes).
Back in January I talking about business planning – and at the time I expected to do several follow up plans which would detail business plans for several of my bigger websites. But it never happened. Why not? Frankly – I was stuck! I couldn’t figure out a business plan for my favourite niche – my main travel blog. So I did, nothing.
Well I did think – quite a bit, and thought of and discarded dozens of plans. Now, several months later, I do indeed have a plan. If you just CLICK HERE I will tell you how to make $997,999 in the next 7 days while planning your next vacation. Nah sorry – but I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do – who knows it may even work out!
Research, Chaweng Beach, Koh Samui. Thailand
Travel Blogging Is Tough
My first website (it wasn’t a blog) – was in travel – it never made a cent. I still have the domain, now it makes a few cents with Adsense. My first blog is long gone (I have the content somewhere on the hard drive). It was the classic: this is what I’m doing type trip diary. Then I discovered you could get paid to write posts about specific companies – then I lost all my page rank and also all the well paying posts. Lesson learnt – don’t blog for cash!
Then I discovered Internet Marketing – found out just how highly competitive most keywords were, and how little interest I had in writing about “Disney hotels with kids club” or “luxury Alasakan cruises” and dropped the whole idea of making money from travel.
For a while.
But I do really, really like travelling. And I’m good at it – I’ve done a lot of it. I am the go-to travel agent for friends. Unless of course they want to know about Disney hotels or Alasakan cruises!
Every year or so I’d look at it again. I learned a whole lot about SEO – it was a tough niche – don’t think that Expedia or Tripadvisor show up in the search listings by accident!
I figured out that long-tails in travel could add up to decent traffic. But still I did very little about it – why? Because traffic won’t pay the bills – traffic is a requirement for a successful website – but you need to figure out a way to monetise that traffic. And I hadn’t.
Travel Blogging – Where’s The Traffic From?
Today I answered a thread over at The Keyword Academy forum – someone had around 7000 visitors and month and not a single Adsense click. I asked simply: where was his traffic from? It was social. He’s worked hard to get this traffic (spread over 3 niches and only in a few months) – but basically the instant he stopped tweeting, facebooking, g plus oning, and pinning – the traffic disappears. And although he may eventually make money from the traffic – it won’t be for a long time, and it won’t be from Adsense.
I’ve seen travel bloggers hesitate to travel – because they thought the destination in question didn’t have good Internet connectivity… Anyone see why that is deeply wrong?
Which brings me right back to the most reliable form of traffic I know – Google. Yeah I know their are plenty of people saying diversify, diversify – but at the end of the date whether I publish this post in the next hour or in 3 months time – will make very little difference to this blog’s traffic. Most of it comes from Google, and most of it comes to posts that are years old.
But bloody hell the competition is flipping fear in travel. I’d looked and looked for “green keywords” in travel. Never found any. I was scared off.
I kept buying toys and playing. I particularly enjoyed playing with Ton’s Keyword Researcher tool. I threw a few terms in around Thailand travel. It came back with some nice long tail phrases. I tossed some of those phrases into Fraser’s Keyword Strategy tool – to give me the search volumes (could have done the same thing with Keyword Academy‘s Niche Refinerary but would have taken longer). Right so – Google is telling me that the terms that Google GAVE me have no searchers. And the terms made sense, and were similar to questions I’d seen asked in travel forums. I built a couple of pages. I interlinked them. I added some backlinks.
Up until a week ago I hadn’t posted on the site since October. I hadn’t built a link since before Christmas. I had 1000 uniques in the last month, 85% from Google, and 20% of the visitors were for search terms which had no search traffic according to Google!
And that 20% of terms that had no search volume? Most of them were variations of the terms from Keyword Researcher! (I’ve been fairly on the fence about Keyword Strategy – but I do REALLY like the way it gives you rankings for all the obscure one off search phrases you get).
Travel Blogging: How To Monetise
This has been my stumbling block – forever – with travel blogging. How the heck do you monetize it? The standard ways to monetize blogs seemed to involved either:
promoting the blogger’s brand in order to launch that career of public speaking or writing: see The Art of Non-Conformity or NomadicMatt. Problem: I loath public speaking and I don’t live in the US or Europe so my chances of getting on the conference circuit are zero. If you want to write books these days I see no point in doing anything except self-publishing.
Getting freebies for press trips, promoting certain hotels or travel companies in return for goods and services: see yTravel or GoBackpacking. Problem: I’m not single, and have zero interest in travelling my own country. Travel freebies never include the airfares – so suddenly I’m paying to travel solo somewhere I may or may not have wanted to go to – and this is the killer -in a GROUP. Yuk no thanks. I’m sure there was a point in my life when the thought of free trips and 5-star hotel stays would have been very exciting. But no longer.
Which left me with
Adsense – most of the topics I am interested in don’t give great CPC’s
Affiliate programs via hotel and airline booking sites. Again awful commissions. On the other hand if this post is right – there is money to be made in hotel affiliates with the right traffic.
Selling my own products. I wrote a book. I have 3 or 4 others – 1/2 finished. Then I got confused – should the content go in a book or on my websites? Both?
Selling ads. There are of course ads and paid links. Paid links are awful, terrible, a blight on the landscape of the Internet, and very popular in the travel niche. Ads are just that – ads. The difference? Add the no-follow tag to a link and its an ad. This monetization method still seems to work for many in the niche.
And then suddenly I realised – I was overthinking it.
I need traffic and I need the social stuff – because advertisers use both to determine what a site is worth to them. There are enough monetization options to worry about the fine details later. Those options are not trivial amounts of money either – for example see Kirsty’s earning reports – almost all of her income is from direct advertisors and all her sites are travel sites. And she spends most of her time volunteering in places that don’t have great Internet.
I’ve redone the site. I’ve now got a “travel blog” separate from my distinctly keyword focussed content. I will silo the keyword focussed content even further (also making it more attractive to future advertisers). Thanks to the magic of Catalyst I didn’t even need to get another theme, just changed the skin and did some different layouts.
Oddly the whole BMR debacle has really energized me. As they say in New Caledonia plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose. I think I just narrowed my focus down from about 30 sites to two – but apart from that – its all business as usual LOL!
What about you? Are you changing your business significantly after the recent Google changes?
Cape Reinga, on a bad day, the Pacific is meeting the Tasman somewhere in the background
Sorry this is a bit of long one, even for me! You might want to read my previous posts first if you haven’t (and they are shorter!): 2011 Looking Back, 2012 Goals – Introduction.
Short version, why should you read over 3000 words of my ramblings? Because most people don’t have a business plan to make money online, and I think more of you need one!
A Whole Bloody Business Plan? Why Not Just Some Goals?
This started off as my 2012 goals post – and ended up as an Internet Marketing plan – how the frig did that happen? I read some other people’s goals posts – and don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking posts like this, or this, this one, or indeed the one that made me buy a book. I read them all, and they all seemed reasonable goals and plans.
Tane Mahuta - the largest Kauri tree in the world.
But I wanted a bigger picture, I wanted a vision, some frigging idea where I was going with this whole business thing, and 2012 in particular. Or, to be allegorical, (’cause I am playing with language at the moment), I needed to know the layout of the forest, before I focussed on individual trees!
And then Google has failed me. I figured that now I was finally ready to write a business plan for my Internet Marketing business, Ms Google would provide me with a handy dandy template, or at least a format to copy!
Nope – I found a couple of sites willing to sell me a a template, for a bargain price, limited-time offer! But not a similar business plan to be found on the Interwebs! Well guess its time to fill the niche! Naturally I should have realised this months ago so that I could be #1 for “internet marketing business plan”, ah well, maybe next year? Maybe its just that Internet Marketers don’t want to admit to their business plans? Well I’m sure the A-Listers dont – but Z-List bloggers signed up for transparency – so here we go!
Anyway what I did start with was a fairly ordinary free business plan – and adapted it, yeah its written by New Zealanders, but none of this is stuff is very country specific.
Does Everyone Need a Business Plan?
Well as I write this I am entering my 5th year in this business. This is my first business plan. Should I have had one early, probably, let’s face it, I’m hardly a star on the earnings front! Should I have done one at the start – nope, you can’t write a business plan until you know your business. I still think it takes at least a year before you have any chance in hell of writing a business plan!
Because unless you can actually write down your business model and strategy – you can’t write a plan. As I look back through my archives, I see so much stuff that I tried and failed at, and some of it my fault some of it just failed business models that are now the relics of history. (Note to self – go through and put some caveats on those old posts in case someone actually reads them!). In the long-ago past I actually used to have to write business plans for company units, every now and then, as part of my job, it was a nightmare, but at least I know how to do it. My lack of business plan to date has nothing to do with being unfamilar with them, it was because I didn’t have the necesary information.
Now I think I do.
I’ve modelled this plan on a “normal” business plan, as linked to in the link above. If you want to apply this to your own business I suggest you download it and read the notes, you could buy a zillion worlds of business books on how to write a plan – but this template is the essence of the format, used world-over and beloved of MBA schools!
Business Model for Internet Marketing – Overview
Introduction
For the brief history – see here. The purpose of my business? Well to make me money while I sleep of course? Could there be any other?
Hmm my products and services … Well I’ve written one book in the travel niche and have plans for more. This in essence is the difficulty of writing this type of plan when you are in the business of affiliate marketing and ranking sites that make money from Adsense. WTF are your products and services!
Are websites products? I think they might as well be for the purposes of discussion, after all they make me money even though I don’t see them as my product per se, i.e. I don’t build websites to sell on a regular basis, instead they product me on-going income by way of affiliate and other advertising.
Yup lets take websites as products – in which case I have, 53 domains registered. Of those 5 are purely personal so can be ignored. Of the other 48 I have websites in some shape or form on all of them. Some of them are supposed to make me money and do, some are supposed to make money and don’t, others are “support” sites which aren’t supposed to make me money directly.
In addition I make money from my writing on revenue-share sites including HubPages and Wizzley
Current Position
Current position of the business – well summary can be found here. Where is my business in the business lifecycle, I’d say its at the start of its growth phase. The industry of Internet Marketing I’d say is an emerging industry which is developing at a frighteningly fast rate.
I really do see the whole on-line digital marketing/publishing world evolving at a speed which its hard to comprehend even to those of us who live in the midst of it. The rate of change is currently only accelerating, quite probably at a exponential rate, regardless of what measurement you are using.
Overall the whole landscape of SEO, affiliate marketing and digital products are all changing at light speed. Really I’ve always liked technology for its speed of change, but the whole online environment is amazing quick moving.
Competitive Advantage
Ooh a competitive analysis – who are my competitors and how can I capitalise on their weaknesses? My competitive advantage is simple, I’m small, I answer to no one, no bank to please, no investors. If I want to try something new in response to changing markets I can, and do.
Who is my main competitor? Well this is where I’m starting to think that I’m going to need to do a business plan for each of my main websites (or groups of websites), for example this site has a quite a different competition environment than say my travel sites.
In fact I think I will do that for a least three of my sites over the following week or so. So I’ll keep this post at a high level.
To be honest I don’t see my main competitors as the people who own the sites that out-rank my own in the search results. Rather I see my main competitor as Google and the major brands (Amazon, eBay, TripAdvisor, Expedia, LonelyPlanet) who Google tends to favour in those results.
My advantage is that I can go more niche and more specific than the competitors. Travel is a classic for this – try searching for a specific destination which you know has hotels. Pick somewhere obscure, but that definitely has businesses with an on-line presence. What will you get? Results for the nearby state, province, town – but not the specific destination you entered. That’s Google preferring their brand partners. But its not in the searchers best interest, eventually it will have to change. Eventually in Internet Marketing is within the year.
My other advantage is that I’m unique, people have called me lots of things, but bland is not one of them. On my count I’ve made more friends than enemies for being outspoken and saying it as I see it. You’ll never get h0nesty from a tourism website or from 99% of internet marketing websites. I can do honesty – must be an advantage!
Growth Plan
How am I going to increase my capability? I’m not, there’s nothing much wrong with my capability, its my application of the same which needs work! So really I need to either, severely limit or eliminate, the time I spend on Facebook and possibly some forums too. The trouble is of course, that forums and social media do get me visitors and subscribers, I’m just not sure that its worth the effort 1/2 the time.
How am I going to increase my capacity. Well I am going to build up my outsourcers as I grow my income. There seems to be plenty of people who can write competently, I’m happy to employ them, as I can afford it, to build my business.
I see no issues with growing my business, the problem is merely the CEO who has to stop bouncing from one new, bright idea, to another and to actually flipping focus!
Cape Reinga, Northland, New Zealand, on a bad day, the Pacific is meeting the Tasman somewhere in the background
Business Strategy
The suggested time frames with the original template business plan is “next year” and “next 1-3 years”. I think we need to focus in a bit of a shorter time-frame to take into account the speed of change in this industry.
1-3 Month Goals
Goal 1: Fast Cash via Wizzley
Well specifically I need to find NZ$3500 by April and the same again in May for taxes.
I’ve proven that Wizzley will rank long tail articles on page 1 of Google within 24 hours so I’m using a combination of content I’ve removed from Hubpages plus Tony’s Keyword Researcher to reuse most of that content and try to make some quick cash on Amazon, to compensate for the loss of Hubpage Amazon earnings from January and to pay my taxes. I’m not pretending its a long-term strategy – but I need the cash now, and the pages can provide backlinks long term.
I have 2 ID’s on Wizzley and I need to get both to over 100 articles to maximise my revenue share. I’m hoping that once I have the momentum going, that I can outsource most of my “anonymous” account’s writing.
I’ll need to average about 7 articles/day to get 200 published by the end of January. That’s lots, but not impossible.
Goal 2: Diversify from Google – Branding and List Building
After years of being anti-list building, I’ve changed my mind. I’m building lists for a single strategic reason. To remove some of my dependence on Google (see SWOT analysis below). The two main areas that I see that I can build lists is this blog, and my travel niche. These are two topics that I have genuine knowledge of and write almost all (all for this site) my own content for.
It also means I have to play the “branding game” – hence the Z-List Blogger manifesto!
I don’t even know what is considered “good figures” for a mailing list. I’ve seen plenty of bullshit figures in the A-List circles (let me know if you want me to tell you how to fake the numbers!). From a standing start (i.e. zero) on the 7 November, I now have 118 subscribers here, and 72 over 2 travel blogs. I probably need to give the travel subscribers a reason to subscribe ie a discount on a book or a freebie, and maybe the same here? I’m not sure. But I am (slowly) evolving the way that I split content between my blog and the subscriber list.
I’ll work out some specifics in my specific business plans for my main sites here, suffice to say, I think 1000 is a nice round number!
Goal 3: Diversify from Google – Publish More Books
I need to finish the books I’ve started and get them out there making some money!
3-12 Month Goals
Goal 4: Use the Wizzley Results to Diversify
Using the results from my Wizzley adventure, any winning keyword groups I will use to develop new niches. Early results suggest that Wizzley is rubbish for Adsense click thru rates, so these will probably be product niches.
Goal 5: Promote my Published Books
This one is vague at the moment – lets get the books out there first!
Tactics
Despite Google’s best efforts at mis-information to the contary, I don’t see a whole lot changing as far as promoting websites in the near future. Its all about content and backlinks, content is a bit more important that it once was, but I still see absolute crap rank at the top of the search results, why, backlinks and site authority.
I know how to build both – but I’ll leave the details to specific posts I think at this stage.
Strategic Impact
The main risk I see in the next few years, for me and other affiliate marketers is Google, pure and simple. But the market is changing so rapidly, its hard to know whether search will even be the more dominant method that consumers use to find information in the next few years.
Core Values
Do no evil. Really, because, lets face it, Google abandoned that particularly philosophy a long time ago. Yeah I’d acutally like to be ethical in this business. Particularly in Internet Marketing, because, lets face it, there is not too much competition! Hence the transparency – how many other Internet Marketing blogs actually tells you the number of subscribers?
Marketing
SWOT and CSFs
SWOT analyses are cool – not heard of them? Read up, there is precious little useful in all the management courses I’ve done over the years, but learning to do a SWOT is handy, not just in business, I do when I’m buying a house too.
Strengths of me/my business:
diversification of income sources: I make money from many niches and from many advertisers.
I have standardised my sites on WordPress and Catalyst – and they are therefore much easier to manage, update and control than previously.
I live in a country that doesn’t have, and is unlikely to have, sales tax. This means the chance of my Amazon affiliate account being banned is low.
I have an eBay account, got in early, not sure what to do with it these days though, as I can no longer use it through HubPages. I do, however, know they are rare.
I’ve been in this game long enough to have some confidence in my own ability to pick keywords and rank pages in the search engines.
Weakness of me/my business;
I’m getting better at selling, but its still against my natural inclinations, I’m particularly uncomfortable about selling to readers and people I know online. I can’t stomach the sort of prices many people seem to be able to put on their products and their time.
short attention span. I’ve always had a tendency to value learning, over doing, so I am suspectible to the “shiny new object” syndrome so common in our industry.
my location. Because I live in a market of only 4 million people there are few local opportunities for selling services to local businesses. Basically pretty much anything will rank here with minimal effort, and the business community doesn’t “get” SEO, because, frankly, they don’t need to.
Opportunities for my business in the current external environment;
the rise of e-readers is driving demand for cheap fiction e-books, and an as yet unknown market, for non-fiction e-books. Self-publishing has never been easier, and the sector is very rapidly evolving. There are opportunities for those of us who can write.
Threats against my business in the current environment
Google is progressively blocking detailed stats from Google Analytics accounts. The only question is when it all become unavailable or unaffordable for most of us.
dependence on Google for much of traffic and the unpredictable changes to the Google’s search engine algorithmns;
dependence of Google for much of my income (Adsense);
dependence on a formerly good revenue site, gone bad (HubPages) for some of my income
Critical Success Factors have got a bit over-run with the newer fad of KPI’s, but I like them – because they are about as basic a question as you can ask your business: “what are the key things that need to go well for this business to be a success”.
CSF1: Chose the right keywords, the terms that people are searching for who have their credit card out and ready to run. I am so over keywords that either have no traffic or no profitable traffic.
CSF2: Produce good books and price them low enough to offer excellent value for money. The pricing of books has absolutely nothing to do with how long it took you to write it!
Market Research
Market research is the basis of this business. I do it two ways. Initially I take a guess at the relevant keywords, then, once I start ranking a site, I look at what I am actually ranking for, and persue those terms as well. Its not rocket science, I doubt that its changed for years, it works.
One of the delights of Amazon – is that they have plenty of actual data that they are happy to share with you (check for most popular items and then apply your imagination).
Google will tell you what people are searching for – by giving you auto-complete suggestions as your type in a query. I also have the feedback from readers and subscribers for the Internet Marketing and Travel.
Distribution Channels
My emphasis is on the US, and will continue to be. America may be having a recession, but even in recession you guys buy far more online than any other country.
Strategic Alliances
Initially, one of the huge appeals of this business was that I could be a one-woman band. The human race is full of idiots and most of the worst ones had been people I’d worked with and for over the years. I was really looking forward to working with no one. It didn’t work out like that. Instead I ended up finding out just how important your friends are online. I’m lucky to have had some of the good and great over the years – many of whom no-longer post regularly.
But the Internet abhors a vacuum and I am lucky to know Mark from SEOCobra (exciting developments there in the next few weeks) and Dave from ZenDuck.me, not to mention Tracey from Tracey-Edwards.com and SY from Hospitalera.com.
E-Commerce and Technology
“Explain how you’re using e-commerce and technology in your business”. Yeah I think we can safely say technology is my business!
Tactical Promotion Plan
Interesting question – in general I’m wondering if I should try some of the tricks of Social Media to use things like Twitter and FaceBook to get more followers. The trouble is, that my experience is, that ranking for the right search terms, is not only easier in terms of time spent, it also gives me far more engaged readers!
I do want to investigate videos and podcasts as methods of promotion as well.
Marketing Budget
Nope no intention of spending anything much on marketing, certainly not going anywhere near PPC! I do pay for editing of my books and cover design – does that count?
Credibility and Risk Reduction
Who do I increase my creditability and reduce my customer’s risk? Basically I think I’ve always maintained my credibility, particularly on this blog, by not having guest posts. I’ve seen so many blogs over the years die a living death by becoming dependent on guest posters.
Selling through Amazon and other “legit” online shops (iTunes, Barnes & Noble etc), is a very easy way to differenate an ebook.
World famous public toilets, Kawakawa, Northland, New Zealand - really, Google it!
Team & Management Structure
Skills, experience, training, retention
Yeah well I think the boss needs to go some 5-star resorts, somewhere warm and learn about planning and better time management. Anyone up for sponsoring that one?
Seriously. I have one full-time outsourced writer who writes my BMR articles. I’ve had him for over a year now and he’s reliable and consistent. Last year, he had exactly one article rejected. I’m keeping him on. I do however want to expand my outsourcing in 2012 as my cash flow allows.
Advisors
Well thank goodness I don’t need a lawyer! My accountant I’m training up to understand my business. A consultant – please God no! A guru and advice? Actually I was just going to delete this section – but I one of the biggest risks in this business is the isolation and the voices in your head! Where do I go for advice?
I’m pretty happy with the contacts and advice I have, I don’t see any significant change in 2012.
Management Systems
my trusty spreadsheet manages my cashflow and income/expenditure in several currency and actual versus cash (because affiliate programs take so long to send cash). It works, I’m not changing it.
I’m currently developing a better system to track my actual output – words or articles and projects they relate to.
Financial Budgets and Forecasts
I don’t do detailed budgets or forcasts, I may add this in this year though as I ramp up. It would be useful to have when I decide to increase my outsourcing budget.
My cashflow forecast is that I need:
7/4/12 – $3599
7/5/12 – $3419
for taxes. We have it, we aren’t going to getting into dispute with the tax man, but I am determined to have that money out of my own business’s cash flow! On top of covering my 1/2 of the household’s expenses (which I have done for 2 years now).
Summary: Internet Marketing Business Plan
Wow that was a bit of a mission! But a useful exercise – I think I still need to drill down and focus on individual sites for their business plan’s – I’m a still a bit vague on just how many sites I’m focussing on this year. But its been an energizing exercise for me, I hope it inspires you too – let me know in the comments!
Let’s face it – I am scared of the camera – well one that takes moving pictures anyways! I don’t really have an issue with photos of me per se, particularly if they are stored on my computer so I can delete at will. But video has always made me nervous.
I’ve tried it a couple of times – and I dislike the sound of my own voice. A lot. Talking the camera is also perilously close to talking to an audience which is alive. And that gives me stage fright.
The Dog's Keen - Me Not So Much!
But the case for audio and video is becoming a bit overwhelming. For example. No prizes for figuring out that both this blog and Pat’s over at SmartPassiveIncome.com go after the same main keyword. There’s not much in it – at the moment he’s #2 and I’m #4 in the SERPs. But I’ve never been able to figure out one little thing – why the hell does he have so much more traffic than I do? According to SEMRush he doesn’t rank for another huge keyword in this niche – so WTF was going on?
Now there are a dozen ways to game social media figures and subscription numbers, but Pat doesn’t do any of them – his subscription numbers are genuine, you can tell by the genuine conversations going on in his comments. Those numbers are real, and impressive.
Then finally I noticed Pat pointing out that- its his podcasts which bring he traffic from iTunes and videos which bring him traffic from all over including YouTube.
At the same time I have Mark from SEOCobra bending my ear, that he doesn’t get why more people aren’t adding Youtube videos to their posts in the system. Mark has a tendency to call late at night, after I’ve had a gin or two, or early in the morning when I haven’t had enough tea (its a time zone thing) – but finally, today, once the coffee kicked in, I went oh duh!
Its because most of us are idiots and don’t haven’t made youtube videos promoting our sites, or demonstrating the products we are flogging.
Wizzley allows you to add videos so you can demonstrate what you are talking about.
If you do it right – you can submit the audio to iTunes – in fact get yourself an iTunes channel – and the video goes on Youtube.
Do You Do Podcasts / Video – What Tools Do You Use?
I’ve used video once to sell something. I used Picasa to string a bunch of photos together to help sell our previous house. It was a lot quicker than learning how to edit video, and I was running out of time after days spent cleaning! It worked pretty well:
I’ve played a little with Jing – which I quite like. I’m perfectly willing to procrastinate over the technology for a while – so what are you guys using – and please, I’m not buying a Mac – it has to work on Windows!
Have You Signed Up Yet?
Did you sign up for the newsletter yet? If you don’t you’ll miss out on all the inside Z-Blogger tips! And how much money I did or did not make this month.
If you keen to check out SEO Cobra when it re-opens – remember lists are awfully good place to make announcements!
Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings.
Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friendspointed out to Leo (and not saying Leo isn’t a friend – merely wrong 🙂 ) I would be in for the argument.
Not Passive Income
OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was – I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck. You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays- I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only get away for 6 weeks ever couple of years.
I could afford the travel – but I didn’t have the time – the rules around my presence at work were my definition of hell.
Business or Passive Income ?
I looked at options – buying a franchise is a popular one around here – but it sounded like buying a job to me (told what to do – lots of bosses (clients) and high overheads (franchise fees)) – no thanks. Plus, again – you have to be in the country to run the business.
Starting my own business – I never considered it to be frank – I not only couldn’t sell, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to risk my capital and the failure rate for small business in New Zealand is pretty high (and usually that takes your house too).
I started to look at other options. When I started researching my options I came across the concept that you could invest now and get paid later. I could buy property and get paid rents, I could buy shares and get paid dividends (rarely in my country but the principal is still there).
Passive Income Take 1
This was promising – I did quite a bit of research. In the end we invested in property (my partner was already in shares) – and its worked for us and continue to do so.
Now some will argue property investment, particularly residential, free-standing, older wooden houses, in earthquake prone countries, is not passive. They will say houses need to be maintained, tenants need to be found, managed and got rid of.
Yup – and you can outsource the lot! Case in point – house we own in small town New Zealand.
Passive Income - New Zealand Style
Here’s the rough figures (all NZ$ – NZ$1 = US$0.75 at the moment – but relatively it doesn’t matter).
Purchase price 2003 – $77,000
Currrent estimated value 2011 $150,000
Unrealised capital gain 6.4% a year
Original tenant left a few weeks ago – yup same tenants for 8+ years – never missed a payment – $140 to $160/week for 8 years.
Gross rental income: $8320 or 10% cash yield
Gross yield 16.4%/year (yup that’s why we don’t focus on shares very much).
Now the property does have expenses, we use a property manager, pay Council rates and insurance, and of course we borrowed the purchase price so there is mortgage interest as well – but time wise its cost us about 2 days when bought the place (one day deciding to buy the place, one day due diligence, signing papers) and now – eight years later we spent 1/2 day, inspecting the property and arranging for someone to give it a good tidy up.
Is that totally passive income? No
Is it bloody close, the way we do it – yes. And even we maintained and managed the properties ourselves (and plenty of larger landlords do) – we would have a business giving a us a ful-time income for a very part-time amount of effort. But we don’t that because between the two of us we are crap at DIY and are too soft to deal with ratbag tenants!
Will this property be passive income for us for the next 10, 20, 30 years? Should be, likely to be, unless there is a major earthquake in the region – when it won’t be a total loss – but we will probably get paid out and have to walk away at that point. Is passive income guaranteed – nope.
So if property investment is so great – why didn’t I stick with it? Well we did – but we stopped buying – why? Risk, to make good money on property you need to gear up (borrow) – to do that you are layering risk on risk – we got to the level of borrowing against asssets that we were comfortable with – and stopped.
Property is an as passive or active income as you design it to be.
Passive Income #2
My second attempt at passive income you are familiar with, as documented right here. I rank websites at the top of the SERPS and make passive income from the advertising on them. Frankly I never started off to build a business online – a wanted a passive, long term income – and I have that now. Some of my income is from fairly new sites, some of my income are from sites and pages that I haven’t touched for three years. Last year I inadvertantly demonstrated that I could do little work for several months have not affect my income.
What’s long-term income though – will my websites still rank in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Maybe, maybe not – but every indication to date is that older sites rank and hold their rankings better than new sites. But one of the reason I have many websites is the same I reason I own 5 rental properties in smaller, cheaper places, rather than just 1 or 2 in the fairly expensive city I live in – diversification. If one of my houses is destroyed or untenanted – it hurts but its only part of my portfolio. If one of websites gets out of favour with Google or that particularly niche falls out of fashion – the others are still producing.
Now from what I am seeing – nothing much has changed on the last Google update – my sites are still ranking in the same place more or less, my Hubpages may be a little down – but that could be coincidence/seasonal too. February didn’t match my record January month – but I know my pattern is that once I hit a new income record it takes 3 to 4 months to match it again – in short I am seeing nothing out of the ordinary in my business.
Leo argues that I really should build a business online – a real business with real clients – but nothing has much changed for me – my freedom is still the most important thing for me – and having to be available to clients cuts into that freedom. Having a few clients is fine (and I do) – but ramping it up seems to be just trading freedom for income – a trade I’m not really prepared to make.
Leo argues that SEO will get more and more competitive over the coming years – it could well do – though I wouldn’t overestimate the ability of corporates to adapt – pretty bloody slow in my experience. He argues that I should establish a “real” business which has real followers and therefore not be dependent on search traffic. I know a little about this – because this blog gets “real” visitors not just search traffic. As far as I can tell though -the people who convert are the search traffic.
What I know is that with my silly little sites – I can make a little money – not a huge amount – sometimes $1/day – sometimes more. But even at $1/day lets look at the rate of return:
Initial purchase of site: (all prices US$)
$8 for the domain
$10-$15 for content on the site Ti
Total: $23
Backlink articles at say $1/each – maybe 30 -90 articles – say $90
Annual profit $243 … annual costs say maybe $20…
No mortgages, no property managers, no rates, no insurance, no risk of earthquakes…
Passive Income – Is It For You? Maybe Not If …
If You Want to Make a Difference
If you want to make a difference in the world – then blogging ain’t where its at – go become a health worker, or a volunteer in a country that needs the help. An engineer bringing clean drinking water to kids in Africa, a researcher finding a cure for cancer is making a difference, me – not so much.
If You Need Money Now
As I have advised many people – if you need money this month, or next month – or even in the next 6 to 12 months – this won’t work for you – it may, but for most beginners it won’t work. It didn’t work for me – I got a job – it paid, it was a crappy job but it delivered what I needed at the time – cash.
If You Have Huge Income Requirements
I remember when I wrote about making $1000/month with Adsense – that it seemed like a lot of money (I hit that milestone almost exactly 2 years later) – $1000/month is a lot of money to me – its not enough to live on – but I could live on it if I had to – its pretty much what the NZ government pays as a pension for the over-65’s and most of them seem to do just fine.
About US$5k /month would work just fine for me – but I see people making $10k plus in the TKA forums – frankly that’s nice – but its unlikely to ever be me – because I don’t really need the money I will probably never persue it! If you really need to make a 6-figure salary – again I’d say get a job – just make sure you have the right skills.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Looking for headless chook image – could only find hoards of tourists (close enough I think)! Thought I would do a follow up on my what is a content farm post – as the fall out continues on Google’s recent update – and just point out that human psychology is quite intereting and I am thinking that maybe Google has a number of psyc PhD’s amongst their software geeks.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Google Farmer Update – What Was It?
On or about 1 March in the US results (but will be rolled out worldwide) Google changed their algorithm – they made the unusual step of annoucing what they had done and Matt Cutt’s is quoted as saying:
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Google claimed to affected nearly 12% of the search results – but a number of us found either nothing had changed, or nothing bad had happened to our sites. As I said in my last post – I wasn’t see much evidence that they had succeeded.
The problem is of course the age old question:
What the Fuck is Quality?
Some people think this site is quality – some don’t – but I have no qualifications in making passive income online. In fact I didn’t even make much income when I started this site – but people thought this site was quality – because I was writing about my own experience.
Here’s another site which is really useful: http://www.cure-back-pain.org/ – the site introduces itself with:
I suffered with crippling lower back pain for 18 years of my life. I know what you must endure everyday while living with back problems. I have empathy for you. I understand because I was there myself. I have found my own cure. I now know how wonderful life can be without the huge burden of chronic pain. It is my most sincere wish that you might find lasting relief, as well.
I found the site because Google has started a thread asking people to report if their site has been adversely affected and think this is unfair – the owner of the site above wrote this:
I am so devastated. My main site and my life’s work, cure-back-pain.org was drastically affected. I am not a learned webmaster, I am a back pain patient and someone who writes to help others recover. My site is 5 years old and has often led in the rankings for my topic, back pain and back pain treatment. I was let go from my “dayjob” in the economic decline of 2008 and found a savior in the fact that I could make a living helping those who needed it most, so I turned to my site full time and found it very rewarding. I write all my own content and work my site 80 hours a week+. I do everything myself. I do not syndicate or outsource anything. All one has to do is read the letters in the Q&A section to see how much I am dedicated to my cause… I could not figure out what I did wrong to suffer such a decline in ranking and then started to research what may have happened and found that many excellent sites (and many not so excellent content farms) were affected. Eventually, I found some advice from my webhost and checked my site for stolen content. Guess what? I found TONS of sites stealing my 100% original and self written content! I am shocked and appalled. This probably has something to do with my dismissal as an authority in the topic I know so well…
I double checked the US SERPs for back pain treatment. At position #4 I found a news result – like who gives a shite if you are looking for treatment why would I care if Barcelona’s soccer coach has back pain??? I found results from webmd and emedicinehealth (also webmd I think), I found an about.com page which quoted scientific results. And I found this little gem on a classic Made For Adsense site:
The quest for effective back pain relief has thrown up some challenges in the modern world. As we move through the early years of the new century, the pace of life is becoming ever more frantic. With every passing day, there seems to be more to do than there ever was before. At the same time, there is little doubt that the pressure …
If I was the owner of back pain treatment I wouldn’t just be “devastated” I would be utterly and totally pissed off and disillusioned. Now we could have a debate about the sites not that pretty – its a standard Site Build It! template, but its the guy’s only income – and he has actually been giving Google exactly what they want – and the kick him in the nuts. But all is good – in this self-satisfied interview with Matt Cutts and another Google Engineer apparently:
However, our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. Wired.com
In the words of the Speights Ad – Yeah Right. But of course I wouldn’t want to running off and saying that Google had stuffed up – that wouldn’t be scientific or anything -right? So I went to the home of all in-depth research in things of a darker nature in Internet Marketing – and found that the owner’s of splogs and autoblogs were very, very happy about the latest update.
I could spend hours going through that Google support thread and finding examples – you may have seen that even sites which are quoted as exemplars of Adsense publishers got slammed included Ask The Builder – page 2 of the thread.
On a skim – the sites I saw that were penalised were:
large and generally old (5 + years)
had had consistent rankings for quite a while i.e. their owners were comfortably making an income from them which they were pretty dependent on
some were general sites but most were specialist
most had good original content written by either experts or by someone with a passion for the topic
high PR (5 and above) sites were affected
Now I hope, and this is sincere, that in many cases the sites in this thread will get reinstated – but the state of chaos currently gives us one clear point:
Google still can’t distinguish original content from scrapped content. If you are are an old, well-ranking site with content your content will get scrapped, copied and re-written – as of today – this may well result in your rankings dropping.
If those sites do get reinstated it will be manually – not algorithmically.
Some are already asking whether this Google update mis-fired and Leo points out the winners from the Farmer update are in fact the scrappers (at least short term). I agree with his recommendation though to build niche sites to fill the gaps. But as Griz points out – fly beneath the radar
So can you still make passive income online? I think so – from where I am sitting – actually looking at the facts, rather than the hype, Google is no closer to cleaning up its search results than it ever was. If I was starting today what would I do? Avoid the niches Griz mentions in his post, avoid having one huge site on lots of different topics, I’d build a bunch of niche sites across a range of topics, build back links to them – and see what worked. If I site started producing I would seriously look at taking Adsense off it and finding an alternative monetization strategy.
On the other hand you might just be so scared off by the latest furore in our little corner of the Interwebs – that you decide that you really should go out and get a real job and contribute to society of something – go ahead – but consider this – that’s probably exactly what Google wants you to do …
Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment.
But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search.
So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me –
News results: according to joisic.com:
The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database.
and gigaom.com thinks that:
Companies that do this have come to be known — somewhat disparagingly — as “content farms” because of the low rates they pay the people producing their content and because of the factory-style atmosphere of some ventures.
They then go on to quote examples of such companies as including:
Demand Media, Associated Content, AOL (with Patch and Seed), About.com, HubPages, Examiner.com and Suite 101.
Odd list – hubpages.com doesn’t pay me a cent – I get paid from a share of revenue from articles on their site- my biggest payout comes from Google’s Adsense… BTW I never heard of either of these sites I was thinking maybe LATimes or TechCrunch – its not like the discussion is not being had…
But getting on to the very, very best results for my query:
wikipedia: the entry is somewhat shorter than the list of references and says precisely – nothing …
seotheory.com asks What is a content farm and offers an opinion based on personal experience – rather than rehashed content – odd how its coming in at #4 behind the nonsense in front of it.
Next we have the site called – yup – “The Content Farm” – and yes you can find really useful stuff like how to talk to a child (hint first check if he is wearing priest’s clothing …) or how to determine the weight of an Oscar (TM) Statuette – hint – first win one … In fact its a lot more amusing than the usual stuff on ehow and good luck to them I say – and it just goes to show the Exact Match Domain (EMD) bonus still works ..
At position #5 we have a 2009 post from readwriteweb.com age and authority will allow you to rank with little effort at all…
Many people know how to rank in Google’s search results – and Google doesn’t like it. If you missed the broadcast mesage – to rank content in the search results it is easiest if:
your domain name matches the search term;
failing that the term you want to be found for is in your url and within your article using the basics of on-page SEO
build links to your site – some of those links should be anchored using your search term or near relatives to it.
Google is trying to rank quality – but frankly – it can’t.
Lets take a topical example. Christchurch New Zealand has suffered 2 damaging earthquakes in the last 6 months. In September 2010 there was a damaging earthquake which didn’t kill anyone, on the 22 February and aftershock of that quake may have killed as many as 240 people (figures still unconfirmed at the time of writing). So I am in NZ and I know that this story is so big that it has played in primetime on CNN, BBC and elsewhere around the world. There was non-stop media coverage (without ads) for the first 48 hours in New Zealand in TV1, TV3 and Radio NZ – my point is that there is an awful lot of information on the topic – a lot of new information – which can’t have been gamed by the clever SEO’s. So what does Google.co.nz come up with when I ask it the question many have asked me (an ex-Geologist) in the last week:
So in order we have:
a bunch of very useful official sites – any query about christchurch and/or earthquake is displaying this in New Zealand at the moment – fair enough but not contextural search.
news results from legit daily newspapers – though it seems a little bit unfair that the UK telegraph showed up an the NZ Herald didn’t – NONE of these results relate to my actual query – the cause of the quake.
now the first actual search results is from – Yahoo Answers – yeah font of all legit qualified opinion that is – at least the answers on this particular listing are not too outrageous – but its hardly at a technical level – or even a good English level.
next we have a pretty awesome photoblog from MSNBC – nice article – nothing to do with the question.
the next two – yup – two results are from suite101 – one of the supposed farms – the first article has a sub heading which matches my query – but it doesn’t relate to the most recent event – thought Google was better than that – the second article – does relate to February’s quake – was written several days ago (I can tell from the estimated death toll) and there is nothing really about the question I asked in my query. These articles are reasonably well-written but obviously not by anyone who is either anywhere near Christchurch or knows much about Earth Science.
Wikipedia is up next – but the link is to the 2010 quake not the 2011
Wikianswers makes it into the top 5 with a little gem – we don’t know in about 300 words.
But maybe that’s the best there is – so I dug a little deeper – here’s a good explanation and another one here and here – of course I only found those because I know that earthquakes are explained by the science of plate tectonics: obviously no one told Google.
Summary for those who skipped the preceding 993 words:
Google can’t make a judgement call about “quality” – all it can try and match search terms with content on a site and the authority of that site. It doesn’t understand even the most basic LSI – plate tectonics goes with earthquakes like cheese goes with wine – go figure.
Google is doing a bit of smoke screen exercise designed to scare the f*k out of some SEOs.
Google can’t even really distinguish between original and copied content – I wish they would because I am bored with the scrapers stealing my content – but I certainly haven’t seen it improve in the last few days.
Google can’t even pick up grammar – not should it – Christchurch’s mayor has been widely quoted as “However it is bad news for one of the city’s key sewage facilities. “Our main sewer truck is seriously munted,” Mayor Bob Parker told TVNZ.” – in my mind the quote of the event and exactly right if you are of a certain age and grew up in New Zealand. So don’t bury it in the results because its not grammatically correct!
Google trusts older sites more than newer sites – and PR has almost nothing to do with it.
They have (almost certainly) temporarily – reduced rankings for some large content sites. Apparently including hubpages – I say apparently because my long-standing well-ranking hubs are still exactly where they were in rankings.
From forum comments it appears those with affiliate sites promoting Amazon/eBay type products have been slapped down and the affiliate site promoted above them. I remember now why I gave up on promoting eBay and Amazon.
From my own figures – niche sites with unique but hardly stellar content are still going strong.
Go read Allyn for his take on Content Farms for Google to Zap
